The world is a garden, whose gardener is the state.  Fakhr al-Din Razi (d.1209CE)

We arrived before the Sultan. He was seated on a large gilt sofa covered with different-sized cushions, all of which were embedded with a smattering of precious stones and small pearls. We greeted him according to the custom of the country—hands crossed on our chests and heads as low as possible.[A Portuguese official in Bengal (1521 CE)]

Myths have nothing to do with history and should be refuted. ~ Ibn Khaldun

History is written by the winners.  ~Alex Haley

The current generation of Bengalis do not recall the great era of the Bengal Sultanate commencing in 1204 CE. This was when Bengal had reached the zenith of civilisation and regional dominance. The Sultanate implemented law and order, enriched the cultural heritage, established justice and brought economic prosperity in the land. It clearly demonstrated how Islam was an integral part of state and society; that it can secure the basic needs and rights of people by providing food, clothing and shelter for all the population, create an infrastructure and exercise independent political thinking on behalf of it's citizens.  This secured their interests, unlike the status quo of Bangladesh today.

Bengal - Golden Age

The reigns of Sultan 'Ala al-Din Husain Shah (1493–1519) and his son Nasir al-Din Nusrat Shah (1519–32) are generally regarded as the " golden age" of the Bengal sultanate.

In Husain Shah's reign, for example, Bengali Hindus participated in government to a considerable degree: his chief minister (vazīr), his chief of bodyguards, his master of the mint, his governor of Chittagong, his private physician, and his private secretary (dabīr-i khāṣ) were all Bengali Hindus.

In terms of its physical power and territorial extent, too, this was the sultanate's high tide. In the second year of his reign, 1494, Sultan Husain Shah extended the kingdom's northern frontiers, invading and annexing both Kuch Bihar ("Kamata") and western Assam ("Kamrup"). Writing around 1515, Tome Pires estimated this monarch's armed forces at a hundred thousand cavalrymen. "He fights with heathen kings, great lords and greater than he," wrote the Portuguese official, "but because the king of Bengal is nearer to the sea, he is more practised in war, and he prevails over them." The king thus managed to make a circle of vassals of his neighbors: Orissa to the southwest, Arakan to the southeast, and Tripura to the east.[Prof. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760]

Note: Some governors later became sultans, and in the process changed their names or titles. In the following table, such changes are indicated by arrows [asterisks].

Sometime in 1243–44, residents of Lakhnauti, a city in northwestern Bengal, told a visiting historian of the dramatic events that had taken place there forty years earlier. At that time, the visitor was informed, a band of several hundred Turkish cavalry had ridden swiftly down the Gangetic Plain in the direction of the Bengal delta. Led by a daring officer named Muhammad Bakhtiyar, the men overran venerable Buddhist monasteries in neighboring Bihar before turning their attention to the northwestern portion of the delta, then ruled by a mild and generous Hindu monarch. Disguising themselves as horse dealers, Bakhtiyar and his men slipped into the royal city of Nudiya. Once inside, they rode straight to the king’s palace, where they confronted the guards with brandished weapons. Utterly overwhelmed, for he had just sat down to dine, the Hindu monarch hastily departed through a back door and fled with many of his retainers to the forested hinterland of eastern Bengal, abandoning his kingdom altogether.

This coup d’état inaugurated an era, lasting over five centuries, during which most of Bengal was dominated by rulers professing the Islamic faith. In itself this was not exceptional, since from about this time until the eighteenth century, Muslim sovereigns ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent. What was exceptional, however, was that among India’s interior provinces only in Bengal—a region approximately the size of England and Scotland combined—did a majority of the indigenous population adopt the religion of the ruling class, Islam. This outcome proved to be as fateful as it is striking, for in 1947 British India was divided into two independent states, India and Pakistan, on the basis of the distribution of Muslims. In Bengal, those areas with a Muslim majority would form the eastern wing of Pakistan—since 1971, Bangladesh—whereas those parts of the province with a Muslim minority became the state of West Bengal within the Republic of India. In 1984 about 93 million of the 152 million Bengalis in Bangladesh and West Bengal were Muslims, and of the estimated 96.5 million people inhabiting Bangladesh, 81 million, or 83 percent, were Muslims; in fact, Bengalis today comprise the second largest Muslim ethnic population in the world, after the Arabs.[Prof. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760]