Sufis, more than any other single group in Islam, have been responsible for large-scale conversions to Islam, and have often paid for their boldness with their lives. They were (and still are) often venerated after their deaths by the descendents of the very people who martyred them in the first place. For the most part these Sufi holy men and women were either fighters or wandering mendicants, who through their performance of miracles, especially of a healing nature, and their saintly lives, devotion to God and communicative abilities were able to convert peoples on the boundaries of Islam. These peoples were varied: from the largely Hindu population of India; to the shamanists, Buddhists and Nestorian Christians of Central Asia; to the Christians of Anatolia (Turkey) and southeastern Europe; to the pagans of West and East Africa, and the Indonesian islands (some Hindus). Sufis in general worked very closely with Muslim traders. It was primarily along trading routes, connected with the great Indian Ocean trade, the salt/gold/slave trade of Western Africa, the Silk Road of Central Asia, and the arteries of the Indus and Ganges rivers that Islam spread.