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Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas
Dr. Jacques P. Leider – is a historian of Myanmar and has headed the research centres of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Yangon and Chiang Mai.
This article is an attempt to partly address the scholarly vacuum by drawing attention to the role of history and the writing of history that have been missing in the current representation of the conflict. It supports the argument that today Buddhists and Muslims uphold mutually exclusive sets of identities based on competing claims to the history and geography of the country. The communities do not share a national narrative about Arakan as their homeland, as the role of Muslims is not acknowledged in the Buddhist narrative and the role of the predominantly Buddhist civilization of Arakan is ignored in the Rohingya Muslim retelling of history. While the Buddhist historiographical record goes back to the 15th century, the definition of a specific Muslim identity and the project of writing a history of Muslims (in terms of a separate community called “Rohingyas”) is fairly recent.
The investigation in this article deals particularly with the context and origins of the Muslim Rohingya narrative. It stresses the background of Muslim history in Arakan to address the issue of the contested identity of the modern Rohingyas. Buddhist markers of history are not extensively detailed in this article as they already figure prominently in other publications (Leider 2002, 2004, 2005). The peculiar Muslim historical narrative depends to a large extent on the Rakhine Buddhist record of history, while it views Arakan’s history as pre-eminently Muslim in character. The Rohingya writing of history does not simply make an attempt to fit some missing links of Muslim history into a national plot. It grafts Islamic features on a narrative derived from Buddhist chronicles and appropriates Arakan’s pre-colonial history, creating a fertile ground for the discourse of political and historical legitimacy that has underpinned the fundamental Rohingya claim of a separate identity. This process of recreating the historical narrative is described here as a hybridization of the historical narrative.
The first section explores the creation of a specific Muslim identity in the north of Arakan and the emergence of the Rohingya movement. The term “Rohingya”, now generally used to refer to Muslims in the north of Rakhine state, denoted at its origins a political movement that emerged during the 1950s and promoted a sociocultural understanding of Muslims in Arakan as a separate ethnic group fighting for political autonomy. The next section focuses on the use of history as a source of legitimacy by both Buddhists and Muslims. This is followed by a critical examination of Rohingya statements on their origins and leads to a brief review of historical sources on the growth of the Muslim community during the colonial period. The article concludes with a few comments on the need for embedding the discourse on the imagined past within the discussion on political rights and humanitarian issues.
