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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
By Jacques P. Leider — is a French research scholar and historian associated with the French School of the Far East.
Summary and Keywords — The name Rohingya denotes an ethnoreligious identity of Muslims in North Rakhine State, Myanmar (formerly Burma). The term became part of public discourse in the late 1950s and spread widely following reports on human rights violations against Muslims in North Rakhine State during the 1990s, and again after 2012.
Claims for regional Muslim autonomy emerged during World War II and led to the rise of a Rohingya ethnonationalist movement that drew on the local Muslim imaginaire, as well as regional history and archaeology. To explore the historical roots of distinctive identity claims and highlight Buddhist-Muslim tensions, one must reach back to the role of Muslims in the precolonial Buddhist kingdom of Arakan and their demographic growth during the colonial period.
Civic exclusion and state harassment under Burma’s authoritarian regimes (1962–2011) put a premature end to political hopes of ethnic recognition, and yet hastened a process of shared identity formation, both in the country and among the diaspora. Since the 1970s, refugees and migrants turned to Bangladesh, the Middle East, and Southeast Asian countries, forming a transnational body of Rohingya communities that reinvented their lives in various political and cultural contexts. A succession of Rohingya nationalist organizations—some of whom were armed—had negligible impact but kept the political struggle alive along the border with Bangladesh. Although Rohingya nationalists failed to gain recognition among ethnic and religious groups in Burma, they have attracted increasing international acknowledgment.
For post-dictatorial Myanmar (after 2011), the unresolved Rohingya issue became a huge international liability in 2017, when hundreds of thousands fled to Bangladesh following military operations widely interpreted as ethnic cleansing. In December 2017, the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights acknowledged that elements of genocide may be occurring.
Exploring the Discourse on Rohingyas — In the late 1950s, Muslim leaders and students in North Arakan (officially known as Rakhine State since 1989) began to use the term Rohingya to assert a distinct ethnoreligious identity for the region’s Muslim community, as distinct from its majority Buddhist population, to which the term Rakhine usually refers. In the early 1960s, Muslim authors of Rohingya pamphlets were keenly aware of how novel their chosen appellation was for the Burmese public at the time. The use of the name spread widely in the international media after riots in Rakhine State in 2012, when Rohingyas became widely known internationally as a state-oppressed Muslim minority. The term Rohingya embodies an ongoing process of identity formation that has unified Muslim communities in the North Arakan region with a similar cultural profile, but a diverse historical background; at the same time, Myanmar officials reject Rohingya as an ethnic denomination, as they reject the legitimacy of the postcolonial Rohingya movement of political emancipation, aiming at the creation of an autonomous Muslim area in North Arakan.
Following the Myanmar census of 2014, the number of Rohingyas has been estimated at more than 1 million, living mainly in the three townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung, andRathedaung situated along the border with Bangladesh, where they form a heavily concentrated third of Rakhine State’s total population of more than 3 million. Another million live outside Myanmar. Migration backgrounds vary. Most are refugees and have lived with semilegal and illegal identities in Bangladesh and the Middle East. In Myanmar, they cannot refer to themselves as “Rohingyas”; yet in the diaspora, they may also be denied “Rohingya” as an official appellation, or rather, they choose to hide their origin to escape public attention.
The majority population of Rakhine State consists of Buddhist Rakhine (or Arakanese), who are ethnically close to the Bamar (Burmans). The ethnocultural tensions between the Arakanese and the Rohingya on the one hand, and state policies of exclusion on the other, have been drivers of a lasting and violent conflict that reaches back to the late colonial period. From the 1980s onward, Myanmar’s military and authoritarian state governments have described Rohingyas as a political and demographic threat and have increasingly,deprived Rohingyas of their civic rights.
Anthropological field work investigating the Rohingyas as a culturally distinctive Muslim community is rare, and the access to essential information and documentation is limited. Background information in the media after 2012 has been mainly based on Rohingya public presentations of their own identity, although extant sources suggest a history of multilayered communities and the formation of a Rohingya ethnopolitical movement as a response to political and social challenges after 1948. At its origins, the Rohingya identity claims can be understood in a narrative context that includes the simultaneous rise of Rakhine Buddhist nationalism in the 1950s, and later, the political oppression and impoverishment that constrained the lives of both Buddhists and Muslims between 1962 and 2011. Like most terms denoting social identity, Rohingya is an unstable signifier, potentially pointing to various features of signification. Today, that term clearly operates inside a historical process of ethnification among Muslims in Rakhine State. In addition, in the early 21st century, worldwide media reports have signified the Rohingyas as being stateless victims of systematic oppression, whose refugee status and disenfranchisement are defining elements of their public identity.
