ISLAM, ETHNICITY, NATIONALISM, AND THE BURMESE ROHINGYA CRISIS1

This article discusses the world’s most oppressed people, the Muslim Rohingya of Burma (Myanmar) through the lens of “state symbologies and critical juncture”. It further argues the amalgamation of Burmese-Buddhist ethnonationalism and anti-Muslim hate speech have become elements of Burma’s state symbology and components. Colonialism established conditions in which ethno-religious conflict could develop through policies that destroyed the civic religious pluralism characteristic of pre-colonial states. Burmese Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism is responsible for a series of communal conflicts and state repression because it did not recognize Muslims and other minorities as full and equal participants in the post-colonial national project. Therefore, the cycles of violence and the complexities of inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations indicate that Burmese political culture has become increasingly violent and genocidal. [Artikel ini menjelaskan mengenai minoritas Muslim di Birma (Myanmar), Muslim Rohingya, yang mengalami tekanan dan kekerasan. Artikel ini hendak meletakkan kekerasan terhadap Muslim Rohingya melalui konsep “state symbologies dan critical juncture”. Artikel ini berargumen amalgamasi 1 This paper is based on ethnographic and historical research conducted in Burma between 1980 and 2007 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Smithsonian Institution Special Foreign Currency Fund. DOI: 10.21274/epis.2020.15.2.287-314


Introduction
The Muslim Rohingya of Burma (Myanmar) have often been described as the world's most oppressed people. A particularly virulent round of state sponsored ethno-religious violence began in 2012 and has continued unabated. 2 It accelerated in November of 2016 there was a new round of state sponsored ethno-religious violence in Burma. 3 Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims attempted to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. Near one million now linger as stateless persons in squalid disease-ridden refugee camps. Others were pushed back or set adrift in unseaworthy boats. Others have sought refuge in Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries. 4 These developments continued a pattern of state sponsored ethno-religious violence that began in 1948 when defacto Burmese Buddhist ethno-religious nationalist state when it gained independence from Britain in 1948. 10 Burmese nationalism emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century as a militantly Burmese Buddhist ethno/religious nationalism. 11 It transformed Burmese perceptions of Muslims from valued partners into existential threats to Buddhism and Burmese Buddhist culture. A substantial portion of the Muslim community identified with Burmese anti-colonial nationalism but were rebuffed by Burmese-Buddhist ethno/religious nationalists. Anti-Muslim sentiments intensified after a series of anti-Indian riots in the 1930s. They further intensified after the 1962 military coup that brought General Ne Win to power. Continuation of this trend has many Burmese Buddhists to conclude that anti-Muslim violence is not only justified, but necessary. 12 Burmese-Buddhist ethno-nationalism and anti-Muslim hate speech have become elements of Burma's state symbology and components of what Sperber terms the "symbolic knowledge" used to understand ethnic and religious others. 13 Anti-Muslim hate speech and malicious rumors propagated by the Burma government and xenophobic elements of the Buddhist sangha (monastic order) have contributed significantly to the normalization of sectarian violence. A myth dating to the colonial era that Buddhists are at risk of being overwhelmed by a Muslim demographic tsunami cause by high birth rates is a persistent theme in Buddhist hate speech. A related theme is that Muslim men marry Buddhist women, force them to convert and raise their children as Muslims. I first heard these rumours in the 1980s. Holt 14 and Kyaw 15 observe that they intensify with successive wave of ethno-religious violence.
The Mandalay based ultranationalist monk Ashin Wiranthu has played a central role in spreading these rumours and encouraging violence against the Rohingya and other Muslims. Time Magazine described him as the "Buddhist Bin Laden." He and his associates have made effective use of social media to spread hate speech portraying Muslims as existential threats to Burmese Buddhism. 16 That a faction of the sangha would encourage and legitimize state sponsored violence is not surprising because in traditional Burmese kingdoms there was always a symbiotic relationship between sangha and state. 17 Some Burmese Buddhist claim that violence against Muslim does not have negative karmic consequences because it is necessary for the defense of Buddhism.

Analytic Themes
Four basic principles are necessary for understanding the Rohingya crisis and the precarious position of Muslim and other minorities in contemporary Burma: First, Burma is a post-colonial state with historically and culturally meaningless boundaries. Second, the Burmese government assumes that colonial boundaries reflect historical and cultural realities. Third, the Burmese state is, in Anderson's terms, "insufficiently imagined." 18 The essential nation building task of creating an inclusive national identity has failed since the beginning of the nationalist movement in the 1930s. There were no serious efforts to build a trans-ethnic, trans-religious identity in the ways that there were in Indonesia. Fourth, ethnic categories are malleable, changing over time. Ethnic classifications are systems for organizing difference. Ethnic groups are imagined communities in the way that nations are. Ethnogenesis by fusion or fission is on ongoing social phenomena. 19 The Burma government inherited a system of ethnic/racial classification from the British assuming that ethnic groups are biological realities with deep histories and unalterable cultural/behavioural characteristics. 20 I also rely on concepts of state symbologies and critical juncture as formulated by Liu, State symbologies are institutionalized meaning systems including narratives, symbols and rituals that establish legitimacy. Critical junctures are points in time where significant reconfiguration of system parameters is possible, necessary and in some cases inevitable. They range for critical points in the lives of important individuals to cataclysmic events such conquests and state failures. were not included in the census of 2014. 24 Estimates range from 2.4 to 5.4 million or 4.5 to 10 percent of the total population. 25 There are at present there are four major groups of Burmese Muslims and numerous smaller ones. Those from a variety of South Asian ethnic backgrounds are referred collectively to as Panthy or Indian Muslims or pejoratively as Kala-a general term for "foreign" South Asians. They use Urdu and Arabic for religious purposes. Indian Muslim is a colonial/post-colonial ethnic category that does not reflect the diversity of South Asian Burmese Muslims. They include ethnic Bengalis, Punjabis, Tamils and others. Each group has distinctive cultural tradition. Zerbadies include descendants of marriages between "foreign" Muslim men and local women and Burmese converts. are less than fully Islamic and even Muslims with Buddhist souls. 28 Burmese Muslims insist that the differences between the two communities are ethnic, not religious and often point to the fact that the religious language of Islam is Arabic, not Urdu. They see themselves as ethnically Burmese.

Burma's Muslim People
The Rohingya are an ethnic group located in Arakan (Rakhine State) on the border with what is now Bangladesh. They are also known simply as Arakanese Muslims. They speak a language related to related to, but distinct from, Chittagongian which is spoken in eastern Bangladesh. Apart from religion they are culturally similar to Arakanese Buddhists. Use of the term Rohingya dates to at least the eighteenth century. It became increasingly common for self-designation after the Second World War to distinguish the Rohingya from culturally similar Rakhine or Arakanese Buddhist. Both lay claim to the legacy of the eighteenthcentury Arakanese Mrauk U kingdom. They were reimagined as distinct ethnicities in political controversies concerning the future of Arakan. This reimagination was both a reflection of and motivation for political conflict. 29 Questions about the term Rohingya and the people it refers to are bitterly contested in Burma and among academics. 30 As Galache observes there is an irreconcilable conflict between Burmese and Rohingya historical narratives. The Rohingya consider themselves to be indigenous people and trace their history to the eighteenth-century Arakanese kingdom Marak U. 31  after 1948. Both narratives are politically motivated. The Burmese narrative is clearly false. The Rohingya narrative understates the extent to which Rohingya is an emerging ethnic category and that many people who claim Rohingya identity descend from people who crossed into what is now Burma when the border and even the concept of borders did not exist. 32

Religious Orientations
Most Burmese Muslims are Sunni and follow the Hanafi legal school. Religious orientations include Barelwi (traditional South Asian Islam), Deobandi (South Asian reformism) and Tablighi Jamaat. There are Sufi orders (tariqah) including the Chisti and Naqshbandi and Tariqah Al-Atas (a Burmese branch of the Ba'alawi). Sufism and saint veneration are prominent features of popular Islam as they are throughout South and Southeast Asia. There is a substantial Shia minority and small Ismaili and Ahmadiyah communities. 33

The History of Islam in Burma
Muslims first came to what is now Burma in the eighth century. Muslim traders from the Middle East and South Asia settled in coastal regions especially Arakan on the west coast. Arabic, Chinese, and Burmese sources mention Arab and Persian Muslim seafarers and traders in the Irrawaddy delta region, some of whom married local women and established lasting communities. These communities were well established as early as the sixteenth century. 34 Some soldiers and slaves came from lands as distant as Afghanistan. 35  Muslims were incorporated into Burmese Buddhist state systems serving as advisers, administrators, and soldiers for precolonial kingdoms. This is an example of what I have described elsewhere (2019) as a sociological form of additive civic pluralism in which religious others are incorporated into a dominant socio-religious order. Muslims were often musketeers, archers, artillerymen and sailors who played critical roles in the military campaigns mounted by Buddhist kings. Muslim soldiers are described as great heroes in Burmese chronicles. 36 Other Muslims were merchants, and in Arakan many became peasant farmers. 37 These arrangements continued until 1885 when the British conquered the last Burmese kingdom of Mandalay. 38 Burmese states and monarchs found these arrangements advantageous because as non-Burmese and non-Buddhists, Muslims administrators and soldiers did not pose a threat to royal authority. They did not have bases of support in the countryside or in elite Buddhist circles. Nor did this form a threat to the monarch's claim to the chief patron of Theravada Buddhism on which royal legitimacy was based. 39 It was also unlikely that Buddhists would have readily accepted Muslim rule because Buddhist monarchs were the chief patrons of the Buddhist sangha (monastic order) and shrines.
Muslims and Islamic culture were particularly prominent in Arakan. Buddhists, Chinese and Animists in both Arakan and Bengal. 46 Mrauk U was a cosmopolitan state. It was a node in both the Islamicate civilization that extended from the Moghul Empire to the Malay Peninsula and the Theravada Buddhist civilization encompassing much of what are now Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. The boundaries of colonial and post-colonial states are not relevant for understanding the dynamics, including population movements, of these civilizations.
Despite the incorporation of elements of Islam into its State symbology and Muslims into its administrative systems, Mrauk U is remembered as an exemplary Buddhist polity. Its rulers devoted vastly more resources to patronizing Buddhism and constructing Buddhist shrines and monasteries than they did to supporting Islam. 47 It also possessed, supported pilgrimage to and patronage of one of the most important Buddha images in Burma. The Mahamuni image was the palladium of Mrauk U. It is said to be an exact likeness of the Buddha cast during his lifetime at the request of the mythological Arakanese king Candrasuriya. It is also said to have once had the power to speak, preach sermons and perform miracles. 48 Mrauk population movements prior to Pakistani (now Bangladesh) and Burmese independence in the late 1940s.
Burmese cities have been multi-ethnic and multi-religious since at least the seventeenth century. Thant notes that there were Jewish, Armenian and Chinese as well as South Asian and Arabic traders and that the Burmese courts also employed Europeans and their assimilated descendants as soldiers. He observes that there were Roman Catholics of Portuguese descent who had assimilated in most every respect other than religion. Muslims from outside Burma were assimilated in the same way. Both became culturally and linguistically Burmese and retained the religion of their ancestors. 54 The penultimate Burmese king Mindon (reigned 1853-1878) carried the incorporation of Islam into state symbology and administration further than the other Konbaung kings. When he constructed the new capital Mandalay in 1857 he designated twelve specifically Muslim neighbourhoods. He facilitated the construction of twenty-one mosques, including one inside the palace walls. He personally laid the cornerstone of the palace mosque (Scott O'Connor 1907). He established Shari'ah courts, appointed judges and provided halal food for Muslim soldiers participating in state ceremonies. He also built a rest house in Mecca for Burmese pilgrims. 55 In summary, pre-colonial Buddhist kingdoms were civically pluralistic in the sense that they incorporated minorities, albeit in subordinate positions. There

Chinese butcher pigs. Both butcher chickens and other birds.
Mandalay was also based on religious additive civic pluralism in the sense that Muslims and elements of Islam were incorporated into royal and popular ritual. Theravada Buddhist states include non-Buddhist spirit cults and rituals because nibbana (nirvana) oriented and monastic Buddhism is not sufficiently concerned with practical religion. 56 In Burma, there are thirty-seven nat (spirit lords) each of which governs a particular territory. 57 Some of these lords are indigenous, other Burmese transformations of Hindu deva (divinities). There are annual festivals (nat pwe) for each of them. Two of the most popular in contemporary Burma are the Taungbyon brothers Shwe Byin Gyi and Shwe Byin Lay, Muslim soldiers know for great valour and magical powers. 58 They were executed for not contributing to the construction of a pagoda, and were transformed into spirit lords. It is forbidden to eat pork at their festival because they were Muslims.

Islam and the Colonial State
The fall of Mandalay to the British in 1885 and the subsequent establishment of direct British rule was a critical juncture that led to a reformulation of what Green calls the "religious economy of colonial Burma." 59 Relationships between Burmese Muslims and the Buddhist majority were, however, shaped by the colonial experience even prior to 56  the annexation of the Konbaung state. The Second Anglo Burmese War (1853) led to British annexation of Lower Burma and the establishment of Rangoon as its capital and principle port. The fact that Lower Burma was then a province of British India led to unrestricted immigration of both Hindus and Muslims from Bengal and other parts of British India. The size of the Muslim population grew rapidly, especially in Rangoon. There were 416 Muslims in the city in 1872 and 41,846 in 1901. By the early twentieth century Rangoon was as much an Indian as a Burmese city. In the 1920s people of South Asian origin constituted the majority of the population. This created an atmosphere in which Burmese felt like strangers in what they saw as their native land. 60 The Muslim and Hindu populations of Arakan also increased substantially. In Arakan the census of 1931 distinguished between Arakanese Muslims whose families were long-term residents and more recent immigrants from Chittagong (in what is now Bangladesh) who comprised approximately 63 percent of the total Muslim population. 61 British India became the model for the emerging Burmese colonial state. By the mid-nineteenth century British India had settled on a policy of religious neutrality. In 1849 Governor General Dalhouisie issued a proclamation stating: "The British Government will … not permit any man to interfere with others in the observance of such forms and customs as their respective religions may enjoin of permit." 62 While framed in terms of liberal tolerance, this policy had at least three pragmatic goals: to avoid entanglement in religious disputes; dispel fears that the British Raj was an existential threat to Indian religions and to escape from pressure exerted by British Christian missionary societies to support their activities that fuelled these fears. An unintended consequence was the collapse of civic pluralism and the growth of sectarian identities and organizations. These were factors contributing to the emergence of ethno-religious nationalisms. Colonial policy also contributed to the development of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim voluntary associations and the beginning of Buddhist monastic political activism. It also contributed to the rise to ethno-religious conflict because the colonial did not regulate religion other than to respond to riots with police power. 63

Ethno-Religious Conflict
There have been sporadic outbreaks of Buddhist-Muslim conflict in Rangoon, Mandalay and other cities since the 1930s. Often seemingly minor incidents such as commercial and labour disputes, religious insults and concerns about Muslim men marrying or raping Buddhist women spark riots in which Buddhist mobs, often led by monks, burn Muslim homes and shops. 64 When ethno-religious tensions are high Id al-Adha (the Muslim feast of sacrifice) enhances them as for Muslims this is a religious obligation while for Buddhists it is "murdering the little goats." These patterns are similar to those described by Tambiah in his account of communal conflict in India. 65 Anti-Indian/Muslim riots in Rangoon in the early 1930s contributed to the British decision to separate Burma from the rest of British India in 1937. 66 This was a critical juncture that led to the formal demarcation of the boundaries between what became Bangladesh, Myanmar and India. It did nothing to calm ethnoreligious tension. It created a sense of concern among Muslims and other minorities about the growing power of Burmese ethno-religious nationalists in the newly established British Burma. Some Burmese nationalists opposed separation because they feared it would slow the course of reform. 67 The outbreak of the Second World and its immediate aftermath further complicated communal relationships. Many thousands of people fled across the border into Bengal and Assam in India. Burmese nationalist leaders including future prime minister Aung San initially sided with the Japanese. Many switched sides as the war drew to a close. Minorities, including the Rohingya, fought on the British side. 68 These political conflicts contributed to the deterioration of Buddhist/Muslim relationship and outbreaks of armed conflict and ethnic cleansing by both Buddhists and Muslims in Arakan. Any sense of shared Arakanese identity vanished as Buddhists and Muslims migrated/were driven into different sections of Arakan. After the war, many thousands of people sought to return to their homes in Burma. The Rohingya and other Muslim minorities sought either autonomy within the proposed Union of Burma or independence. 69

Burmese Independence, Ethnic Insurgency and the Rohingya Crisis
The Union of Burma was established in 1948 as a democratic, secular, multi-ethnic confederation within the 1937 boundaries of British Burma. Under pressure from Burmese nationalists and in their own rush to disband their Indian empire the British failed to take steps to ensure the political and cultural rights of ethnic and religious minorities. anything, even more brutal, in the wake of pro-democracy protests. Ne Win instituted the "Burmese way to socialism," nationalized much of the economy and closed Burma to the outside world, leaving its people mired in abject poverty. 76 When I lived in Burma in the 1980s the blackmarket economy was the economy. Ne Win was also an extreme ethnonationalist. Rodgers notes that he intended to purge Burma of Muslims, Karens (most of whom are Christians) and other ethnic peoples. 77 His government expelled hundreds of thousands of ethnic South Asians and severely repressed Burmese Chinese. 78 Ne Win's ethno-nationalism was based on two mythological propositions. The first is that prior to the advent of colonialism "national races" lived in harmony in a cultural/ political entity coterminous with the 1937 boundaries of British Burma. The second was that economic difficulties and political discord are the products of foreign influences. 79 Ethnic cleansing began with Operation King Dragon in 1978 during which approximately 200,000 were driven across the border with Bangladesh. 80 The Citizenship Law of 1982 provided a legal basis for ethnic cleansing. It denied citizenship to people who are not members of ethnic groups "permanently residing" in Burma prior to the outbreak of the First Anglo-Burmese war in 1824. This criterion was based on a list of 135 "national races" compiled by Ne Win and his associates based on a survey conducted by British authorities after the war that did not include the Rohingya. Other provisions stripped Rohingya who 76 Michael Charney, A History of Modern Burma. 77 Benedict Rogers, Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads (Random House, 2012). 78 Maureen Aung-Thwin, Thant Myint-U, and Thant Mynt-U. "The Burmese Ways to Socialism." Third World Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1992, pp. 67-75. 79 Michael Charney, "A History of Modern Burma"; Nick Cheesman, "How in Myanmar "National Races" Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya," Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 47, No. 3, 2017, pp. 461-483. 80 Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991). had citizenship papers based on 1948 legislation of their rights. 81 It established a legal basis for the xenophobic, Islamaphobic position that the Rohingya are illegal Bengali immigrants and legitimized repression and ethnic cleansing. 82 Severe repression at varying levels on intensity has continued ever since.
Burma has undergone gradual and partial democratic transition since 2008. 83 Limited democratization and economic liberalization have done nothing to alleviate the Rohingya crisis. Aung San Su Kyi, founder of the National League for Democracy has been defacto Prime Minister since 2016. She was once hailed as a champion of human rights and democracy but has proven unwilling to end or even condemn ethnic cleansing and genocide in Arakan and has routinely placated the military and Buddhist extremists. 84

Conclusions
Colonialism established conditions in which ethno-religious conflict could develop through policies that destroyed the civic religious pluralism characteristic of pre-colonial states. Burmese Buddhist ethno-religious nationalism is more directly responsible for conflict and repression because it did not recognize Muslims and other minorities as full and equal participants in the post-colonial national project. General Ne Win was more directly responsible because he used the brutality of his military regime to turn xenophobic ideologies into social realities. The partial democratic transition of 1989 and subsequent reforms did little, if anything, to diminish Burmese Buddhist chauvinism and the perception that Islam is an existential threat to Theravada Buddhism and Burmese culture. For Aung San Su Kyi and the National League for Democracy reforms are only for Burmese Buddhists. Her 2019 defense of the Burmese government against genocide charges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and her refusal to use the word Rohingya because of government assertions that they do not exist as an ethnic group 85 makes her at least complicit with genocide and other crimes against humanity. In her defense she stated that Western critics of the Burmese government she stated that what much of the international community recognizes and genocide is merely "cycles of inter-communal violence going back to the 1940s" and described critics of her government for not understanding the complex history of ethnic relations in Burma. In an ironic sense, she is correct. However, the better one understands these cycles of violence and the complexities of inter-ethnic and interreligious relations it clearer it becomes that Burmese political culture has become increasingly violent and genocidal. 85 Marlise Simons and Hannah Beech, "Aung San Suu Kyi Defends Myanmar Against Rohingya Genocide Accusations," The New York Times, 11 December 2019 at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-myanmargenocide-hague.html.