Person · governor & saint · Bangladesh
Khān Jahān ʿAlī
The fifteenth-century governor or saint — the sources make him both — who cleared forest on the Sundarbans fringe, dug tanks, cut roads and built some sixty mosques including the Sixty Dome, founding a town he called Khalifatabad in country that had been mangrove.
- Date
- 1369–1459
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 22.674, 89.741
Worth knowing
His method is the standard one by which Bengal's delta was settled: a Sufi with a land grant clears forest, digs a tank, builds a mosque, and a cultivating population follows him and converts. Richard Eaton's account of the rise of Islam in Bengal is built largely on cases like his, and the tank he dug at Bagerhat still supplies the town.
About the place
Placed at Bagerhat, the town he founded as Khalifatabad and where his tomb and the Sixty Dome Mosque stand.
Connections (1)
- Imperial administration ofSundarbans National Park
Khan Jahan Ali cleared forest on the northern fringe of the Sundarbans, dug tanks and settled cultivators — the standard mechanism by which the delta was brought under rice and, in the process, converted. Richard Eaton's account of the rise of Islam in Bengal is built on cases like his: not conquest but agrarian frontier settlement, with a Sufi holding the land grant and a mosque going up where the forest came down.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Khan Jahan Ali”. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (1993); Perween Hasan, Sultans and Mosques (2007).
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