Islam, brought by conquerors, adventurers, and mystics, entered Bengal (including the Indian province of West Bengal in the west and the present nation state of Bangladesh in the east) from the early seventh/thirteenth century. 1. Before Islam Like the setting in which Islam emerged as a cultural, literary, and political-economic force in nearby Southeast Asian kingdoms, Bengal was home, in the centuries before the rise of Islam, to various religious practices, including an expanding Sanskritic Brahmanic culture, Theravada Buddhist monastic communities, Jain mendicants, and the worship of deities