Inculturation

Bengal

Allah ThAkur

mohammadan poets in Bengal used to call allah as Niranjan, Kartar, Goshai (Goswami), Prabhu or Allah Thakur/Bhagaban. They stopped after Faraizi Wahhabi movement.

bon bibi

Here is Bon Bibi, Islamized version of Vana Durga, who is worshipped in Bengal (particularly the Sunderbans).

Muslims appropriated her folklore by claiming she is the daughter of Ibrahmin Ghazi, an Islamic saint with a Hindu woman named Gulal Bibi. The Muslim beside her is Ghazi Pir.

Muslims claim that she came from Arabia (basically swapped Kailash with Gulf), also notice the Islamized version of her son (which I think is Kartikeya).

satya-pIr

There is also an Islamized version of Vishnu called Satya Pir btw

v1 muhammad

in villages. The Census Report of 1911 records the existence of communities which were “neither Hindus nor Muslims but a mixture of both.” The ascetic Aulechand (d. 1769) the founder of the Kartabhaja sect, preached the Satya Dharma (True Religion) in the Nadia district of Bengal, and had as his disciples Muslims as well as Hindus. A muqaddam of a Muslim village in Bengal told a missionary (c. 1851) that Prophet Muhammad was born in a Bengali Brahman family. Intermarriage or concubinage with the ….

kAshmIra

In Kashmir, they had Turushka Bhairava worshipped as kshetrapala who donned Muslim clothes.

Here too I am aware of no firm evidence of worship before the time of Sahib Kaul, who refers to one of the Kṣetrapālas, Maṅkharāja alias Turuṣka-rājānaka, in his Kashmiri Janmacarita, telling us that he resides in the Kāṭhūl quarter of Srinagar (Skt. Kāṣṭhīla), which was at least formerly a locality inhabited by brahmins, not far from the royal palace and a vanished temple of Sadāśiva.

The name of this guardian is intriguing since it appears to mean that he was considered to be a Muslim, turuṣkah having only this meaning in the Sanskrit of the Kashmirians of the Islamic period; and this is confirmed by the visualization-verses to be recited when offering his Bali according to the Kṣetrapālapaddhati.

For there he is described as a follower of Islam (musulavan-rajus-). Nor does his visualization show any of the usual features of a Bhairava other than that he is said to reside at the foot of a tree, or rather, in this case, at the foot of a Mādhavī [creeper]. He has only one face and two arms, carries a bowl of fruit in his left hand and a multicoloured staff in the right, and wears two cotton garments, one white and the other black. Here, it seems, we are at a level of popular religion where the barrier between the two faiths of Kashmir, Islam and Hinduism, was somewhat porous; and this porousness seems on occasion to have worked in both directions.

For concerning another of these Kṣetrapālas, Pūrṇarājānaka, who resides at the foot of a mulberry tree by a spring in the Rajoikadal area of Srinagar, it is claimed that when for some time in the 1970s his worship was neglected some local Muslims reported that he had appeared to them in their dreams to ask them to persuade the Hindus of the area to restore the Pūjā.

A further example of the blurring of religious divisions at the local level is provided by the case of the Kṣetrapāla Viṣvaksena. This ‘Bhairava’, whose shrine was in Srinagar’s Dalal Mohalla, is described in his visualization as a black, two-armed attendant (anucarah) of Viṣṇu, wearing the brahmanical sacred thread. Evidently this is the Viṣvaksena of the Vaiṣṇavas, whose

TN

In TN draupadi has a muslim general enshrined in her temples.