The Book Presents A Comprehensive Account Of The Politico- Economic History Of Bengal From Ad 1205 To 1576. It Makes Extensive Use Of Coins And Epigraphs To Interpret And Substantiate The Historical Narrative Culled Out From The Contemporaneous Chronicles And Travelogues. The Entire Narrative Is Enriched By A Corpus Of Rare Coins Spread Over 32 Plates. Required Reading Not Only For The Serious Schlor But Also The Lay Reader Interested In Medieval Indian History And Numismatics .

Eaton ranges over all the important aspects of that community's history, whether political and social, or cultural and religious...This study must rank among the finest contributions to South Asian scholarship to appear for some while.

Bangladesh, the eastern half of earth’s largest delta, Bengal, is today an independent country of 163 million people. Among the 98% ethnic Bengali population, above 90 percent practice Islam. Surprisingly, Buddhism was the predominant religion of the region until the beginning of the 2nd millennium. In the midst of a long and fierce Brahman-Buddhist conflict, political Islam arrived in Bengal in the very early 13th century. Against the background of the above history, this book tells the story of successive religious and political transformations, touching upon the sensitive subject of Bengali Muslim identity. Encompassing a period of more than a millennium, it narrates a political history beginning with the independent Muslim Sultanate and closing with the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. The book concludes by discussing the present day, here termed “Authoritarian Secularism”.

Before the Mughal style came to dominate the Islamic architecture of the Indian sub-continent, Bengal and its rulers had developed their own forms. The mosque architecture of the Independent Sultanate period (from the 14th to the 16th centuries) represents the most important element of the Islamic architecture of Bengal. This distinctive regional style drew its inspiration from the indigenous vernacular architecture of Bengal, itself heavily influenced by Hindu/Buddhist temple architecture. The early Muslim architecture of Bangladesh is an important but little studied part of the architectural heritage of the Islamic world and the Indian sub-continent. Perween Hasan's work is a most original contribution to this subject.