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Buddhist–Muslim Interactions in Burma/Myanmar

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Buddhist-Muslim Relations in a Theravada World

Abstract

This chapter presents a broad history of Muslim–Buddhist encounters and dynamics in Burma/Myanmar, focusing on two primary aspects: First, due to the Buddhist demographic majority and a tradition of political rule influenced by Buddhist symbolism and legitimation for centuries, these encounters have been overwhelmingly unequal, with Buddhists consistently dominant. Second, even during periods where political authorities practiced policies of religious inclusion, allowing non-Buddhists to practice their religions or hold influential political, economic or societal positions, Muslims of virtually any background have consistently been portrayed and viewed as foreign in particular ways, and as standing outside either the polity or a more nebulously defined ethno-religious community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Because there is a significantly larger body of scholarly work on variations of practice, belief and identity among Buddhists, it is not dealt with in detail here, although I provide extensive references in the following section.

  2. 2.

    Although this suggests that Theravada Buddhism was already relatively well-established among the Mon.

  3. 3.

    International Crisis Group, “Counting the Costs: Myanmar’s Problematic Census,” Asia Briefing, Yangon/Brussels, 2014.

  4. 4.

    Republic of the Union of Myanmar, The 2014 Myanmar Population and Housing Census, the Union Report: Religion (Ministry of Labour Department of Population, Immigration and Population, 2016).

  5. 5.

    Works that engage with different aspects of Buddhism in Myanmar include King (1964), Sarkisyanz (1965), Smith (1965), Spiro (1967, 1982), Mendelson and Ferguson (1975), Brohm (1957), Schober (1989, 2011), Houtman (1999), Charney (2006), Jordt (2007), Carbine (2011), Braun (2013), Kawanami (2013), Turner (2014) and Walton (2016).

  6. 6.

    There are officially 135 recognized ethnic groups in Myanmar, although this figure is arbitrary and disputed. The largest groups, apart from the majority Burmans are the Shan, Karen, Kachin, Rakhine, Mon, Wa, Chin and Karenni. These eight groups all have either ethnically defined states or, in the case of the Wa, an ethnically defined special region. However, the members of these ethnic groups, while usually concentrated in the states that bear their name, are also spread out across the country, especially in urban centers. Additionally, mixed ethnic heritage is anecdotally quite common, although no empirical study of this has ever been done and the 2014 census did not adequately capture mixed identities. Burmans, Shan, Rakhines and Mon are all majority Buddhist groups. Kachin, Chin and Karenni are majority Christian groups. The Karen are likely majority Buddhist, although clear evidence is not available and Karen ethnic oppositional identity has been more closely aligned and identified with Christian leadership. The Wa practice Christianity, Buddhism and Animism.

  7. 7.

    Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, “An Overview of the Field of Religion in Burmese Studies,” Asian Ethnology 68, no. 2 (2009): 202.

  8. 8.

    Recent examples of scholarship on non-doctrinal, non-textual or non-majoritarian Buddhisms in Myanmar include Foxeus (2011) on millenialist groups, Tannenbaum (1995) on Shan Buddhist beliefs, a 2009 special issue of the journal Contemporary Buddhism on Shan Buddhism, and an edited volume (Brac de La Perrière et al. 2014) on weikza (Burmese wizards or supermen).

  9. 9.

    Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1972); Jean A. Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2008); Melissa Crouch, ed., Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016a).

  10. 10.

    Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims, 7ff.

  11. 11.

    Andrew Selth, “Burma’s Muslims and the War on Terror,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 27, no. 2 (2004): 107–109.

  12. 12.

    Curtis Lambrecht, “Burma (Myanmar),” in Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook, eds. Greg Fealy and Virginia Hooker (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), 23–25.

  13. 13.

    Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Alienation, Discrimination, and Securitization: Legal Personhood and Cultural Personhood of Muslims in Myanmar,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 13, no. 4 (2015).

  14. 14.

    Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 83.

  15. 15.

    Andrew D.W. Forbes, “The ‘Panthay’ (Yunnanese Chinese) Muslims of Burma,” Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs Journal 7, no. 2 (1986): 385.

  16. 16.

    David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

  17. 17.

    Forbes, “The ‘Panthay’ (Yunnanese Chinese) Muslims of Burma,” 388.

  18. 18.

    Stephen Keck, “Reconstructing Trajectories of Islam in British Burma,” in Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 66.

  19. 19.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 33.

  20. 20.

    Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims, 11–12.

  21. 21.

    Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, The Indian Minority in Burma: The Rise and Decline of an Immigrant Community (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

  22. 22.

    Adas (1974) details the socioeconomic dynamics of moneylending practices, displacement, indebtedness and discontent in the Irrawaddy Delta region.

  23. 23.

    Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims, 48.

  24. 24.

    Nick Cheesman, “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47, no. 3 (2017).

  25. 25.

    There is a single reference to “Rooinga” in a 1799 report by the British doctor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton. Other than this, reports refer to “Moslems” or “Mahommedans” or a range of other descriptors and ethnonyms.

  26. 26.

    Jacques Leider, “Rohingya: The Name, the Movement and the Quest for Identity,” in Nation Building in Myanmar (Myanmar Egress, 2014).

  27. 27.

    Michael Charney, “Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)” (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999).

  28. 28.

    Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst & Co., 2016).

  29. 29.

    Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides, Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict (London: Hurst & Co., 2018).

  30. 30.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 58–59.

  31. 31.

    Pe Kin [U], Pinlon: An Inside Story (Yangon, Myanmar: Ministry of Information, Government of the Union of Myanmar, 1994), 18.

  32. 32.

    Pe Kin, Pinlon: An Inside Story, 18.

  33. 33.

    Crouch, Islam and the State in Myanmar, 18.

  34. 34.

    Melissa Crouch, “Myanmar’s Muslim Mosaic and the Politics of Belonging,” in Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016b), 70–71.

  35. 35.

    Crouch, “Myanmar’s Muslim Mosaic and the Politics of Belonging,” 88.

  36. 36.

    See, for example, Nick Cheesman, Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015a).

  37. 37.

    Eric Tagliacozzo, “Burmese and Muslim: Islam and the Hajj in the Sangha State,” in Burmese Lives: Ordinary Life Stories Under the Burmese Regime, eds. Wen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 103.

  38. 38.

    The word’s origins and the related debates are discussed in more detail in Renaud Egreteau’s “Burmese Indians in Contemporary Burma: Heritage, Influence, and Perceptions Since 1988,” Asian Ethnicity 12, no. 1 (2011): 46–48; Chakravarti’s The Indian Minority in Burma, 11; W.S Desai’s India and Burma, a Study (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1954), 37–38; Robert Taylor’s Refighting Old Battles, Compounding Misconceptions: The Politics of Ethnicity in Myanmar Today. ISEAS Perspective (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015), 4.

  39. 39.

    Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, Southeast Asia-Politics, Meaning, Memory (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 138.

  40. 40.

    Yeni, “A Leader of Men,” Irrawaddy, September 2007, http://www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=8463&page=1.

  41. 41.

    Also see the chapter in this volume by Frydenlund and Jerryson on Buddhist ways of Othering.

  42. 42.

    Imtiyaz Yusuf laments the almost total absence of Muslim or Buddhist scholars in Southeast Asia who study each other’s tradition, noting instead the continued reliance on misleading Orientalist or Christian-produced scholarship, or uninterrogated popular tropes. See Imtiyaz Yusuf, “Nationalist Ethnicities as Religious Identities: Islam, Buddhism, and Citizenship in Myanmar,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 4 (2017): 101–103.

  43. 43.

    Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83.

  44. 44.

    Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 140.

  45. 45.

    Stephen Keck, “The Making of an Invisible Minority: Muslims in Colonial Burma,” in Living on the Margins: Minorities and Borderlines in Cambodia and Southeast Asia, ed. Peter J. Hammer (Siem Reap, Cambodia: Center for Khmer Studies, 2009), 221.

  46. 46.

    Tagliacozzo, “Burmese and Muslim: Islam and the Hajj in the Sangha State,” 103.

  47. 47.

    Keck, “The Making of an Invisible Minority,” 222.

  48. 48.

    Keck, “Reconstructing Trajectories of Islam in British Burma,” 44.

  49. 49.

    Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 139.

  50. 50.

    See, for example, the interviews cited in Schissler, Walton and Phyu Phyu Thi (2015).

  51. 51.

    Egreteau, “Burmese Indians in Contemporary Burma,” 44–45.

  52. 52.

    Nicholas Farrelly, “Muslim Political Activity in Transitional Myanmar,” in Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 108–115.

  53. 53.

    G.E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1925), 10.

  54. 54.

    Harvey, History of Burma, 24.

  55. 55.

    Bryce Beemer, “The Creole City in Mainland Southeast Asia: Slave Gathering Warfare and Cultural Exchange in Burma, Thailand and Manipur, 18th–19th c.” (PhD dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 2013).

  56. 56.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 9.

  57. 57.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 6.

  58. 58.

    Tagliacozzo, “Burmese and Muslim: Islam and the Hajj in the Sangha State,” 85.

  59. 59.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 10.

  60. 60.

    Harvey, History of Burma, 276–277.

  61. 61.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 12.

  62. 62.

    Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 50.

  63. 63.

    Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 51.

  64. 64.

    Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 164–165.

  65. 65.

    Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 164–165.

  66. 66.

    Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 126.

  67. 67.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 12.

  68. 68.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 15.

  69. 69.

    Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 73–74.

  70. 70.

    Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 17.

  71. 71.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 26–27.

  72. 72.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 27.

  73. 73.

    Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims, 2–3.

  74. 74.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 31.

  75. 75.

    Keck, “The Making of an Invisible Minority,” 225–226.

  76. 76.

    Keck, “The Making of an Invisible Minority,” 230.

  77. 77.

    John F. Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 295.

  78. 78.

    Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 122.

  79. 79.

    Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 130.

  80. 80.

    (Ma) Khin Mar Mar Kyi, “In Pursuit of Power: Political Power and Gender Relations in New Order Burma/Myanmar” (PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 2013).

  81. 81.

    Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar: The 969 Movement and Anti-Muslim Violence,” in Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 192.

  82. 82.

    Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement in Burma (1930–1938) (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988), 5.

  83. 83.

    Donald Eugene Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 97–98.

  84. 84.

    See Saha (2013) for a brief investigation of the inherent “slippage” between categories of race and religion in Burma/Myanmar.

  85. 85.

    Keck, “Reconstructing Trajectories of Islam in British Burma,” 40.

  86. 86.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 36.

  87. 87.

    Michael Mendelson and John P. Ferguson, Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership (Symbol, Myth, and Ritual) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 211–212.

  88. 88.

    Nile Green, “Buddhism, Islam and the Religious Economy of Colonial Burma,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 180.

  89. 89.

    Robert Taylor, “Do States Make Nations? The Politics of Identity in Myanmar Revisited,” South East Asia Research 13, no. 3 (2005): 276.

  90. 90.

    Pe Kin, Pinlon: An Inside Story, 16.

  91. 91.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 75.

  92. 92.

    Pe Kin, Pinlon: An Inside Story, 7.

  93. 93.

    Yeni, 2007.

  94. 94.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 95.

  95. 95.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 96.

  96. 96.

    Cited in Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims, 51.

  97. 97.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 97.

  98. 98.

    Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims, 57–58.

  99. 99.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 97.

  100. 100.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma.

  101. 101.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 103.

  102. 102.

    Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 76–77.

  103. 103.

    Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 189.

  104. 104.

    Tagliacozzo, “Burmese and Muslim: Islam and the Hajj in the Sangha State,” 85.

  105. 105.

    Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 230.

  106. 106.

    Mendelson et al., Sangha and State in Burma, 348.

  107. 107.

    Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 233.

  108. 108.

    Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 237–238.

  109. 109.

    Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 248.

  110. 110.

    Mendelson et al., Sangha and State in Burma, 350.

  111. 111.

    Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 247.

  112. 112.

    Mendelson et al., Sangha and State in Burma, 352.

  113. 113.

    Mendelson et al., Sangha and State in Burma, 353.

  114. 114.

    Human Rights Watch, “Crackdown on Burmese Muslims,” Human Rights Watch, 2002, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/asia/burma-bck4.htm.

  115. 115.

    Human Rights Watch, “Crackdown on Burmese Muslims.”

  116. 116.

    Selth, “Burma’s Muslims and the War on Terror,” 111–112.

  117. 117.

    Kei Nemoto, “The Rohingya Issue: A Thorny Obstacle Between Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh,” Unpublished Paper (2013), 5.

  118. 118.

    International Crisis Group, “Counting the Costs,” 5.

  119. 119.

    Selth, “Burma’s Muslims and the War on Terror,” 12.

  120. 120.

    Iselin Frydenlund, “Religious Liberty for Whom? The Buddhist Politics of Religious Freedom During Myanmar’s Transition to Democracy,” Nordic Journal of Human Rights 35, no. 1 (2017): 61.

  121. 121.

    Nick Cheesman, “Problems with Facts About Rohingya Statelessness,” E-International Relations, December 8, 2015b, http://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/08/problems-with-facts-about-rohingya-statelessness/, accessed May 25, 2017.

  122. 122.

    Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar,” 194, and this volume.

  123. 123.

    See Matthew Walton and Susan Hayward, Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar (Honolulu: East West Center, 2014); Kyaw San Wai, “Myanmar’s Religious Violence: A Buddhist ‘Siege Mentality’ at Work,” RSIS Commentaries, 2014.

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  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Matthew J. Walton

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  1. Matthew J. Walton
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  1. MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Oslo, Norway

    Iselin Frydenlund

  2. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH, USA

    Michael Jerryson

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Walton, M.J. (2020). Buddhist–Muslim Interactions in Burma/Myanmar. In: Frydenlund, I., Jerryson, M. (eds) Buddhist-Muslim Relations in a Theravada World. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9884-2_3

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