"It was at this place that he [Ilyas] first came into contact with the Mewatis… These uncouth and illiterate people had converted to Islam on a mass scale as a result of the efforts of the well-known sufi Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia and his descendants, But in practical life they were far from Islam… They kept their Hindu names,… they celebrated all the Hindu festivals and made sacrifices to the pre-Islamic gods and goddesses… In 1921 new problems arose when Arya Samaj preachers resolved to reconvert the Indian Muslim to their ancestral religion. Thanks to the religious and cultural poverty of the Meos, the large-scale activities of the Aryan missionaries met with great success. The solution of this problem was to impart to them religious education so that they did not yield to any malign influence… The only solution to this problem, as the Maulana saw it, lay in separating them from their milieu… They changed their way of dressing and grew beards, shaking off one by one almost all their pre-Islamic customs that they had retained after their conversion…"