South Asia People Groups

Bihari Muslims

Website: BihariMuslims.com

People Name: Bihari Muslims
Primary Language: Urdu
Other Languages: Hindi, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magadhi, and Nagpuri.
Pronounced: bee-HAR-ree

Primary Religion: Islam, mostly traditional Islam, but some more orthodox Islam.  Traditional Islam makes use of practices such as worship of Muslim saints and sometimes assimilates Hindu rituals and customs into their practices.

Location: 16.5 million live in India, and another 1 million live in Bangladesh. In India, they live in both rural and urban regions. Men often leave their families and migrate to an urban area to seek work to support their families. They often work as manual laborers and bicycle or auto rickshaw drivers. They make up half of Calcutta's Muslim population and 20 percent of Delhi's.

In Bangladesh, 1 million Bihari Muslims live in refugee camps, where they have been settled since the end of the war between Pakistan and what is now the country of Bangladesh.

Primary Location: About 12 million of the Bihari Muslims continue to live in the state of Bihar, India.

Current Status: There are three main groups among the Bihari Muslims the wealthy Sunnis, the middle class and poor Sunnis and the Shiites.  In Bihar,Muslims have incorporated many aspects of cultural life from the surrounding contexts. Folk Islam involves Hindu and animistic practices such as praying to saints and pilgrimages to tombs. It is believed that a majority of Muslims in India are involved in these popular Islamic practices. This certainly is the case among the Bihari Muslims. For this reason, they may be somewhat responsive to the Gospel when compared with the orthodox and the Koranic Muslims.

Conflict: Hindus, Muslims, and Christians experience some tensions in existing in such close proximity. Hindus have increasingly become more fundamentalists politically. Only about 20 percent of Patna and more than 12 percent of Bihar's entire population are Muslim, so they have little power to unite as a people. Violence occasionally erupts within the Muslim community itself when there are conversions. Nine out of 10 Muslim converts are said to revert back to Islam.

Prayer

I wait for the Lord,

my soul does wait,

and in His word do I hope.

My soul waits for the Lord

more than the watchmen for the 

morning; indeed, more 

than the watchmen for 

the morning.

O Bihar,

hope in the Lord;

for with the Lord

there is loving kindness,

and with Him

is abundant redemption.

(Psalm 130:5-7 Paraphrased)