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Michel W. Charney’s PhD thesis on Arakanese Religious was done in 1999. Forchhammer’s comparison of the Arakan Littoral to Palestine, in the 1890s, is ironic, for today. The population of the Arakan Littoral is polarized into two religious-ethnic communities, the Rakhine Muslims or Rohengyas or Rohingyas and the Rakhine Buddhists or Maghs or Rakhine. Each community has drawn upon the same periods of Arakan’s history and each has used archaeological evidence to support its communal claims to Arakan as a homeland.
As one summary of Arakanese history from the Rohengya point-of-view explains: Arakan was a Hindu kingdom in the distant past . . . The Mongolian [Burmese-speaking Arakanese] invasion of 957 put an end to the Chandra dynasty and Hinduism in Arakan. The Mongols later assimilated with the locals-the Rohingya Muslims and the Magh [Bengalis, according to this account] Buddhists. In the 15th century, a number of Muslim Kings ruled Arakan, which was a golden period in the history of Arakan. During this period, Rohingya Muslims played a dominant role in the political life of Arakan … Burmese rule of Arakan [after 1784] was short lived but bloody and brutal. Historically, the Rohingyas association with Arakan is much older. The ancestors of the people, now known as the Rohingyas, came to Arakan more than a thousand years ago. They became [an] integral part of the Arakan [Littoral] socially, politically and economically.
On the other hand, the Burmese have always been identified as the plunderers and despoilers. This view has been shared by some scholars, who have hinted that Muslims in Arakan are a relatively recent development: [T]here is a danger posed by the increasing Muslim population. The Muslims have entered Arakan mostly during the British times and after [the] independence of Burma Thus, just as Arakan has come to have two religious’ identities, Arakanese history, as the quotations above indicate, has come to have two edges. The primary focus of this dissertation is on the rise of the Rakhine Buddhist community within the overarching ”family” of Burmese Buddhists in the Irrawaddy Valley.
Today, the Rakhine Buddhists, who form the more powerful of the two communities, define themselves as Burmese Theravada Buddhists. They, along with Buddhism in Arakan. In this dissertation, I seek to explain why one of these religio-ethnic communities, that of the Rakhine Buddhists, has emerged and why this emergence took place within the same context, the same polity, the same environment, and the same time period as that which saw the emergence of the Rohengyas.
