A fundamental and basic difference between the two communities was app — Religion in West Bengal

"[Bengal was conquered by...] Muslim militant saints, the Firs who cropped up after the seed or Islam had been broad cast in the plains of Bengal."

"The Mussulmans of Calcutta though adopting various Hindu practices, have never amalgamated with the Hindus. They seem to retain towards them the views of Timur who said, - The Hindu has nothing of humanity but the figure. Ambitions characterized the Moslem here last century as much as avarice did the Gentoo, but the days are gone for ever when a Mussulamn like the Foujdar of Hooghly had Rs. 6000 monthly salary and when the kora or the whip was hung up in every Mofussil Court for the Mussulman officials to flagellate the Hindus."

"(The Sufis) established their khanaqahs on the sites of Buddhist shrines, and (it) fitted well into the religious situation in Bengal."

"About a century after the military and political conquest of Bengal, there began the process of the moral and spiritual conquest of the land through the efforts of the Muslim religious fraternities that now arose in every comer. By destroying temples and monasteries, the Muslim warriors of earlier times had only appropriated their gold & silver; but the sword could not silence history, nor carry off their immortal spiritual treasure wherein lay rooted Hindu idolatry and Hindu nationalism. The ‘saints’ of Islam completed the process of conquest, moral and spiritual, by establishing dargahs & khanqahs deliberately on the sites of these ruined places of Hindu and Buddhist worship. This served a double purpose of preventing the revival of these places of heathen sanctity, and later on, of installing themselves as the guardian deities with tales of pious fraud invented by popular imagination. Hindus who had been accustomed for centuries to venerate these places gradually forgot their past history, and easily transferred their allegiance to the pirs and ghazis. The result of this rapprochement in the domain of faith ultimately created a more tolerant atmosphere which kept the Hindus indifferent to their political destiny. It prepared the ground for the further inroad of Islam into Hindu society, particularly among the lower classes who were gradually won over by an assiduous and persistent propaganda regarding the miracles of these saints and ghäzis, which were in many cases taken over in toto from old Hindu and Buddhist legends. The most notable example of the invasion of the sites of Hindu worship by Muslim saints is the transformation of the Sringi-Rishi-kund into the Makhdum-kund at Rajgir, and the translation of the miracle-working Buddha of the Deva-datta legend into a Muslim saint, Makhdum Sabib."