Hindus preferred to live in the country and would not frequent the company of those whom they considered as outcasts.  Still, Hindus were often employed as accountants and revenue officers.  All non-Moslims had to pay the jiziya or poll tax, and the remission of this impost accorded to converts was naturally a powerful incentive to change of faith.  Yet Mohammedanism cannot record any wholesale triumph in India such as it has won in Persia, Egypt and Java.  At the present day about one-fifth of the population are Moslim.  The strength of Islam in the Panjab is due to immigration as well as conversion,[1164] but it was embraced by large numbers in Kashmir and made rapid progress in Oudh and Eastern Bengal.  The number of Mohammedans in Bengal (twenty-five millions out of a total of sixty-two in all India) is striking, seeing that the province is out of touch with the chief Mohammedan centres, but is explicable by the fact that Islam had to deal here not with an educated and organized Hindu community but with imperfectly hinduized aboriginal races, who welcomed a creed with no caste distinctions.  Yet, apart from the districts named, which lie on the natural line of march from the Panjab down the Ganges to the sea, it made little progress.  It has not even conquered the slopes of the Himalayas or the country south of the Jumna.  If we deduct from the Mohammedan population the descendants of Mohammedan immigrants and of those who, like the inhabitants of Eastern Bengal, were not Hindus when they embraced the faith, the impression produced by Islam on the religious thought of India is not great, considering that for at least five centuries its temporal supremacy was hardly contested.

It is not until the time of Kabir that we meet with a sect in which Hindu and Mohammedan ideas are clearly blended, but it may be that the theology of Ramanuja and Madhva, of the Lingayats and Sivaite sects of the south, owes something to Islam.  Its insistence on the unity and personality of God may have vivified similar ideas existing within Hinduism, but the expression which they found for themselves is not Moslim in tone, just as nowadays the Arya Samaj is not European in tone.  Yet I think that the Arya Samaj would never have come into being had not Hindus become conscious of certain strong points in European religion.  In the north it is natural that Moslim influence should not have made itself felt at once.  Islam came first as an enemy and a raider and was no more sympathetic to the Brahmans than it was to the Greek Church in Europe.  Though Indian theism may sometimes seem practically equivalent to Islam, yet it has a different and gentler tone, and it often rests on the idea that God, the soul and matter are all separate and eternal, an idea foreign to Mohammed’s doctrine of creation.  But from the fifteenth century onwards we find a series of sects which are obviously compromises and blends.  Advances are made from both sides.  Thoughtful Mohammedans see the profundity of Hindu theology:  liberal Hindus declare that no caste or condition, including birth in a Moslim family, disqualifies man for access to God.