Munshi Mohammad Meherullah

Meherullah was born in 1861 to a Bengali Muslim family of Munshis in Kaliganj under Jhenaidah subdivision, Jessore District of the Bengal Presidency. He learnt Bengali at a local school until the untimely death of his father, Munshi Muhammad Warith, when he was around 10 years old. He further continued his education under the guidance of Moulvi Ismail Sahib, with the financial help of his maternal family. He learned Arabic and Persian during these years. From another teacher, Munshi Musabuddin, he learned Urdu. With his vast knowledge of languages and the Quran, he became not only an important figure in his local community but someone who could converse with members of elite households in Dhaka and Calcutta. The elite spoke and wrote in different languages, depending on where they resided and who they were. He was a polyglot, visionary, and a channel for communication between these people of different socio-economic classes. Interestingly, along with everything else, Meherullah was a businessman. After doing a government job for a short while, he got trained as a tailor and used his business not only to support his family but also to stay in touch with his community.

During his lifetime, Christian missionaries moved into disaster-struck rural parts of Bengal and started converting Muslims with the promise of hospitals, food, and education. The salvation that the missionaries provided improved lives but at the cost of having to give up on one's beliefs.

Young Meherullah was initially attracted to Christianity, seeing the charitable efforts of the missionaries.^[3] Muhammad Abdul Majid mentions this in Chotoder Munshi Mohammad Meher Ullah. According to Majid, Meherullah became a Christian, moved to Darjeeling, and lived under the patronage of Christian missionaries.^{[citation needed]} There, he studied not only the Bible but also the books written by Muslim dais and decided to revert to Islam and shed light on the beauty of Islam to the people who were converted with misinformation used to vilify Islam .^{[citation needed]}

Abul Ahsan Chaudhuri points out that cycles of epidemics, flooding, and famines had unsettled the agricultural ecosystem and the socio-economic infrastructure in Nadia and Jessore. As a result, the charitable efforts of Christian missionaries made the Muslim peasantry particularly vulnerable to conversion.^[4]

Meherullah, upon returning to Jessore District and with his re-converted disciple Shaikh Jamiruddin, adopted oratory method known as bahas^{[citation needed]} (disputation) and sought to refute Christian missionaries.^[5][6] He was able to re-convert numerous Muslims who had been converted to Christianity. He established Madrasaye Karamatia and Islam Dharmottejika Sabha in 1889 at Manoharpur village in Jessore. He contributed regularly to Muslim newspapers like the Sudhakar and Islam Pracharak published from Kolkata.^[1][3]

According to Kenneth W. Jones, no other Muslim preacher contributed to polemical literature in that period. While debating Christian missionaries, Meherullah did not vilify them. He called for intra-communal harmony.^[3]

Also, among his other major contributions, Meherullah strived to teach the Muslim population not to adopt primitive ideas from their neighboring Hindu society, which was opposed to the remarriage of widows.