Islam in Myanmar – Research Notes
Asst. Prof. Dr. Imtiyaz Yusuf
Lecturer and Director, Center for Buddhist-Muslim Understanding
College of Religious Studies, Mahidol University
Salaya, Thailand
Myanmar is a non-secular Buddhist majority country. The
Theravada Buddhists and Christians are the two main religious communities
groups in Myanmar with the Muslims being the third, enumerated population of
Burma tells that, Buddhists make up 89.8 percent of the population, Christians
6.3 percent and Muslims 2.3 percent.
The Burmese Muslim community is largely a community of
traders and ulama who are economically well but with poor levels of human
resources development in the professional fields of education, science,
engineering, medicine, technology and business management. Yet, there are
several prominent law specialists among them.
As a hard and a difficult country, Myanmar was born out
of the ashes of the murder of its integrationist freedom fighter leader General
Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, he was assassinated on 19 July 1947 a
few months before the independence of Burma on 4 January 1948. His legacy of
seeking integration and the legacy of violence associated with his murder
alludes Myanmar until today.
In its 69 years of existence, Myanmar is dominated
politically by the Bamar Buddhist majority which espouses a Bamar racist
interpretation of Buddhism. The Bamar and other 135 distinct ethnic groups are
officially grouped into following eight "major national ethnic races”
viz., Bamar; Chin; Kachin; Kayin; Kayah; Mon; Rakhine and Shan who are
recognized the original natives of the country of Myanmar. Others are
classified as outsiders of illegal immigrants as in the case of the Rohingya Muslims.
The Muslims in Myanmar are divided into 4 groups:
1) The India Muslims known as Chulias, Kaka and Pathans
were brought by the British colonizers to administer the colony. They resided
largely in the colonial capital city of Yangon which at one time had 56% Indian
population. Comprising mostly of factory and dock workers, gems traders and
owners of businesses, they did economically well. The Indian Muslims speak Urdu
and follow the Indian Muslim religious traditions of the Barelwi, Deobandi and
the Tabligh Jamaat. They are led by the maulvis and often give only Indian
styled madrasa education to their children. The male graduates of which take on
the management of family businesses and the women folk become house wives.
After seizing power through a military coup in 1962,
General Ne Win expelled 300,000 Indians from Burma to India as a part of
nationalization process.
Among the prominent Muslims of Burma are:
1.1) The last Mughal king Bahadur Shah was exiled by the
British to Rangoon after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. His mausoleum is located
at at No. 6 Theatre Road in Yangon. It is become a Sufi shrine.
1.2) Mr. U Razak (1898 – 1947) was a prominent secular
Burmese politician of Tamil ancestry who deeply loved Burma and called for
unity between Burmese Muslims and Buddhists. Being an educator, he learned Pali
and Theravada Buddhism and founded the Mandalay College now Mandalay
University). He was the Minister of Education and National Planning in General
Aung San's pre-independence interim government and also the chairman of the
Burma Muslim Congress. U Razak was assassinated, along with Aung San on 19 July
1947.
2) Pathi or Zerbadee – are the Burmese Muslim offsprings
of the intermarriage between Persian and Indian Muslim men and Burman and other
women. They see themselves different from the other Muslim groups both racial
and culturally and as being closer to Buddhist Burmese ethnically and
culturally. They distance themselves from the Indian Muslims whose religious
lives are influenced by the Indian theological schools of Barelwi and Deoband.
The Zerbadee Muslims being ethnically Burmese Muslim minority within a minority
are caught between the Burmese Buddhists with whom they share same racial and
cultural identity but not religious identity.
3) Panthay or Hui Muslim of Chinese background are
culturally Chinese engaging in business and trading occupations. They mostly
migrated from the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan during the 13th
century and also fleeing from the 1949 Chinese communist persecution, they are
settled around the northern city of Mandalay.
4) Rohingya numbering around 1 million are natives of the
Rakhine state which was formerly the Arakan kingdom. The Rohingya are
designated as illegal Bengali migrants from Bangladesh and are discriminately
referred to as the “kalla” - dark skinned people. The Rohingya also known as
has the Arakan Muslims have a long historical presence since the times of the
ancient Arakan kingdom along with Arakan Buddhist is now denied and effaced
thereby weakening the legitimacy of their claim to Myanmar citizenship.
The historical presence of the Arakan Muslims in today’s
state of Myanmar is rooted in the historical past of when there were no-state
borders and there was free movement between Chittagong in Bengal since long
time. Politically, it related to the time of Kingdom of Mrauk-U which existed
from 1430 until 1785 which ruled over much of present day Bangladesh and Burma.
It founder and the last king was Narameikhla Min Saw Mon, a Buddhist also known
as Suleiman Shah was the founder and the last king founder of Mrauk-U Dynasty
of Arakan. He became king in 1404 but was driven out in 1406. He lived as an
exile in Bengal for 24 years, regaining his throne in 1430 with military
support Sultan Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah of the Sultanate of Bengal. From 1430
to 1531 Mrauk U was a protectorate of the Bengal Sultanate, as a vassal state
the Buddhist kings of Arakan, the court officials and military leaders held
Islamic titles. Islamic gold dinar coins from Bengal were legal tender within
the kingdom. The king Narameikhla minted his own coins with Burmese characters
on one side and Persian characters on the other. In the 16th and 17th Mrauk U
was an important maritime port which could be reached by large trading ships in
the Bay of Bengal.
In 1784, the Bamar king Bodawpaya invaded and conquered
the Arakan kingdom and incorporated into his kingdom. The British annexed
Arakan in 1826 after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26) the British colonial
era was marked by a large influx of Indians into British Burma to assist in
administration and in the business and labour sectors. Their descendants today
are among the economic elites of Myanmar.
The Rohingya constitute approximately 1.3 million out of
3 millions population of the Rakhine state. It is estimated that currently
there are 1 millions Rohingyas inside Myanmar of which 140,000 live in refugee
camps as IDPs the Rakhine state since the eruption of 2012 ethnoreligious
clashes. And there are 1.5 million Rohingya living in exile in Bangladesh,
Pakistan; Saudi Arabia; UAE; India, Malaysia; Thailand; UK, USA and Australia.
In 1940s during the period of independence struggle and
the separation of India into two Pakistans, there was an insurgent group named
Mujahids who desired to join East Pakistan and separate from Arakanese Buddhists
and Burmans. They sought help from Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of
Pakistan. Jinnah discussed this matter with General Aung San who assured their
protection in new Burma and Jinnah was not supportive of separation.
In June 1989 as per the, “Adaptation of Expressions Law”
(Law 15/89) 1989 the name of the state of Arakan was changed to Rakhine state
and came to be identified as a only Rakhine Buddhist dominated state.
Myanmar is a country of restive ethnic minorities which
are also defined along religious lines has a three-tired system of 1) Full
Citizen; 2) Associate Citizen; 3) Naturalized Citizen, as per 1982 citizenship
law the second and the third types of citizenships subject to revocation. The
Rohingya are denied all 3 types of citizenship by law.
The delegitimization of the Rohingya began during the
1970s military regime of General Ne-Win. The promulgation of the 1974
Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Myanmar and the 1974 Emergency
Immigration Act laid the basis for ethnic citizenship. It invalidated The
National Registration Certificates issued as per the 1947 legislation which
where possessed by the Rohingya. The new laws began the process of
delegitimization the citizenship state of the Rohingya, it culminated in the
1982 Burmese Citizenship Law which created four types of citizenship: citizen;
associate citizen; naturalized citizen and foreigners, as per this law the
Rohingya were declared as being foreigners. The final stroke at making the
Rohingya totally stateless happened in 2015, following the 2012-13 violence and
under pressure from the 969 Burmese Buddhist nationalists, the Thein Sein
government declared that the White Cards identity held by the Rohingya null and
void, the Rohingya were declared to be outsider “Bengalis.” The Rohingya are
the only stateless people in Southeast Asia.
In light of oppression and violent conflict between the
Burmese army and the Rohingya since 2012, the democratically elected government
led by state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi , in 2016 established an Advisory
Commission on Rakhine State led the former UN secretary general, Kofi Annan
with a mandate to examine the Rohingya issue and propose recommendations. The
commission was "not mandated to investigate specific cases of alleged
human rights violations." In its report released on 24 August 2017, the
commission recommend the state of Myanmar to scrap restrictions on movement and
citizenship of the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority as a solution to avoid
the conflict from spiralling into radicalization within both communities.
In 1998, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) and
Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) jointly founded the Arakan Rohingya
National Organization (ARNO) and its Rohingya National Army (RNA). The most
recent Rohingya resistance group currently engaging with the Burmense army is
the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
Apart from Tatmadaw (Myanmar Armed Forces) there are also
several Arakan Buddhist nationalist groups of the Rakhine state who view the
Rohingya as Bengali Muslims and a threat to their state because of their Muslim
faith. These groups include the Arakan National Party (ANP); the Arakan
Liberation Party (ALP) and its Arakan Liberation Army ALA) and the United
League of Arakan (ULA) and its armed wing the Arakan Army (AA).
Apart from the Rohingya issue, of recent Myanmar has also
witnessed the rise of non-violent extremist nationalist movement of Buddhist
nationalist monks called the Ma Ba Tha or 969 movement. In 2015, it pressured
the former military led regime of President Thein Sein to pass the “Protection
of Race and Religion” targeting the country’s Muslim minority. The law imposes
compulsory "birth spacing" for women; monogamy laws; marriage laws
requiring Buddhist women to register their marriages in advance if marrying a
non-Buddhist man; and a law regulating religious conversions. The 969 movement
sees Muslims as dangerous people.
Ashin Wirathu, the leader of the Ma Ba Tha or 969
movement began by protesting against and boycotting Muslim businesses. It invented
the 969 numerical symbol written in Burmese numerals and not Arabic numbers
representing the ‘Three Jewels” – the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha as cosmological
powerful symbol to combat the Indian Burmese Muslim use of the Arabic numbers
of 786 as reference to the Qur'anic verse "In the name of God, the Most
Gracious, the Most Merciful" which is often displayed at Muslim business
and in transaction slips. Ashin Wirathu and others premise that the addition of
the 7+8+ 6 = 21 is a symbol of a Muslim plot to conquer and convert Myanmar to
Islam in the 21st century.
Recent months has seen increased anti-Muslim campaign in
Myanmar. During November 2015 in anticipation of the 2016 Myanmar election, the
Ma Ba Tha nationalists issued a 12-point policy statement calling upon the
voters public to consider alleged threats to support the protection of race and
religion when voting. The group has also called for a ban on wearing of Islamic
headscarves and the ritual slaughter of cows during the Eid al-Adha festival.
Since its independence in 1948 independence Myanmar has
failed to become a multicultural society of ethnoreligious equality and
plurality.
On the regional front, there are also media reports of
the forming of a Buddhist-Hindu transnational anti-Muslim alliance the
comprising of the Ma Ba Tha of Myanmar; the Bodu Bala Sena BBS of Sri Lanka and
Rashtriya Swam Sevak Sangh (RSS) the Indian Hindu nationalist movement main
political force behind the present Hindutva led Indian government of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister Narendra Modi.
In view of geo-politics, Muslim-Buddhist fault lines in
Southeast Asia and the rise of global religious nationalisms, I anticipate the
rise of Asian Islamophobia soon.
Bibliography:
Yegar, Moshe The Muslims of Burma; Wiesbaden: O.
Harrassowitz, 1972.
------- Between Integration and Secession : The Muslim
Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western
Burma/Myanmar. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.
Berlie, J. A. The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims.
Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press, 2008.
Siddiqui, Dr Habib. The Forgotten Rohingya: Their
Struggle for Human Rights in Burma, 2008.
Ibrahim, Azeem. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden
Genocide. 1 edition. London: Hurst, 2016.
Constantine, Greg. Exiled to Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya.
1ST ed., 2012.
Rogers, Benedict. Burma: A Nation At The Crossroads.
Revised edition. Random House UK, 2016.
Melissa Crouch, ed., Islam and the State in Myanmar:
Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, 1 edition. (New Delhi,
India: Oxford University Press, 2016).
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