William Carey's Muslim encounters in India: the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society of England in 1792 and its sending of William Carey to India the following year resulted from Carey's sermonic pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Obligation of the Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen

Baptist History and Heritage, Spring, 2004 by Galen K. Johnson

Carey's missionary activity among Hindus in the Bengal province of India is widely known, particularly among Baptists in England and America. Indians, too, readily acknowledge Carey's important place in the modernization of their country, its languages, and educational standards.

In his Enquiry, Carey estimated that the population of India was 50 million "Mahometans and pagans," that is, Muslims and Hindus. (1) The suggestion that India had a roughly equal number of Muslims and Hindus was born out by Carey's actual experience in India. The population of the villages he visited was often evenly divided between those two groups. (2) Why, then, did Carey target only half of India's non-Christian population, the "pagan" or "heathen" Hindus, for conversion? The reasons are several; not only do they indicate how little had changed in Christian-Muslim interaction since the Middle Ages, they also help us to understand the current attitudes of Christian missionaries toward Muslims.

Muslim Hostility Toward Christianity

Carey wrote in the Enquiry that most of Africa and a sizeable proportion of Asia and Europe were under Muslim control. That was also largely true of northern India at the turn of the nineteenth century. Although Britain's commercial presence in India was steadily increasing, governmental control of India did not pass into British hands until 1857-1859. Previous Christian attempts to evangelize Muslims in India had met with disappointment. In 1319, four traveling companions of Jordanus, a Dominican friar, were killed by Muslims while on their journey to the East. (3) After the Muslims established the Mogul Empire in India, Emperor Sahjahan took captive 4,400 Christians, some of whom recanted their faith in order to survive. A century before Carey arrived, Catholics, Anglicans, and Moravians attempted missions in Bengal but with practically no success among Muslims. (4) Those like Carey who knew this history must surely have been wary of encountering Muslims and even somewhat fearful for their lives.

While the hostility of Muslims toward Christians might begin to explain Carey's targeting of Hindus instead of Muslims, it is not a sufficient explanation. For, in the Enquiry, Carey wrote, "The impediments in the way of carrying the gospel among the heathen must arise, I think, from one or other of the following things;--either their distance from us, their barbarous and savage manner of living, the danger of being killed by them, the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life, or the unintelligibleness of their languages." (5) Carey obviously let none of these obstacles prevent him from carrying out his missionary vision among the "heathen" Hindus, not even his perception that he could be putting his life at risk in the process. How much greater a threat could Muslims have posed than what Carey already expected from Hindus? Yet, he did not consider work among Muslims to be the reason for his going to India. On January 17, 1793, he wrote to his father: "I am appointed to go to Bengal, in the East Indies, a missionary to the Hindoos." (6) Carey's sincerity in accepting this commission is beyond question, but his commission was to minister to Hindus, not their Muslim neighbors and governors. If his convictions existed not because the potential danger posed by Muslims was any greater than what Carey anticipated from Hindus, then what accounted for his exclusive focus on the latter?

Carey's Debates With Muslims

Carey felt a particular "calling" to work among the "heathen," a term which to him excluded Muslims. He divided the world's population into Christians (sub-categorized by Catholics, Protestants, and Greeks), Jews, "Mahometans," and "Pagans." The Muslims were not considered to be pagans from a Christian perspective because they claimed, as did Christians and Jews, to serve the one true God. Making population estimates based upon an average number of people per square mile, Carey calculated that 420 million people, or 57.7 percent of the world's inhabitants, were pagans. (7) Relying on impressions from travel books, Carey concluded that over half "of the sons of Adam ... are in general poor, barbarous, naked pagans as destitute of civilisation, as they are of true religion." (8) Carey, therefore, saw a greater need for missionary work to commence among the 57.7 percent of the world that was pagan rather than the 17.9 percent that he believed to be Muslim, despite an equal distribution between those two particular groups in his targeted area of northern India. Besides, over three hundred years of suspicion and mistrust since the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 had done little to change the western image of Muslims as brutal, superstitious, and intolerant.

In truth, Carey at first found little evidence from his encounters with Muslims in Bengal that would contradict this perception, that is, when be finally met with them. Carey arrived in India late in 1793 at Bandel, a Portuguese settlement thirty miles from Calcutta. (9) According to his letters, this village was comprised of Catholics and Muslims, although Hindus lived within a two-mile walk. (10) Carey recorded his first meeting with Hindus on November 7, 1793, but his first meeting with Muslims did not take place until January 19, 1794, and the meeting was in Manicktulla, despite the fact that he lived among Muslims at Bandel.(11) Carey seemingly could not avoid the Muslims despite his concentration on Hindus.