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Buddhist Islamophobia: Actors, Tropes, Contexts
Dr. Iselin Frydenlund is Associate Professor in Religious Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology and Director of the MF Centre.
In recent years, Muslim minority communities in Buddhist majority states have experienced an increasing number of attacks on their lives and properties, culminating in the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya population in 2017. During the fall of 2017 nearly 800,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh in order to escape atrocities committed during the Burmese military’s ‘clearance operations’ against the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (arsa), a small and ill-equipped militant group. In addition to massive violence against Rohingya civilians, allegations have been made that Rakhine Buddhist civilians (at least in certain villages) were active in the violence (Wa Lone et al. 2018). The atrocities in Rakhine followed repeated waves of violence since 2012, spreading from Rakhine to other parts of Myanmar, mostly affecting Muslim lives and property.
From 2012 onwards, Muslim minorities in Sri Lanka were also victims of intimidation and violence, the gravest being the so-called Aluthgama riots in 2014, resulting in the death of three Muslims, hundreds of displaced persons, and massive destruction of Muslim property. While anti-Muslim attacks do not mean that Muslims living in Buddhist countries are generally at risk of persecution, weak state protection of Muslim communities has left them at risk of violence and intimidation when other groups in society see benefits from starting a conflict.
Violence against Muslim minorities has taken place in the wake of intense anti-Muslim campaigns, most vociferously articulated by certain groups of Buddhist monks, who in sermons and public speeches have warned against the dangers of Islam. While there is reason to believe that anti-Muslim sentiments might be shared by a larger section of the Buddhist monastic order (the Sangha) in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, such systematic anti-Muslim discourseshave for the most part been articulated by specific monastic groups.
These movements are engaged in aggressive—and occasionally militant— anti-Muslim campaigns, based upon the fear of a global Islamic conspiracy to eradicate Buddhism. The concept of Islamophobia is highly contested, due, among other things, to the implication that fear of Islam is rendered pathological. However, the term has established itself as an academic concept, broadly referring to an indiscriminate hatred of Muslims and of Islam, often followed by exclusionary social practices. Thus, a distinction has to be made between general dislike of Islam or legitimate forms of critique of Islam, and Islamophobia as a religious, cultural, and political phenomenon (Esposito and Kalin 2011; Bangstad 2016).
Consequently, it is not my concern here to analyse political disputes over religion in public space, access to sacred places, or state preference for Buddhism and its implications for religious minorities. Rather, my aim is to identify tropes and themes in Buddhist fears of anything Muslim when this fear of ‘anything Muslim’ is closely linked to theories about a global Islamic plot to govern the world. Thus, I distinguish Islamophobia from general anti-Muslim sentiments and opt for a narrow understanding of ‘Buddhist Islamophobia’, defining it as the deep fear about the existence of a secret and coordinated global Islamic plot to eradicate Buddhism and eventually rule the world. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to cross-cultural comparison of various forms of Islamophobia, and so far, most research has been carried out on Islamophobia in Christian and/or secular liberal contexts in North America and Europe.
This article seeks to address this research lacunae and analyses various aspects of Asian Buddhists’ fear of Islam: how do Buddhist conspiracy theories envision the Islamic takeover, and how are individual Muslims seen as local agents of such larger schemes? Finally, the chapter discusses the political contexts of Buddhist conspiracy theories: why do Buddhist conspiracy theories about Islam flourish from 2012 onwards, and how are they related to domestic and regional politics?
