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

After moving to Serampore in 1800, Carey made weekly visits to surrounding villages to preach to Hindus and Muslims. (19) Yet, not until 1802 in Serampore, two years after he baptized his first Hindu and nine years after arriving in India, did Carey baptize his first Muslim, a man named Peroo. (20) When Carey and other missionaries founded the Serampore Native School and Serampore College, in 1800 and 1818 respectively, the curriculum offered Persian and Arabic to attract Muslim students. Yet, Chatterjee commented that Carey's outreach yielded little evangelistic success, (21) and F. Deaville Walker opined that of the one hundred or so Indians Carey baptized, only five were Muslims. (22)

Reasons for Carey's Lack of Success

Two significant events help to complete our understanding of why Carey himself found Muslims so difficult to reach. The first occasion came out of the tragic death of Carey's five-year-old son Peter in 1794. The Carey family moved six times within their first year in India, and during those travels, family members contracted but survived malaria and dysentery. When young Peter developed dysentery, however, he was unable to withstand it and died within a few days. (23) Peter's death sent Dorothy Carey into an irreversibly deep depression. In order to bury Peter, the Careys needed assistance, but Hindus practiced cremation and had strict regulations against contact with the dead. The Muslims buried their dead but had taboos against handling the bodies of non-Muslims--one of the stipulations offered by Shaikh Hamadani for protection to non-Muslims (zimmis) in India was that "they are not to bring their dead near the graveyards of Muslims." (24) These conditions prompted Carey's words in October 1794:

   I could induce no person to make a coffin, though two carpenters are
   constantly employed by us at the works. Four Musselmans, to keep each
   other in countenance, dug a grave; but, though we had between two and
   three hundred laborers employed, no man would carry him to the grave.
   We sent seven or eight miles to get a person to do that office; and I
   concluded that I and my wife would do it ourselves, when at last a
   servant, kept for the purpose of cleaning, and a boy who had lost
   caste, were prevailed upon to carry the corpse, and secure the grave
   from the jackals.... On account of the four men above mentioned
   digging a grave for my poor child, the Mundal, that is, the
   principal person in the village, who rents immediately under the
   Rajah, and lets lands and houses to the other people in the place,
   forbad every person in the village to eat, drink, or smoke tobacco
   with them and their families, so that they were supposed to have
   lost caste. The poor men came to me full of distress, and told
   their story. (25)

In essence, the Muslims of Bengal considered themselves a separate caste, and so it was particularly grievous for the four Muslims who agreed to help Carey when they were disowned by their village for assisting in Peter's burial. Carey, in his anguished state, sent for the Mundal and threatened to report his contempt to an English judge in Dinadjpur if they would not eat and drink with the four men. The Mundal eventually declared the four to be innocent of offense and then dined with them. This episode, despite showing that four Muslims and Carey aided each other at critical times, demonstrated to Carey that Bengali Muslims thought of participation in Christian rituals virtually as a violation of caste. As Carey described it, "This was not owing to any disrespect in the natives towards us, but only to the cursed caste." (26)