Bihari Muslims

People Name: Bihari Muslims

Primary Language: Urdu

Other Languages: Hindi, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magadhi, and Nagpuri.

Pronounced: bee-HAR-ree

Primary Religion: Islam, mostly traditional Islam, but some more orthodox Islam.  Traditional Islam makes use of practices such as worship of Muslim saints and sometimes assimilates Hindu rituals and customs into their practices.

Location: 16.5 million live in India, and another 1 million live in Bangladesh. In India, they live in both rural and urban regions. Men often leave their families and migrate to an urban area to seek work to support their families. They often work as manual laborers and bicycle or auto rickshaw drivers. They make up half of Calcutta's Muslim population and 20 percent of Delhi's.

In Bangladesh, 1 million Bihari Muslims live in refugee camps, where they have been settled since the end of the war between Pakistan and what is now the country of Bangladesh.

Primary Location: About 12 million of the Bihari Muslims continue to live in the state of Bihar, India.

History:  Bihari Muslims are a people misunderstood by the majority of the world. The state in India from which they come is degraded with nearly every derogatory and stereotypical adjective a person can imagine -- backwards, illiterate, corrupt, dirty, poor, neglected, hopeless. In their own state they are a minority among the predominantly Hindu population.  Few take the time to care about the welfare of these Muslims and learn about the real Bihari people.

When they migrate to other cities in search of work, they find themselves even more downtrodden. They attend mosque when they can.

They worship at the tombs of their Muslim saints. Rarely are they lifted out of the sludge, and seldom do they find their way to the King's table. They are a forgotten people. They are an Unreached People, because Christians have yet to reach out and extend to them an invitation into the Kingdom of God. Yet the Bihari Muslims are a people loved by God, a people He desires to raise up to sup with Him around His table and bring Him glory.

Islam arrived in full force upon the Indian subcontinent just 150 years after the death of its prophet, Mohammed. It came via Arab armies as well as traders and Sufi missionaries. Muslim kingdoms ruled the subcontinent for 700 years, until the British took over in the Nineteenth Century.

Current Status: There are three main groups among the Bihari Muslims the wealthy Sunnis, the middle class and poor Sunnis and the Shiites.  In Bihar, Muslims have incorporated many aspects of cultural life from the surrounding contexts. Folk Islam involves Hindu and animistic practices such as praying to saints and pilgrimages to tombs. It is believed that a majority of Muslims in India are involved in these popular Islamic practices. This certainly is the case among the Bihari Muslims. For this reason, they may be somewhat responsive to the Gospel when compared with the orthodox and the Koranic Muslims.

Conflict: Hindus, Muslims, and Christians experience some tensions in existing in such close proximity. Hindus have increasingly become more fundamentalists politically. Only about 20 percent of Patna and more than 12 percent of Bihar's entire population are Muslim, so they have little power to unite as a people. Violence occasionally erupts within the Muslim community itself when there are conversions. Nine out of 10 Muslim converts are said to revert back to Islam.