Hazrat Bulbul Shah: The first known Muslim missionary in Kashmir

Introduction

The events of the last decade and more have occasioned a veritable flood of writings on Kashmir. Some of these are genuine scholarly works, but most of them may be considered little more than pure propaganda. A particularly tragic victim of this sort of historiography has been the early history of Islam in Kashmir. Efforts have been made to attempt to prove that the mass conversion to Islam in this region was the result of political patronage extended by Muslim kings or even their alleged mass persecution of the Hindu and Buddhist populace. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As Bukhari rightly points out, 'It is an irrefutable fact of history that the people of Kashmir accepted Islam perfectly voluntarily with their hearts and souls [dil-o-jan se], without any force or pressure'.1

This article deals with the first known Islamic missionary to Kashmir, a Sufi from Turkistan popularly remembered as Hazrat Bulbul Shah. Little has been written about him, although scattered references to him and his work are found in most of the medieval chronicles about Kashmiri history. Hazrat Bulbul Shah is, however, of central importance in any study of Islam in Kashmir, for not only did he play a pioneering role in the spread of Islam here, but he is also thought to have made bold efforts to bring about a transformation in the caste-ridden Brahmin-dominated society of the Kashmir of his times, no doubt seeing this as part of his own religious mission. The success of Hazrat Bulbul Shah's missionary endeavours therefore needs to be understood in the context of the Brahminical social order of early medieval times, and to that we now turn.

Brahminical Rule in Kashmir

Kashmir, on the eve of the advent of Islam in the region, was a society rigidly hierarchically ordered, with the Brahmins exercising an untrammelled hegemony over the hapless majority who were consigned to the unenviable status of 'low' castes. The extreme oppression under which the 'low' castes laboured is reflected in one of the earliest Kashmiri Sanskrit texts that we have at our disposal, the Nilamata Purana, in which Nilanaga, the Hindu king of Kashmir, provides the social rules for the people of Kashmir to follow. Among the many detailed commandments are...