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Nationalist Ethnicities as Religious Identities: Islam, Buddhism and Citizenship in Myanmar
By Dr. Imtiyaz Yusuf is the director of the Center for Buddhist-Muslim Understanding, College of Religious Studies, Mahidol University, Salaya, Thailand.
Preliminary Statement : An Overview of Muslim-Buddhist Relations — For centuries, the Rohingya have been living within the borders of the country established in 1948 as Burma/Myanmar. Today left stateless, having been gradually stripped of their citizenship rights, they are described by the United Nations as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. In order to understand the complexity of this conflict, one must consider how Burma is politically transitioning from military to democratic rule, a process that is open (much as was Afghanistan) to competition for resources by international and regional players such as the United States, China, India, Israel, Japan, and Australia. To be fair, the record of Southeast Asian Muslim countries with Buddhist minorities is also not outstanding. Buddhist minorities identified as ethnic groups have faced great discrimination in, among others, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei.
As Muslim nationalist causes, the Rohingya case may be compared to that of Palestine, Kashmir, the Moros, and the Pattani Malays. Muslims worldwide have been sympathetic and supportive of the Rohingya, but there is more to their plight than a conflict between Islam and Buddhism. I study the history of the relationship between Islam and Buddhism, worldviews and traditions whose often cordial and sometimes tense relations extend from the early days of Islam. It is clear to me that contemporary Muslim-Buddhist tensions cannot be understood simply through the lenses of religion. This approach offers fodder for forms of Islamophobia with an Asian face, now with respect to coexisting religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shintoism.
Early Muslims met Buddhists along Asian travel routes and accorded them the status of ahl al-kitāb (people of the book) long before European Christians came to know of Buddhism through the fourteenth-century travels of Marco Polo. Muslim scholars, whom I regard as pioneers of the phenomenological and comparative historical approaches to the study of religion – including al-Biruni, al-Shahrastani, Rashid-al-Din Hamadani, and the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh – wrote extensively about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other religions without religious inhibitions.
In modern times, the famous Indian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal paid glowing tributes to the Buddha’s mission and message of the Buddha in his poems Nanak (in Bang-e-Dra 143) and Taseen-e-Gautam (Gautam Budh Ki Taleemat) (in Javed Nama 12). The first comprehensive academic study of Buddhism from a Western Christian perspective, entitled Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien, was written in 1844 by the great French scholar of Sanskrit Eugène Burnouf. Meanwhile, Muslims largely abandoned the study of Buddhism.
It is sad to note that although Muslims and Buddhists make up the two largest religious communities of Southeast Asia (42 and 40 percent, respectively, out of a total population of about 568. million), and have coexisted for the last 900 years, there is not one Muslim scholar of Buddhism or one Buddhist scholar of Islam. During and after the colonial era, Muslims, unlike their predecessors, abandoned the self-study of Buddhism and thus became dependent upon both the Orientalist and Christian interpretations of that religion. I am often surprised to hear Buddhist monks, when discussing Islamic monotheism, requesting pictorial or figurative illustrations of Allah similar to those of Jesus Christ.
Apart from the recent excellent work on Buddhism by Reza Shah Kazemi, the works of Harun Yahya5 and Imran Nazar Ho-Yusuf: Nationalist Ethnicities as Religious Identities 101 sein are polemical, criticizing Buddhism from the perspective of Islamic monotheism, while that fact is that Islam and Buddhism are two different religious worldviews that are theologically and doctrinally incompatible and belong to two different geographic religions of Arabia and Asia, respectively.
This is similar to the case of Zakir Naik and other Muslim preachers who conclusively construe that Prophet Muhammad is the Maitreya (the future Buddha) who, as per the Mahayana branch, is a bodhisattva residing in the Tushita heaven who will descend to preach anew the dharma (doctrine) when the teachings of Gautama Buddha have completely decayed. Since the institution of nubūwwah (prophethood) is a monotheistic institution and not an Indian religious classification, Buddhists feel offended by such attributions. Such instances, along with the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhaswhich had survived 1,422 years of Muslim history, close all doors for building an understanding between Islam and Buddhism in the modern age.
