memons

Who are the Memons? I am sure most of you haven't a clue. But I am a Memon and I want to think a little here about my community.

Until recently I had no idea about my origins, not until I made a trip to the Cutch province of Gujarat state in India. In its capital, Bhuj (later to be destroyed by an earthquake), I found that the people there all spoke my mother tongue, Memni (also called Cutchi) even though not all of them were Memons. I was received with open arms, being invited into their homes for meals and shown around town. They were amused that I spoke the language in a slightly different sort of way. Either my forebears, when they migrated, adopted a different talking style or the people who didn't migrate had done so. I am not sure which.

I am the sort of person who loves libraries and so I visited the only one in Bhuj. There the librarian found for me a book which had a passage about the Memons. It seemed that about 4-500 years ago some 6000 Hindus from the Lohana community (whatever that meant), who resided in the Sindh province of what is now Pakistan, were visited upon by a Muslim preacher and converted to Islam, and were given the name Memon by this preacher, Memon meaning faithful. These Memons later moved down south to Cutch, apparently because the other Hindus living in the surrounding villages, who had chosen to remain Hindus, had started persecuting the Memons for abandoning their traditional faith.

Now what interests me is why these Memons (or more likely in the beginning their headman) embraced Islam? History doesn't say anything, as far as I am aware. Whatever people might say about the truthfulness of their religion, it is never, never easy to get converts to any religion, for religion is based not on reason or logic or rational thought but on conditioning, on rewards and punishments. A child can get conditioned to it by its parents and so can an adult by a preacher offering inducements or threatening dire consequences of some kind or other.

What was offered to the Memons?

Money, land, tax benefits? Or was it simply inter-marriages between the muslim rulers of that area and the local women? No one seems to know or care.