Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History
Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
Jacques Leider
Subject: Political, Southeast Asia Online Publication Date: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.115

Summary and Keywords
The name Rohingya denotes an ethnoreligious identity of Muslims in North RakhineState, 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 andarchaeology. 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 processof shared identity formation, both in the country and among the diaspora. Since the1970s, 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 politicalstruggle alive along the border with Bangladesh. Although Rohingya nationalists failed togain recognition among ethnic and religious groups in Burma, they have attracted
increasing international acknowledgment. For postdictatorial Myanmar (after 2011), theunresolved Rohingya issue became a huge international liability in 2017, when hundredsof 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.
Keywords: Arakan, Rakhine state, ethnonationalism, Rohingya, Burma, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, state
oppression, refugees

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar

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.1 In the early 1960s,
Muslim authors of Rohingya pamphlets were keenly aware of how novel their chosenappellation 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.2 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 historicalbackground; at the same time, Myanmar officials reject Rohingya as an ethnic
denomination, as they reject the legitimacy of the postcolonial Rohingya movement ofpolitical emancipation, aiming at the creation of an autonomous Muslim area in North
Arakan.3
Following the Myanmar census of 2014, the number of Rohingyas has been estimated atmore 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. Anothermillion 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 ofmultilayered 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 andimpoverishment that constrained the lives of both Buddhists and Muslims between 1962
and 2011. Like most terms denoting social identity, Rohingya is an unstable signifier,Page 2 of 35

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
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.
Although the ethnoreligious tensions in Arakan had remained a marginal issue for
decades, in the early 21st century, the worldwide media reports on the Rohingyastransformed the case of their de facto statelessness into a cause célèbre in both Westernand Muslim countries. Descriptions of the Rohingyas, therefore, must take into accountthe global media image of the “plight of the stateless Rohingyas.”4 Myanmar’s state
security services have reinforced such an image through their disenfranchisement andsystematic oppression of the Rohingya people. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in the
media to present these matters as if they were the only acceptable way in which todiscuss the group. Although legal approaches grounded in activist agendas are
significant, other aspects of these important and complicated issues merit further
investigation.
The article has five sections. The first, “Muslims in Early Modern and Colonial Arakan,”presents a historical background from the early modern to the colonial period, focusing
on the role of Muslims at the time of the Buddhist monarchy and after the Burmese(1784) and British (1826) conquests. The second section, “The Rise of a Muslim
Nationalist Movement,” presents the political awakening of the North Arakan Muslims
after World War II and the rise of the Rohingyas as an ethnopolitical movement in the late
1950s. It is followed by “Muslim Imaginaire and Rohingya Ideology,” an examination of
the Rohingya concepts and ideas drawn from a Muslim imaginaire, as well as local history
and archaeology. The fourth section, “Toward a Regime of Civic Exclusion and State
Harassment,” traces the record of Rohingya civic exclusion and state harassment underBurma’s authoritarian regimes. Following an increased awareness of the humanitariancrisis in Rakhine State, the globalization of the Rohingya cause after 2012 has cast newlight on the worldwide Rohingya diaspora, as discussed in the fifth section, “Rohingya
Diaspora and the Globalization of a Muslim Minority Cause.” Rather than a monolithic
body of refugees, it appears as a transnational group of communities that have reinvented
their lives in various geographical and political contexts. A final section, “Research
Challenges,” will specify some of the issues concerning research hinted at in thisintroduction.

Muslims in Early Modern and Colonial Arakan
Arakan is a strip of coastal plains, mangrove marshlands, and river valleys that connects
Bangladesh to the deltaic landscape of Lower Myanmar. Shut off from the Irrawaddy
Valley to the east by a hinterland of steep forest-covered hills, it runs in a north-south
direction along the eastern Bay of Bengal. The early modern Buddhist kingdom of Arakan
had its own independent history centered on Mrauk U, an inland urban site overlooking
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
the fertile Kaladan and Lemro valleys. At the margins of South and Southeast Asia, itborders on Muslim Bengal and Buddhist Burma. The presence of more than a million
Buddhists in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Division and more than a million Muslims in North
Rakhine State in the early 21st century underscores a complex ethnoreligious setting.
Inner cultural and ethnic frontiers overlap but rarely converge with the political bordersof the postcolonial nation-states.
History of Arakan/Rakhine State is at the heart of the ethnic claims that the Rohingya
raised in the 1950s, but precolonial history did not predict the contemporary
ethnocultural conflicts and economic rivalries. Sources testify to a patchwork of Muslim
presence since the early modern period. In the 15th century, the use of Muslim titles by
Arakanese kings and inscribed coins suggests that the Bengal sultanate had a cultural
impact on the court elite of Mrauk U. The cult of Sufi saints, venerated as the protectorsof sailors and a resident community of Muslim traders, is also attested. Arakan’s
territorial expansion in the 16th century led to the conquest of Chittagong, Bengal’s
prosperous port ruled by Muslim lords since the 14th century. Until 1666, Chittagong’s
Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist populations were part of the Arakanese realm and a pillarof its economic power.5
The systematic deportation of Bengali country folk supplied personnel for the court,
notably to till the royal lands around Mrauk U. It also fed a thriving slave trade. Local
men likely served in the royal navy, which successfully resisted Burmese and Mughal
attempts to crush Arakan’s coastal hegemony. The percentage of Muslims in the general
population must have varied considerably. Western sources suggest a complex picture of
the Muslim population, with privileged members serving at the court, a bigger group of
bonded labor, and a community of Muslim merchants from around the Indian Ocean.6 The
linguistic traces of Arab and Persian in Arakan Muslims’ eastern Bengali dialects point tothese multifaceted contacts. With his works in Bengali embedding Persian narratives in
Sanskrit poetic forms, the poet Alaol stands out as an eminent representative of the
Muslim elite at the Arakanese court.7
When the kingdom’s political star waned in the late 17th century, most of the traders left.
Arakan became a regional backwater. Muslim guards were still playing a prominent role
in removing and installing kings, but the region earned a dismal reputation as a pirates’
nest.
When the Burmese conquered Arakan in late 1784, they deported leading Buddhist,
Muslim, and Hindu families from Mrauk U and resettled them in the capital, Amarapura.
An Arakanese Muslim was appointed head of the kingdom’s Muslim community. Traces of
Mrauk U’s deported Muslim elite were lost in the late 19th century. In 1795, during a
residence of several months in the Burmese capital, Francis Buchanan, a British
physician, noted the peculiar language of the Arakanese Muslims, who referred to theirplace of origin and their own language as “Rooinga,” designating Arakan in their own
tongue.8 The term, an obvious forerunner of the modern word Rohingya, was never used
as an ethnic category by British administrators, most likely because Muslims themselves
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
did not use it as an ethnonym. Since the rediscovery of Buchanan’s 1799 article in theearly 21st century, however, his mention of “Rooinga” has been quoted as proof of theexistence of an indigenous Muslim ethnic community, to be referred to retrospectively as“Rohingya.”9 A more discerning approach is nonetheless advisable, taking into accountthe much later and specific postcolonial context.
Several years after the conquest of Arakan, forced labor and deportations pushed tens of
thousands of people, including local Muslims, into Bengal, crossing the Naf River, which
had been the border since the time of Mughal rule and Rakhine kings. After 1799, theEast India Company resettled many of the displaced in a location that took the name of its
founder, Hiram Cox: Cox’s Bazar, now a Bangladeshi seaside resort. Incursions led by
Arakan’s exiled chiefs provoked Burmese reprisals, which had a detrimental impact on
British-Burmese relations between 1811 and 1815 and, among other reasons, led to theFirst Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826). A 19th-century missionary described the Muslim
refugees as a bilingual group that adopted Arakanese dress, food habits, and customs anddiffered from the Buddhists only by its religion and language. They integrated into thehost society more easily than the Arakanese.10
The percentage of the Muslims in the total population of Arakan at the time of the British
conquest has been discussed amid some controversy. Charles Paton’s assessment, statingthat 30 percent of the total population was Muslim when the British took control in 1825,
was based on T. C. Robertson’s preliminary inquiries.11 This estimate is questionablebecause it could signify a decline of the Muslim population during the following decades.
Census reports in 1869 and 1870 put the share of the Muslim population at 5 percent.12
Paton’s estimates most likely reflect the fact that Muslims had a strong presence in thoseplaces where British administrators became active (namely, North Arakan, Akyab, andMrauk U). The context further suggests that Muslims proficient in several languages
played a significant role as informers since 1823, when the British started to prepare for
an invasion of Burma.13 The theory that Buddhist-Muslim communalism became a driverof social disintegration in the country since the early 19th century seems doubtful as,
unlike today, the precolonial sociopolitical order prioritized functional rather than ethnic
belonging.14
Rapid demographic and economic changes took place after the opening of the Suez Canalin 1869. The new maritime corridor acted as a powerful stimulus for the export of riceand conditioned a growing demand for labor. Chittagonians came massively for theseasonal work, but many settled permanently in the country. The seasonal moves wererecorded only partially by the colonial administration, while the rapid increase of the
newly resident Muslims was documented in the census reports of 1881, 1891, 1911,
1921, and 1931. Between 1881 and 1941, the percentage of the Muslim population grewsteadily, reaching 27 percent of the total.15
Paying close attention to the linguistic, religious, and ethnic classifications in British
census reports and their changes over the decades is essential to any discussion about
the mixed Muslim population. The criteria that prevailed in the first reports were
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
religious identity (“Muslim”) and linguistic group (“Bengali”). This division of the majorityof the population into a predominantly Arakanese-speaking Buddhist group and a Bengalispeaking Muslim group fused the old (pre-1785) Arakan Muslim community with thepost-1826 arrivals and the latest wave of new migrants from Chittagong Division. The
1921 and 1931 censuses, however, differentiated among these two (and other smaller)
Muslim groups. Members of the reputedly old Muslim community were referred to as“Arakan Mahomedans,” according to their wish, and put into a newly created racial
category of “Indo-Burman” (numbering 51,615 in 1931), while the larger, but relatively
recent, Muslim community was called “Chittagonians” (numbering 252,152) and was
racially classified as “Indians.”16 Detailed information about how these two groups
progressively merged is lacking, but regional and political differences persisted until theearly 1960s, and probably beyond.
Chittagonian migrant labor and their descendants formed 80 percent of the total Muslim
population. In 1931, three-quarters of them had already been born in Arakan, but they
were perceived as foreigners, with no deep roots in the country.17 The next section will
describe how the political mobilization of the Muslims of North Arakan led to the birth of
the Rohingya movement.

Rise of a Muslim Nationalist Movement, 1942–
1964
There is no available information on social, religious, or politically active Muslim
organizations in North Arakan during the colonial period.18 A council of religious teachers(Jam’iyyat ul-Ulama), created in Maungdaw in 1936, became politically active only in theaftermath of World War II. The date of its foundation was nonetheless a crucial moment,
as Burma separated from India in 1937 and obtained its own constitution and greater
political autonomy.
The political awakening of the Muslims of North Arakan took place during the war,
following the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942. The arrival of the Japanese triggered
an exodus of more than 400,000 Indians fleeing from Burma to India, many of themcrossing Arakan to reach Bengal. In Central Arakan, the collapse of the colonial order inlate March and April 1942 included advances by troops of the anticolonial Burma
Independence Army (BIA), who preceded Japanese troops. BIA cadres and Arakanese
Buddhists attacked Muslim villages whose inhabitants were driven away or killed in
Minbya, Myebon, Pauktaw, and other townships. Reportedly, 20,000 Muslims—with latersources stating much higher figures—fled to the north and farther on, to India. In
retaliation, Arakanese Buddhists were attacked in the predominantly Muslim townshipsof Maungdaw and Buthidaung and fled south. These events, which were never thoroughly
investigated, led to diverging stories of injustice and victimhood, and fueled bitterness.
Efforts by local Arakanese and Muslim headmen and administrators to put an end to theviolence were sidelined in later narratives.19

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
For three years (1942–1945), Burma’s Arakan Division was partitioned, with the Japanesein control of the mainly Buddhist areas and the British army entrenched in the north withthe support of local Muslim recruits. Rivaling Muslim township leaders acted as de facto
political entrepreneurs and created so-called peace committees, which maintained their
allegiance to the British. After Burma’s independence in 1948, North Arakan Muslim
leaders from Maungdaw stated that the Muslims of Arakan were an indigenous
population and natives of the country. The purpose of this ethnic claim, made in requests
to British and Burmese authorities in 1947 and 1948, was primarily to gain politicalautonomy. The British and the Burmese authorities dismissed the request, while the local
Buddhist population resented the politically vocal Muslims.
The creation of the Pakistan-Burma border produced a new reality along the Naf River,where people had been moving back and forth with few restrictions for centuries. The
North Arakan Muslim leaders were divided about the course that their community shouldtake. Some favored joining Pakistan but failed to obtain the support of Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, Pakistan’s first governor general, in 1946. Others put their hopes in the British
government that they had supported against the Japanese. Informal promises for an
exclusive Muslim zone, apparently made by military officers during the war, were neverbacked up by any official British commitments.20
In early 1947, the Jam’iyyat ul-Ulama of Maungdaw pleaded for recognition of North
Arakan as a frontier zone, a request immediately denied on the grounds that there was no
historical foundation for such a status. In 1948, the Jam’iyyat ul-Ulama also approachedthe Burmese government with a similar request for an autonomous Muslim zone,
displaying a powerful sense of political self-confidence. They firmly stated that Muslims
formed an indigenous group with historical roots, and yet also had a troubled relationshipwith their Arakanese Buddhist neighbors, so a split-up was necessary. Nonetheless,requests to introduce sharia law, as well as Urdu as a language of education, bolstered
the reputation of North Arakan Muslims being separatists at heart, despite avowals of
being law-abiding citizens devoted to the Union.21 It is this line of thought and selfaffirmation that marked the beginning of the peculiar form of Muslim subnationalism thatcharacterized the Rohingya movement in the 1950s.
In 1949, Burma was in a state of civil war, with the government and the army besieged by
ethnic rebels in Rangoon, Burma’s capital, and threatened by more nationalist andcommunist insurrections throughout the country. In North Arakan, the outbreak of the
Mujahid insurrection (1948–1961) can be attributed to the violent exactions of local
militias, the dissatisfaction of local landlords, the unfair treatment of Muslims by
Arakanese administrators, and murky business conflicts. The Mujahid allegedly claimed
to fight for an autonomous Muslim area, but even modern Rohingyas have rarely invoked
the Mujahids as model fighters for a national cause. Not only did they attack security
forces, but they terrorized the local population, too. They were accused of bringing illegal
migrants from East Pakistan to Arakan and controlling rice-smuggling networks. Annual

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
campaigns by the army disabled their military capacity up to 1954, and yet the last rebels
surrendered only in 1961.22
Conservative political leaders chose parliamentary politics to further their own ambitions
and Muslim interests. Arakan Muslim candidates participated in the elections of 1947,
1951, 1956, and 1960. Four of five Arakan Muslim representatives at the Constituent
Assembly of 1947 were elected as members of the Jam’iyyat ul-Ulama. In the 1951
Charter of the Constitutional Demands of the Arakani Muslims, Muslim leaders
unsuccessfully reiterated their requests.23 Yet the appointment of Sultan Mahmud, awealthy town notable and head of the Arakan Muslim Association, as minister of health in1956 appeared to be the result of pragmatic Muslim politics. Facing the strident calls of
the Arakan National Union Organization (ANUO) for the creation of an ethnic Arakanstate, Prime Minister U Nu allied himself with Sultan Mahmud against the Arakanesenationalists.24
At the same time, a younger generation of unsatisfied Arakan Muslims pushed for a moreaffirmative posture on their acclaimed identity and Muslim autonomy. The choice andwidespread adoption of a common name, Rohingya, created a decisive but also
contentious moment. Importantly, it gave Muslim nationalists a likeness of unity that they
had lacked throughout the 1950s.25
The discussion of how to spell the name continued for years, coming to an end onlyaround 1963. Rwangya had briefly circulated among members of the old ArakaneseMuslim community in the late 1940s to distinguish themselves from the later migrants.
Its use shifted ten years later, when Chittagonians were referred to as “Rwangyas” todifferentiate them from illegal migrants from East Pakistan. In Burmese and English
sources, one can find various spellings, such as Rowannhyas, Rawengya, Royankya, orRohinjas, and Ruhangya.26 In his early articles, Mohammed A. Tahir Ba Tha, the father ofRohingya Muslim history, preferred Roewengyas, using the now-orthodox Rohingyas only
since 1963.27
Quoting these variants is not a superfluous point. They show that the term had not been
put into writing previously, but rather was in oral use among people who pronounced it
differently and still were unsure about how to spell it. Although historical linguistics can
explain its derivation from Ra(k)khanga, a literary Pali term, nonscientific etymologies
have flourished, linking Rohingya to Arabic words and even Arakanese expressions.
Certainly, it was not an invention, but with its adoption by a group of tightly knit
nationalists, it was instantly impregnated with the group’s political messages. Sultan
Mahmud disagreed. He may have shared the political objectives of the younger
nationalist generation, but he remained opposed to the choice of a distinctive yet divisive
ethnonym to denote the Arakan Muslim community.
The Jam’iyyat ul-Ulama, based in Maungdaw adopted the name Rohing[y]a at anunspecified date, while five new organizations including the term in their name were
founded between 1956 and 1960 in Rangoon (United Rohinga Organization, Rohinga
Youth Organization, Rohinga Students Organization, Rohinga Labour Organization, andPage 8 of 35

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
Rohinga Rangoon University Students Organization).28 The early development of theRohingyas as a movement of young educated Muslim nationalists was driven by thepolitical requirements of the day. When U Nu won the 1960 parliamentary elections, he
was prepared to grant Arakan statehood within the Union. This led to “frantic activities”
by the Muslims around Sultan Mahmud and the Rohingya organizations.29 Sultan
Mahmud’s Arakan Muslim Organisation ultimately was ready to compromise and accept
the creation of an Arakan state if the Muslims were given religious, cultural, economic,
political, and educational guarantees.30
The Jam’iyyat ul-Ulama also gave detailed conditions under which it was ready to accept
an Arakan state. But the creation of that state was still perceived by Rohingya leaders asa bad political option, as it implied the risk that North Arakan Muslims had to coexist
with the Arakanese under an unsympathetic administration controlled by Buddhists. In
1960 and 1961, Rohingya speakers expressed widespread opposition. Yet it was not the
Rohingyas, but rather the military putsch of March 2, 1962, that spoiled Arakanese
Buddhist expectations. The Arakan state did not come into existence before 1974.
In the short run, the Muslims were the political winners. In early May 1961, following
months of consultation, U Nu’s government created the special Mayu Frontier
Administration (MFA) to satisfy Muslim demands. It included the areas dominated by
Muslims (i.e., Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and a part of Rathedaung township). The
surrender of the last few hundred Mujahids in July and November 1961 hailed a return topolitical stability in the region, and it went with an official declaration by the deputy chiefof defense, Brigadier General Aung Gyi, recognizing the Rohingyas as an ethnic group
despite the relatively recent adoption of this name. The Rohingya leadership in
Maungdaw saw the creation of the MFA as the beginning of a “new era” and an explicit
recognition of Rohingya ethnic claims.31
Yet while the MFA, run by army officers in Rangoon, offered a separate status, it was
hardly the type of self-administration for which the Muslims had fought. The MFA looked
rather like an administrative refashioning of the Frontier Areas Administration (FAA),
created by General Ne Win during his caretaker regime (1958–1960). The FAA shouldhave improved the economic and social development of the region, but primarily it
extended the army’s sway over an ill-controlled border region seen as a hideout for rebels
and smugglers and an open gate for migrants from Pakistan. The border agreement withPakistan concluded in 1961 had a similar purpose. In 1964, two years after the putsch,
the MFA was reintegrated into the Akyab (now Sittway) district by General Ne Win’s
administration.
Although the MFA died an early death, the ideas and motives of the Rohingya
organizations did not. Having emerged as a group of political enthusiasts who competedwith the pragmatism of the older generation of Muslim notables, the Rohingyas were
nonetheless more than a radical movement. Unlike their predecessors, who had brought
to mind historical nostalgia and war memories to demonstrate their Muslim roots andprowess, the Rohingyas stepped up efforts in English-language (and less so in BurmesePage 9 of 35

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
language) media to inspire their movement with a set of core beliefs. By fusing theirethnic identity claims with their political goals and a record of the past, they attempted tomirror the causes of other ethnic minority groups who were looking for recognition and astate of their own within the Union. Such was the case of the ethnic Mon, and more
visibly the loathed Arakanese Buddhist nationalists, who struggled for increased rights
and autonomy qua their ethnic status, too. Defining themselves as a distinctive ethnic
group within the Union and transforming the local Muslim imaginaire into an exclusive
ideology, the Rohingyas set the Muslims of North Arakan apart from other Muslim groups
in the country.

Muslim Imaginaire and Rohingya Ideology
North Arakan’s Muslim leaders believed that the best way to escape a Buddhistdominated administration would be to obtain a separate status for the area, in which
Muslims would form a majority. Yet their vision of territorial autonomy and cultural selfexpression was not inclusive, as it disregarded the voices of other Muslim communities in
Arakan. They cut across this diversity by defining an encompassing Muslim identity called
Rohingya, which included the majority of Muslims in past and present Arakan—with thesole exception of the tiny Kaman minority, which had its own genealogy harking to the17th century. By drawing on colonial authors who referred to Portuguese and Dutch
sources containing information about the economic and political roles of Muslims in the
Mrauk U kingdom, the Bengali literary heritage of Mrauk U’s 17th-century court, andlegendary stories, Rohingya writers imagined a historical Muslim community that they
tried to condense into a coherent historical account.
The novel Rohingya narrative was enabled by two instances of intellectual production:
first, the appraisal of the Muslim heritage in Arakan by colonial authors; and second, theefforts of two Arakanese Muslims who endorsed Arakan’s traditional Islam by embedding
it into a historical Burmese context. In the late 1940s, Muhammad Khalilur Rahman’s
Tarikh-i-Islam: Arakan aur Burma (1944) and Azadi G. Hasan’s Qaum-i-halat-imusulmanane Burma wa Rakhine (1946), both written in Urdu, linked the ArakaneseMuslims with the history of Burma’s Muslims for the first time.32
The historical approach of the Rohingya was entirely different, as they promoted theRohingya identity as one of Muslims in Arakan on the basis not of a shared culture, but ofa localized ethnicity. To do so, citing proof of relatively late source material appeared to
be insufficient. An arrival of Arab and Persian ancestors in the first millennium CE,
therefore, was derived from legendary stories, Muslim lore, and Arakanese chronicles.
Later Rohingya writers argued that Rohingyas qualify as the descendants of the early
inhabitants of the country, who used Sanskrit for their inscriptions, thus preceding thearrival of the ethnically Tibeto-Burman Arakanese. Such assertions have provoked the ireof Buddhists, whose religious self-identity is rooted in similar beliefs about Aryan
ancestors.

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
For the Muslims of Arakan, the originality of the Rohingya narrative lay in its streamlined
account of the past. Such an account did away with regional ethnic and culturalconnections while lending ideological support to the Rohingyas’ ethnic claims, whichwere meant to make them acceptable in Burma. These claims ultimately failed—but, since
the late 1950s, the historical narrative generated by the Rohingyas has contributed to a
dynamics of ethnification that has furthered a Muslim group identity in the face of theauthoritarian military rule, as well as in the diaspora.
Defining Rohingyas as an ethnic group that existed since antiquity was problematic, but it
was posited as a historical certainty and saturated with the thick cultural meanings of animagined collective past. In the 1950s, the Rohingyas were not fighting to beacknowledged as citizens, as the 1947 constitution indeed offered them access; rather,
they wanted to be accepted as a national race (taingyintha) so that they could claim theirown territory. Only acceptance as a native community could pave the road to a
constitutional recognition of ethnicity and national belonging. As Nick Cheesman argues
in his analysis of how the Rohingyas failed to be included in national races, “thesurpassing symbolic and juridical power of taingyintha [national race] is at once theirproblem and their solution.”33 By arguing from early on that they were a taingyintha
population, the Rohingyas conformed to Burma’s postindependence citizenship paradigm(the “solution”), but they faced an insurmountable challenge: to base their argument on
historical claims, which were rejected by the authoritarian regime and were exceedingly
difficult to prove.
Despite a show of acceptance during the brief MFA period, neither the authoritarian
Burmese governments since 1962 nor any ethnic communities were ready to recognize
the Rohingyas as a native community. In the early 21st century, the concept of taingyintha
became even more entrenched in political parlance and a clear divider between “us” and“them.” The detrimental effects of this political essentialization of ethnicity will be dealt
with in the next section. The rest of this section will survey Rohingya historical writings,
from their approach toward local Muslim history to their increasingly dogmatic turn.
Mohammad A. Tahir Ba Tha’s seminal Short History of the Rohingyas and Kamans of
Burma (1963) rooted Rohingya historical identity in the first-millennium Hindu–Buddhist
culture by interpreting a reference to a shipwreck of people from the west (kala) in an
Arakanese Buddhist chronicle as evidence of the arrival of Arab and Persian traders.34
This was an original claim made independently of reliable external knowledge about the
spread of Islam in the Bay of Bengal.35 Ba Tha further linked this appearance of Muslims
to the foundation of Vesali. Yet the dating of Vesali, an early urban site in Arakan’s
Kaladan Valley, remains uncertain, with scholarly estimates varying between the 4th andthe 8th centuries CE. As he situated Rohingya roots within a distant past, Ba Tha
connected the local Muslims to a prestigious Middle Eastern background and a wellknown historical site in Arakan.
In the same vein, the assertion that Rohingyas were a mix of early Arabs and Persians
with Afghans, Bengalis, Mughals, and other Muslims from around the Indian Ocean
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
became part of a mainstream narrative that created new and untested cultural
certainties. However, Rohingya writers did not include the most likely ethnic mix—
namely, Arakanese-Bengali intermarriage—a fact noted in the British census records to
explain the origins of the old Arakanese Muslim community.
Colonial scholarship on Arakan, though quite limited in its scope, provided anotherimportant input for Muslims to discover past identities. Arthur P. Phayre’s early work on
Arakanese history and D. G. E. Hall’s exploration of Dutch sources pioneered anunderstanding of the social, economic, and political roles of Muslims in Arakan.36 It also
led some authors to overstate the role of the Muslims. In his History of Arakan—Past andPresent (1994), Mohammed Yunus expressed the idea that the Mrauk U kingdom had
virtually been a sultanate and suggested that Muslims had outnumbered the local
Buddhists before the Burmese conquest of 1785.37
Neither Ba Tha nor those who followed him discussed the more recent history of Muslim
communities. They disregarded the Chittagonian labor migrations and ignored the British
census records. This effort to de-Indianize their recent ethnic credentials for politicalreasons left a huge narrative gap in Rohingya accounts between the end of the Arakanesemonarchy in 1785 and the ethnic violence in 1942.
The political movement of the 1960s lost its traction when many educated Rohingyas leftor were pushed out of Arakan in the 1970s. Since that time, the project of Rohingya selfrepresentation and political struggle has been taken up largely by the diaspora in
Bangladesh. The foundation of the Arakan Historical Society in Chittagong in 1975
marked a key moment of this transition. The writings of Mohammed Yunus, A. F. K. Jilani,
and Mohammed Ashraf, produced in Bangladesh, subordinated the interpretation of thepast to the militants’ goal of restoring an autonomous Muslim area. Like the Rohingya
refugees, however, the Rohingya rebels remained internationally isolated until the late
1990s. Neither Libya, nor Saudi Arabia, nor the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation(OIC) has provided substantial support.
The Rohingya Muslim narrative, starved of intellectual innovation in the meantime,
contributed to the Rohingya militants’ often-hyperbolic discourse from the 1960s to the1990s. As the Bangladeshi historian Abdul Karim stated in 2000, even the definition of
the Rohingyas sounds like a terse and bloodless article of faith: “The Rohingyas … aredescendants of those who have been settling there in Arakan from a thousand years
before … and above all … form a homogeneous group.”38 In Myanmar, on the other hand,
U Kyaw Min (aka Abu Anin), a Rohingya political leader, has tried to bring interpretationsof Rohingya identity in line with the current state of historical knowledge.39
Myanmar state harassment and persecution, described in the next section, have become
increasingly prominent themes around the world in public discourse concerning
Rohingyas, and also in Rohingya self-representations of their own identity, reflecting theirexperience of torment and exclusion by the Myanmar government and their isolation fromother groups in the country. That isolation has been further aggravated by Rohingya
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
political efforts to portray their own community as being more unified internally thanseems justified historically based on the available records.40

Toward a Regime of Civic Exclusion and State
Harassment
Burma/Myanmar’s leaders and most of its inhabitants see their country as a historicallyshaped body of diverse people whose ethnicity determines their civic belonging. The
Union Citizenship Act of 1948 defined national races as those groups that lived
permanently in the country before the First Anglo-Burmese War (i.e., before 1824). Thisethnicization of civic status is generally taken for granted and has not been contested bymultiethnic group members. It is the political hegemony of the majority-Burman (Bamar)
ethnic group that has led to decades of civil war between the government and ethnic
minorities, not the inflexible principle that ethnic belonging primarily determines civic
rights. Unlike other groups with a hybrid historical or ethnic status in the country (e.g.,
the Chinese in Kokang), the Rohingyas have been singled out for increasingly inequitable
treatment by the state.
In light of those who argue that the 1982 citizenship law made the Rohingyas de jurestateless, Cheesman has shown that hundreds of thousands of Muslims were renderedstateless by a “deliberate breach and selective application” of the law when it was applied
after 1989.41 The argument that their denationalization was the result of a deliberatestate policy has been advanced by Rohingyas for many years. In the 1950s, National
Registration Cards (NRCs) were widely used as de facto proof of citizenship or
nationality, but in the 1970s, North Arakan Muslims were no longer issued NRCs, andmany NRCs were allegedly seized by the authorities. When a new citizenship regime wasapplied in the late 1980s, people had to relinquish their identity papers to obtain colorcoded Citizenship Scrutiny Cards (CSCs), but after 1995, most Rohingyas were merely
given Temporary Registration Cards (TRCs), the so-called white cards, certifying thatthey were not full citizens. These TRCs were cancelled in February 2015. In June 2015,
new green cards were distributed to those people who were ready to be scrutinized for
citizenship under conditions that denied them self-identification as Rohingyas. This briefchronology illustrates both the arbitrary nature of the state’s treatment of Rohingyas andtheir bureaucratic exclusion from citizenship.
What forces have been driving this process on the side of the central state? Based on along record of human rights violations, a plethora of motives, stretching from racism andIslamophobia over security concerns to accusations of illegal immigration, can be alleged
to account for systematic discrimination. Yet although these factors definitely played into
each other, none can explain the vicious turn of state policies by itself, and a response canonly be tentative. As it was the army that assumed the task of supervising the borderregion after independence, a possible way to search for an answer is to try to understandarmy border policies. The foremost aim of the army was to establish efficient control ofthe border, prevent smuggling, and check cross-border movement. Friendship treaties
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
and border demarcation agreements with Pakistan and Bangladesh were concluded over
several decades to reach this objective. Neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh were perceived
as strategic threats, and although there were occasionally serious tensions and violent
incidents, efforts were made to settle border issues by negotiations.
Moreover, unlike in other regions at the country’s periphery, the army did not faceunsurmountable military challenges in Arakan. The Mujahids (1948–1961) and a
succession of inconsequential Rohingya armed groups (1965–2005) did not drag the army
into endless warfare as the Karen, Shan, and Kachin rebellions did. The political controlof the region was eased by the presence of two rival groups, giving the state theopportunity to play the ambitions and interests of the Arakanese Buddhists against thoseof the Muslims. Arakan was an area of much lesser political concern for the army thanthe country’s eastern periphery, bordering communist China. This situation at thewestern border prevailed until the mid-1970s. When the civil war in Bangladesh drove
tens of thousands of refugees over the border, the Burmese government tolerated theirpresence at first, but it was wary that many would stay on, increasing the number ofother illegal migrants that had reportedly settled in the rural countryside of North Arakansince independence.
In early 1978, shortly after the Burmese army’s successful operations against Arakanese
rebel groups, the government launched a campaign to arrest illegal migrants backed by
security forces. It led to widespread panic in North Arakan’s countryside and an exodusof nearly 200,000 people to Bangladesh. The Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF), an armed
organization, surmised that there was a premeditated plan to exterminate the Muslim
community. Although most refugees were repatriated, thousands stayed in Bangladesh
while many more moved to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. There is little doubt that theexperience at the country’s western border had an impact on the formulation of the 1982
citizenship law, which enjoined people to apply once again for their citizenship. The law’santi-Arakan Muslim bias did not escape anyone’s attention; shortly after, it led to thefoundation of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, an armed movement, in
Bangladesh.42
In 1965, 300,000 Indians had left Burma following the nationalization of private
businesses by General Ne Win, which entailed their exclusion from the country’s
economic and social life. The exodus had no direct impact on Arakan’s mainly rural
Muslim community. Nevertheless, Ne Win’s socialist visions, which isolated the country
economically and politically, along with his nationalist, Burman-centric state ideology andBuddhist rigidity, tilted public opinion toward anti-Indian prejudice. Already firmly
anchored in the national consciousness since the late colonial period, the mistrust
between the Buddhist and Muslim parts of the population was particularly deep in
Arakan, offering state authorities the opportunity to exploit these tensions andresentment for their own advantage. Among the Burmese military, Bangladesh’s
population growth was perceived as a lasting threat to the thinly populated Arakanstate.43

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
In the early 1990s, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) regime, formerly
the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), reasserted the presence of thearmy in the border region. Land confiscations for military camps, compulsory relocations,and the settlement of Burmese colonizers among the majority-Muslim population raisedtensions that led to a massive exodus of 250,000 Rohingyas in 1991–1992. The
repatriation efforts under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) faced resistance from many Rohingyas. Many ran away soon after
their return because of forced labor and brutal violence, including rape and extortion.
The verification procedures of the Burmese authorities were not facilitating the return of
the refugees. The repatriation process slowed down after 1997 and came to an end in
2005. Two official Rohingya camps with more than 30,000 people existed in Bangladesh.
In 1992, the Burmese government considered many of the refugees as illegal migrants
from Bangladesh who had no right to claim an identity that did not exist officially. The
term Bengali was increasingly used by the authorities to refer to the community as awhole.
Throughout the 1990s, the policies of harassment perpetrated by the Nasaka, a mixed
unit of police, intelligence, and customs officers, created increasing hardship for the
Muslim population. The authorities kept livelihood conditions low by failing to invest in
economic development and infrastructure.44 Reduced freedom of movement, theintroduction of restrictions on marriage and birth registrations, and the obstruction ofreligious practices pushed many people out of the country. At the same time, a project ofmodel villages was launched to repopulate North Arakan with Buddhist settlers, including
former prisoners.45 After 2012, against this increasingly well-documented background, a
new generation of pro-Rohingya advocacy groups reiterated the accusation that the
government intended the slow extermination of the Muslim population.46
The politics that motivated the harsh but ambiguous government policies in North
Rakhine State have yet to be fully understood. Despite the disenfranchisement of
Muslims, state authorities still resorted to the Muslim voting bloc at the constitutionalreferendum of May 2008 and in the general elections of November 2010, when Rohingya
white-card holders were promised full citizenship. Three Rohingya members of
Parliament (MPs) were affiliated with the Union Solidarity and Development Party(USDP), the government party, from 2010 to 2015.
President Thein Sein’s reform policies did not bring an end to murky party politics, nor
did the increasingly autonomous role played by the parliament and the courts break any
new ground. Rather, it confirmed the high level of social and political exclusion of
Rohingyas in Myanmar. In September 2014, white-card holders were barred from being
members of a political party, but the proposal of giving white-card holders voting rights
was reiterated by the ruling USDP in February 2015. Once it was approved by theparliament, however, it was rapidly invalidated by Myanmar’s constitutional court.
Rohingya political leaders who had been candidates or elected MPs at the 1990 and 2010
elections readied themselves for the free elections of November 2015, but the court’s
final decision coincided with a widespread anti-Rohingya backlash following the 2012
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
communal violence and, more generally, a tide of Buddhist nationalism that swept across
Myanmar from 2013 to 2015.
The outbreak of violence in 2012, which marked the beginning of a series of humanitariancrises in Rakhine State, was triggered by the rape and killing of a Buddhist woman at theend of May, followed in early June by the killing of a group of Muslims who were visiting
South Rakhine from another region. More violence erupted in the Muslim-majority area—
Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Rathedaung—in the north on June 8, followed by attacks inthe capital, Sittway. A state of emergency was declared, but security forces were lateraccused not only of failing to stop the violence, but of being complicit in it. Until mid-July,
more than 100,000 people were reportedly displaced and resettled in IDP camps. Eighty
people were killed, and more than 4,000 houses were destroyed. A second wave ofviolence, in October, spread over a much wider area in central Rakhine and led to another80 dead, with 22,000 people displaced and more homes destroyed. More than 80 percentof the victims were Muslims.47
Since the 1990s, the outside world has increasingly taken notice of the plight of theRohingyas on both sides of the border due to greater international awareness ofMyanmar’s conflicts. In 1994, Rakhine State became accessible to individual travelers
and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) like Médecins Sans Frontières(MSF; Doctors Without Borders) and Action Contre la Faim (ACF; Action Against Hunger),which launched humanitarian projects in Rohingya villages. The stream of Rohingya
migrants crossing the Andaman Sea to reach South Thailand and Malaysia became aseasonal phenomenon after Malaysia started (though only briefly) to register Rohingyas
for work permits in August 2006. It was poorly recorded at first, and this was perceived
as a major regional problem only when news spread about the atrocious treatment of
Rohingya refugees by the Thai navy in 2009, the scandals that broke out about official
involvement in human trafficking, and finally the reluctant moves of Thailand, Malaysia,
and Indonesia to accept desperate Rohingya boat people abandoned by their traffickers
on the high seas in May 2015.
Taking stock of the migration of Muslim people from Arakan to the neighboring countries
and beyond during many decades, the next section will provide an overview of theRohingya diaspora, who have played a decisive role in the post-2012 globalization of theRohingya cause.

The Rohingya Diaspora and the Globalizationof a Muslim-Minority Cause
The number of Rohingyas in Rakhine State, as derived from the 2014 census, wasindicated as fewer than 1.1 million, not including Muslims who would potentially identify
as Rohingyas throughout the rest of Myanmar. But nearly half of the people who claim aRohingya identity either do not live in Myanmar, have left Myanmar a long time ago, or
have never lived there. More than 300,000 Rohingyas have lived in neighboring
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
Bangladesh, but their number has been sometimes overestimated both by Rohingya
organizations and the Bangladeshi authorities. The latest exodus culminated in the arrivalof 672,700 Rohingyas in Bangladesh as of January 2018.48
In Saudi Arabia, a census done in 2013 by authorities in the Governorate of Mecca incooperation with Rohingya associations revealed 230,000 people claiming a Rohingya
identity. The actual number of Rohingyas in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states is likely to
be at least 300,000. The number of resident Rohingyas in Pakistan has lately been
estimated at 250,000.49 This estimation does not include Rohingyas who hold Pakistani
passports and reside outside of Pakistan. Rohingyas in Thailand and Malaysia number
more than 100,000, while Rohingyas living in Western countries, including Japan, New
Zealand, and Australia, may number a few tens of thousands. Substantial communities
also exist in India (reportedly Jammu and Kashmir) and Indonesia.
The media have mainly focused on the Rohingya migrant movements and displacements
at moments of acute crisis and massive outflows. This was the case in 1978 and 1991–
1992, following the communal violence in June and October 2012, as well as since
October 2016, when attacks by a new armed group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation
Army (ARSA) triggered massive military operations that included the systematic
destruction of hundreds of villages. The silent departure of smaller groups, families, orindividuals who have kept a low profile, trying to escape official attention, were nottracked or recorded before 2006. The migrations of Muslims from Rakhine State to Lower
Myanmar (Yangon Division) and other parts of the country (notably the border withThailand), as well as to Pakistan and the Middle East, reach back to the late 1940s and1950s, suggesting patterns and drivers of migration that differ from economic andpolitical reasons during subsequent decades.
Several types of communities have developed in the host countries. Yet the primary or
secondary function that the Rohingya identity has played in these countries is largely
unclear. Migrant and human-trafficking networks that underpin the Rohingya diaspora
remain poorly understood. Field studies have yet to examine Rohingya survival andcoping strategies.50 The structures of human trafficking and exploitation, as well as the
networks of solidarity, that have created transregional bonds could be the starting points
of such investigations.
Tracking Rohingya websites provides glimpses of social and linguistic adaptation (e.g.,
the written use of Arabic or Malay in addition to English, Urdu, and their own East
Bengali dialect). The existence of diverse Rohingya diasporic communities also raises
questions about contexts that favored or prohibited the spread of Rohingya identity.
Changes in outsiders’ usage of the name Rohingya have been perceptible over the past
several years, especially since the 2012 violence.51 Until recently, however, Muslims from
Arakan and their descendants in Pakistan and the Middle East were commonly referred toas Burmese Muslims.52

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
North Arakan Muslim lives have evolved simultaneously in a number of countries undervarious conditions. Individual and group stories have been determined by different sets ofpressures, motives, and strategies in states characterized by cultural, political, and social
differences. Considering the diversity of places of refuge and relocation on at least fourcontinents, the known unknowns of Rohingya migration do not suggest the existence of amonolithic block of worldwide Rohingya refugees, but rather of a diverse transnational
community.
Bangladesh presents an interesting and complex case as a host country. Its role incontemporary Rohingya history has been marked by cultural ambiguity, politicalconstraints, and drivers of national self-interest. Looking back at the history of theRohingya presence in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, however, one does not findconfirmation of the current media cliché of Rohingyas as a cluster of refugees devoid ofagency and solely depending on international caretakers.
North Arakan Muslims first fled to East Pakistan following violent clashes in 1949 that led
to the creation of the Arakan Muslim Refugee Organization in Chittagong, which enjoyed
the sympathy and the support of the local population. Little is known about these firstrefugees and subsequent migrants who left the region during the 1950s and 1960s, when
only the activities of the Mujahid attracted public attention. Rohingyas trickled by thehundreds into Bangladesh in 1974 and 1975, and the country saw nearly two hundred
thousand refugees following the search for illegal immigrants by the Burmese authorities
in 1978. At that time, Bangladesh was a country of transition for thousands of theserefugees heading for the Middle East countries that welcomed migrant labor, but it also
became a country of permanent residence for many Muslims from Arakan who did notwant to be repatriated.
For a long time, Bangladesh had a tradition of soft policy toward the Rohingyas and theirmilitant groups based in Chittagong, but its official stance began to harden in 2002, whenthe Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO) was pushed out of the country. The
last armed rebels of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization were reputedly dislodged by
the Bangladesh army in 2005. Nonetheless, Rohingyas in Bangladesh have been
described in international reports as a vulnerable group, and their stay in the country has
been marked by difficulty. Many have had to subsist as a marginalized and largely
destitute community, referred to in mostly negative terms by the local media. While
protesting and appealing to the international community for support when people crossed
the border by the tens of thousands, Bangladesh has generally tolerated the arrival of
refugees during moments of acute crisis. However, government plans announced in May
2015 to relocate thousands of Rohingyas to Hatiya Island in the Bay of Bengal wereimmediately criticized by both refugees and international organizations.53
After the Myanmar military campaign in late 2016, 74,000 people fled from Rakhine State
to Bangladesh as recently as February 2017.54 They were followed at the end of Augustand early September 2017 by an exodus that totaled more than 500,000 following
operations in Rakhine State by battle-hardened infantry troops. The Myanmar
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
government rejected an international investigation of these events, which included theburning of hundreds of villages and were internationally perceived as a campaign of
ethnic cleansing, but also made a commitment to repatriation and to the implementationof recommendations made by an advisory commission headed by former United Nations(UN) secretary general Kofi Annan.55
The increasing global attention for the Rohingya cause in Myanmar may lead to a greaterawareness of the huge Rohingya communities in the Asian region as well. Long-heldpolitical stances and migratory policies toward the hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas in
the diaspora may be further affected by the latest crisis outbreak. Bangladesh is acountry that does not recognize Rohingyas as a self-identifying ethnic group (referring tothem as “Myanmar nationals”), but at the same time, it is the country where many
Rohingyas have successfully integrated, both socially and culturally. In 2011, an inquiryof the Danish Immigration Service (DIS) reported that “no distinctive physical features[existed] between Rohingya and Bangladeshis in the Cox’s Bazar area,” with “all thesources stat[ing] that the cultural and religious practices performed by the Rohingyas are
similar to the local Bangla practices.”56 However, the report also portrayed them as “anextremely fragmented group” that “does not speak with a unified voice.” A French fieldresearcher has described middle-class Rohingyas as an “invisible” group in Chittagong’s
urban landscape.57 Security interest in the Rohingya diaspora has been limited to risk
evaluations about Rohingyas being recruited by Islamist outfits in Bangladesh, India, orPakistan.
The expanding international conversation on Myanmar’s democratic opening anddiscrimination against the Rohingyas has already powerfully affected the transnational
Rohingya ecosystem. The Arakan Rohingya Union, founded in Jeddah in 2011 under the
auspices of the OIC, resuscitated the project of a federation of competing Rohingya
organizations. The European Rohingya Council was registered in the Netherlands in2012.58 Recent Rohingya self-representations have downplayed history-bound accounts of
Rohingya identity and emphasized instead Rohingya victimization as Muslims. This shift
in rhetorical strategy seems adapted to social media, where even sympathetic readers
may find it difficult to disentangle traditional historical arguments, ethnic identity ideas,
and cultural terminology.59
Together with a loose alliance of pro-Rohingya human rights defenders and legal experts,
Rohingya organizations have dropped the communal aspects, representing the conflict
mainly as a “state/army versus ethnic minority” issue. The reiteration of itemized root
causes (xenophobia, Islamophobia, cultural dissimilarity, socioeconomic tensions, andsystematic state discrimination) in media analysis powerfully underscores the discursive
shift from a local and historicized issue to a global cause owned by non-Rohingya
activists. As the globalization of the Rohingya cause has moved the political and moral
debate on Rakhine State issues from the national to the international level, it has eased
calls for international intervention while further sidelining Buddhist and Muslim voices in
Myanmar itself.

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
For the Rohingyas themselves, the ethnic claim is a certainty, a source of pride, and ashow of resistance to oppression as well. It is in line with principles that the international
community has agreed upon, making clear that the Muslim community has a right to selfidentify as Rohingyas. Rohingyas, therefore, should be fully recognized as Union citizens.
In the eyes of the Rakhine Buddhists and among Myanmar’s political decision-makers, theclaim that Rohingyas are a unique ethnic group remains unacceptable. For them, theRohingya identity stands out as the primary cause of the discontent, and the demographic
threat looms large in their depictions. To be granted citizenship, people should undergo aprocess of verification in line with the 1982 law.
As things stand in early 2018, political realism suggests that social and politicalacceptance of Muslims identifying as Rohingyas remains at a far distance.

Research Challenges
With widespread accusations of genocide, the international outrage about the military
exactions in North Rakhine in 2017 had a strong impact on the prospect of political andeconomic relations with Myanmar’s government. The resulting international concern has
further contributed to an abundance of reports that focus on humanitarian aspects, theviolation of human rights, and the statelessness of Rohingyas during the last four to five
decades.
To appreciate the emergent Rohingya narrative from a contemporary vantage point, onemust bear in mind that the early Rohingya writers were not aware of many facts brought
to light since the 1980s by scholars who specialize in the Bay of Bengal’s early modern
period.60Apart from historical studies that include the early modern and contemporary
history of Muslims, there have been few studies of this topic in the field of social sciences.
The knowledge of cultural and religious practices is still limited to the description of
Rohingya folklore. As mentioned previously, no research has been done on the East
Bengali dialectology that would enlighten us on the regional linguistic variety. Writing
about the Rohingyas remains, therefore, a challenging exploration of social, political,
religious, economic, and cultural fields of inquiry, where no peer-certified academic
discourse exists as yet. The small amount of academic work on Rohingya refugees leaves
opportunities for anthropological research on the Rohingyas in their various national andpolitical contexts. As Rohingya groups and organizations have been reticent to share
information about themselves and their social, political, and organizational practices, theformation of an archive of documents and field observations is a major challenge by itself.
The dynamics of Rohingya identity formation are a primary concern, as the dogmatic selfstatements on the Rohingyas as a perennial group call for a critical approach to thecontexts in which community-building processes took place. To explore the discontents instate-ethnicity and Buddhist-Muslim relations, there is a need to move beyond the eventsbased historical descriptions (which, for good reason, have taken up a large part of thisPage 20 of 35

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
article), as well as the dichotomous perpetrator-versus-victim perspective, by looking at
each group as an entity empowered by various forms of agency.
There is a need not only to deepen, but also to broaden, the scope of investigation. One of
the most neglected topics of research in Myanmar itself has been the life of Muslim
communities and the experiences of coexisting Buddhists and Muslims. The Islamophobic
urban violence in central Myanmar in 2013 and 2014 was superficially wrapped up in the
media with the dissimilar situation in Rakhine State, blurring a clear understanding ofboth issues. Comparative studies of the socioeconomic situation of ethnically andculturally diverse Muslim communities in Myanmar should fill some of the gaps in our
knowledge.
The Rohingyas are the biggest Muslim community in Myanmar. Since the late 1990s,
their case as a persecuted minority in the country has been presented in a narrative ofhuman rights violations and failed civic rights that has diminished the interest in thedeterioration of relations and the stunning lack of communication between Buddhists andMuslims. As observers prioritized the dichotomy of failed state-minority relations, the factthat in 2012, members of the two communities went at each other’s throats was soon lostto oblivion.
To pave the road toward the peaceful coexistence of the two estranged communities,
legal approaches arguing for justice and in favor of Rohingya citizenship amount to one
aspect of a larger challenge.61 The 2016–2017 mass evictions have redrawn the bordersof the Rohingya question itself, and the impact on national and international stances issuch that it will never again be possible to treat the situation as just a national or regional
issue. Applied research drawing on the expertise of peace and ethnic conflict studies, aswell as the most recent geopolitical approaches, is therefore needed to address thecontemporary complications of the Arakan/Rakhine State conundrum.

Primary Sources
Primary sources considered for this article include published and unpublished documents
in Burmese or Western languages. Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, and Malay sources may containrelevant information and call for further research. Burmese (including Arakanese/
Rakhine) and Western (mainly English) sources may be divided into those that provide
information on the historical presence of Muslims in precolonial and colonial Arakan, andthose that are essential to understand the Rohingyas as a self-defining ethnic andpolitically active group after independence. Rohingya historiography has heavily drawn
on the Buddhist chronicle tradition of Arakan, creatively embedding both mythical andhistorical Islamic elements.62
The travelogue of the Augustinian missionary Father Sebastião Manrique and the various
descriptions relating to the Arakanese kingdom in the Dutch surgeon Wouter Schouten’s
account contain references to Muslim traders in the 17th century and are best read inPage 21 of 35

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
conjunction with recent academic work on archival Portuguese and Dutch East India
Company documents.63
Descriptions of the Muslim elite at the Arakanese court are found in Alaol’s poetry in
Sanskritized Bengali and are accessible in Thibaut d’Hubert’s French and English
translations.64 British narratives and reports between the late 18th century and thesecond part of the 19th century, both printed and kept in the India Office collections,convey a checkered picture of the Muslim communities of Arakan before the Chittagonian
immigrations.65 At the time of writing this article, an entry point to engage with an arrayof British imperial sources (such as census reports), printed accounts relating to Arakan
during World War II, and administrative correspondence of the early postwar andBurma’s postindependence years is the archived website of Network Myanmar, which
provides downloadable Portable Document Format (PDF) files of such documents.66
Modern reprints of gazetteers produced in the early 20th century are still widely
available in Myanmar and elsewhere, and provide access to valuable information andstatistics.67
The foundational texts legitimizing a Rohingya identity on historical grounds were
published during and around the early 1960s, when several Rohingya-denominatedorganizations engaged in campaigns to lobby for their political and ethnic claims in
Burma. Prañ thoṅ cu i tuiṅḥ raṅḥ sāḥ lū myuiḥ ta myuiḥ phrac so “Ruihaṅgyā” lū myuiḥ
cu i rājavaṅ akyañ: khyup (A short history of “Rohingyas”: An indigenous race of theUnion of Burma), published by the United Rohingyas Organization in 1960, is an essential
document for any in-depth study of Rohingya self-representation. It was the first in a
succession of efforts to muster historical research to argue in favor of a Rohingya
genealogy.68 Simultaneously, Mohammed Tahir Ba Tha’s cultural and historical
publications in The Guardian and a few other magazines between 1959 and 1965
supported the political struggle of the Rohingyas.69
There are very few sources documenting relations between the Middle East diaspora andthe refugee communities in Bangladesh on the one hand, and the North Arakan Muslims
in Burma until the late 1980s on the other. Biographical sources are rare.70 Only in the
1990s, following the impact of the 1982 citizenship law, did human rights issues (and thecitizenship issue in particular) become overriding themes in international Rohingya
publications. These developments, as well as political shifts among Rohingya exile
organizations, can be partly followed in irregular publications by the ARNO after 1998.71
Yet there is no single archive of the pamphlets and booklets of Rohingya militant
movements from the 1960s to the 1990s. Some of these can occasionally be traced via
private collections and Rakhine anthologies contesting Rohingya claims.
The texts of Burma’s constitutions of 1947, 1974, and 2008 are searchable on theInternet, and yet internal documents relating to Burmese/Myanmar policies in RakhineState remain hard to access. An overview of reports on human rights violations in
Rakhine State would call for a systematic study of publications by human rights
organizations that have taken an interest in Rohingya refugee issues.72 The UNHCR
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
archives in Geneva contain primary evidence on the refugee crises of 1978 and 1991–
1992, although not all these materials will be available for consultation.

Further Reading
Ahmed, Imtiaz. ed. The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State, Society,and the International Community. Dhaka: University of Dhaka Press, 2010.
Bhattacharya (Chakraborti), Swapna. “Imperialist Provocation and Muslims of Arakan/
Myanmar (1942–1948).” In Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 55th Session,
Aligarh, 1994. Edited by Indian History Congress, 542–550. Delhi: Indian History
Congress, 1995.
Chan, Aye. “Burma’s Western Border as Reported by the Diplomatic Correspondence(1947–1975).” Kanda Journal of Global and Area Studies 2 (2011): 1–14.
Chan, Aye. “The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma(Myanmar).” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 3, no. 2 (2005): 396–420.
Cheesman, Nick. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenshipand Exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (2017): 1–20.
Cowley, Alice, and Maung Zarni. “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya.”Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 681–752.
Eaton, Richard M. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Fleischmann, Klaus. Arakan—Konfliktregion zwischen Birma und Bangladesh
Vorgeschichte und Folgen des Flüchtlingsstroms von 1978. Hamburg: Mitteilungen desInstituts für Asienkunde Hamburg 121, 1981.
Gommans, Jos, and Jacques Leider. eds. The Maritime Frontier of Burma—Exploring
Political, Cultural, and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800.
Amsterdam and Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen/KITLV Press, 2002.
Irwin, Anthony. Burmese Outpost. London: Collins, 1946.
Islam, Nurul. “Facts About the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan.” 2006. Arakan: Arakan
Rohingya National Organization (ARNO).
Jilani, Ahmed F. K. A Cultural History of Rohingya. Chittagong, Bangladesh: Selfpublished, 2001.
Karim, Abdul. The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture. Chittagong,
Bangladesh: Arakan Historical Society, 2000.

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
Khin Maung Saw. “The ‘Rohingyas’: Who Are They? The Origin of the Name ‘Rohingya’.”
In Tradition and Modernity in Myanmar Proceedings of an International Conference Heldin Berlin from May 7th to May 9th, 1993, Vol. 1. Edited by Uta Gärtner and Jens Lorenz,
89–100. Berlin: Lit, 1994.
Leider, Jacques P. “Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas.” In
Metamorphosis: Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. Edited by Renaud
Egreteau and Francois Robinne, 151–178. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015.
Leider, Jacques P. “Rohingya: The Name, the Movement, the Quest for Identity.” In Nation
Building in Myanmar, 204–255. Yangon: Myanmar EGRESS/Myanmar Peace Center, 2013.
Leider, Jacques P. “Transmutations of the Rohingya Movement in the Post-2012 RakhineState Crisis.” In Ethnic and Religious Identities and Integration in Southeast Asia. Editedby Ooi Keat Gin and Volker Grabowsky, 191–239. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2017.
Maung Tha Hla. Rohingya Hoax. New York: Buddhist Rakhaing Cultural Association,
2009.
Razvi, Mujtaba. “The Problem of Burmese Muslims.” Pakistan Horizon 31, no. 4 (1978):82–93.
Robinson, Robert. Among the Mughs or Memorials of the Rev. J. C. Fink, Missionary in
Arracan. Calcutta: Light Press, 1871.
Rui haṅ gyā mvat ca laṅ ñī ñhvat reḥ tap poṅ cu aphvè. khyup/. Prañ t[h]oṅ cuṁ (read: cu)
sāḥ rui haṅ gyā lū myuiḥ cu sui. rājavaṅ akuiḥ akāḥ nhaṅ. pan krā: acī raṅ khaṁ khyak(Rohangya Muslim United Front of Burma. Report submitted and historical references
regarding the Rohangyas, an ethnic group of the Union). Rangoon: Pali Pitaka Publishing
Press, 1961.
Selth, Andrew. Burma’s Muslims: Terrorists or Terrorised? Canberra: Australian National
University, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 2003.
Siddiq Khan, M. “Muslim Intercourse with Burma. From the earliest times to the British
Conquest.” Islamic Culture 10, no. 3 (1936): 409–427; 11 (1937): 248–266.
Smith, Martin. Burma—Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity. London and New Jersey:
Zed Books, 1991.
Tha Htu. “The Mayu Frontier Administrative Area.” The Guardian Monthly (February,1962): 29–30.
Uddin, Nasir. ed. Life in Locker: State of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Saarbrücken,
Germany: Scholar’s Press, 2013.
Walton, Matthew. “Religious Discrimination and Religious Conflict.” OxfordMyanmar Policy Brief Series 1, no. 1 (August, 2016), 1–9.
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
World Muslim Congress. History of Arakan (Burma). Karachi: World Muslim Congress,
1978.
Yegar, Moshe. The Muslims of Burma. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harassowitz, 1972.
Yegar, Moshe. Between Integration and Secession. The Muslim Communities of theSouthern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/Myanmar. Lanham/Oxford,
UK: Lexington Books, 2002.

Notes:(1.) The terms Arakanese and Arakan are still commonly used by Buddhists and Muslims
alike, as well as by people writing about the region. The official names Rakhine State andMyanmar (formerly Burma) are used in this article when referring to the country after
1989. No political bias is linked to the use of either term. Nonetheless, it is relevant tonote linguistic differences. Rakhine is an adjective rather than a noun (corresponding
with Arakanese, and usually designating the ethnic group of the majority-Buddhist
population), while Arakan as a noun signifies a territorial and political entity that haschanged over time, such as the kingdom of Arakan (before 1785), Arakan division (during
the colonial period), or Arakan state (since 1974). The old denominations Burma andArakan are preferred when talking about the history and geography of the region.
Similarly, Bengal and Bengali (rather than Bangla or Bangladeshi) have been used when abroadly cultural or historical sense is applied. The term Bengali to denote the Rohingyas
has been used in official parlance in Myanmar since the 1980s and became extremely
controversial after 2012, as it implied the nonnative character of the Muslim community.
(2.) Benjamin Zawacki, “Defining Myanmar’s “Rohingya Problem,” Human Rights Brief
20, no. 3 (2013): 18–25, ; Human Rights Watch, “The Government Could Have Stopped
This”: Sectarian Violence and Ensuing Abuses in Burma’s Arakan State (New York:
Human Rights Watch, 2012); Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”: Crimes
Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State(New York: Human Rights Watch, 2013); Insani Yardim Vakfi, Arakan Report (Istanbul:
IHH—The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, 2013);
David Dapice, “A Fatal Distraction from Federalism—Religious Conflict in Rakhine,”
Proximity Reports 14 (2014), Harvard Kennedy School—Ash Center for Democratic
Governance and Innovation.
(3.) For a general historical overview, see Jacques P. Leider, “Rohingya: The Name, theMovement, the Quest for Identity,” in Nation Building in Myanmar, 204–255 (Yangon:
Myanmar EGRESS/Myanmar Peace Center, 2013). After 1948, issues of separatism,
federalism, and autonomy loomed large amid the armed struggles of the Rakhine
Buddhist and Muslim Rohingya groups. Pending more detailed studies, one may note a
recent statement by an authorized Rohingya spokesperson, saying that “we Rohingya are
NOT demanding a separate state” (tweet by Tun Khin @tunkhin80, president of Burmese
Rohingya Organization UK, February 26, 2018). This statement aligns with thefoundational declaration of the ARNO of December 13, 1998, which espouses the
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar“peaceful co-existence” of “two sister communities” and the right to “self-determination.”
Available at http://rohingya.webs.com/arakanhistory.htm.
(4.) The expression has been used widely in the media. It is also found in the title of thebook by Imtiaz Ahmed, The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State,Society, & the International Community (Dhaka: Dhaka University Press, 2010).
(5.) Jacques Leider, “On Arakanese Territorial Expansion: Origins, Context, Means, andPractice,” in The Maritime Frontier of Burma—Exploring Political, Cultural, andCommercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800, ed. Jos Gommans andJacques Leider, 127–150 (Amsterdam and Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Nederlandse
Akademie van Wetenschappen/KITLV Press, 2002).
(6.) Stephan Egbert Arie van Galen, Arakan and Bengal: The Rise and Decline of the
Mrauk United Kingdom (Burma) from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century AD, PhD
diss., Leiden University, 2008.
(7.) Thibaut d’Hubert, “Pirates, Poets, and Merchants: Bengali Language and Literature
in Seventeenth-Century Mrauk-U,” in Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in
Early Modern India, ed. Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill,2014); Thibaut d’Hubert and Jacques P. Leider, “Traders and Poets at the Mrauk-U Court—On Commerce and Cultural Links in Seventeenth-Century Arakan,” in Pelagic
Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal Before Colonialism, ed. Rila Mukherjee, 77–
111 (Delhi: Primus Books, 2011).
(8.) Francis Buchanan, “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in
the Burma Empire,” Asiatick Researches 5 (1799), 219–240.
(9.) Francis Buchanan, “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in
the Burma Empire,” Asiatick Researches 5 (1799), 223. Rohingya historian Aman Ullah
cites Buchanan as implicit proof in “Dr Francis Buchanan MD and Rohingya,” March 15,
2016, available at http://www.thestateless.com/2016/03/dr-francis-buchanan-md-androhingya.html). Gregory B. Poling is inclined to accept Buchanan’s testimonial as
sufficient proof in “Separating Fact from Fiction About Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Critical
Questions, Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 13, 2014. The
Japanese Myanmar scholar Kei Nemoto treats this as an open question in “The Rohingya
Issue in Myanmar,” Asia Peace Building Initiatives, October 10, 2015. For a balanced
assessment of the identity issue in general, with a reference to Buchanan, see Carlos
Sardiña Galache, “The True Origins of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” December 4, 2017. For aninterpretation of the term as a “geographic locator,” see Derek Tonkin, “The Rohingya
Conundrum,” October 2, 2017.
(10.) Robert Robinson, Among the Mughs or Memorials of the Rev. J. C. Fink, Missionary
in Arracan (Calcutta: Light Press, 1871).

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(11.) Charles Paton, “Historical and Statistical Sketch of Arakan,” Asiatick Researches 16(1828), 353–381. T. C. Robertson was a town magistrate closely associated with the
British invasion; Paton was an assistant commissioner.
(12.) British Burma/Foreign Department, Administration Report for 1869–1870 (Rangoon:
Secretariat Press, 1871). British colonial archives are silent on the evolution of the
Muslim community in the middle of the 19th century. The modest growth of the general
population was mainly due to the return of the exiled Arakanese. An American missionary
source refers to the presence of Bengali people besides local Muslims; G. S. Comstock,“Notes on Arakan,” Journal of the American Oriental Society I (1847), 3. An Arakanesechief in the Maungdaw region is known to have actively promoted the settlement of
Bengali agriculturists.
(13.) The historical annals presented in Paton’s sketch of Arakan contain peculiar Muslim
spellings of the titles and names of kings that are rarely, if ever, found in contemporary
Arakanese manuscripts.
(14.) Michael Walter Charney, Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious
Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (15th to19th C.), PhD diss., University of Michigan, Department of History, 1999.
(15.) James Baxter, Report on Indian Immigration (Rangoon: Government Printing andStationery, 1941); Burma Gazetteer Akyab District Including Town and Village Census
Tables (Rangoon: Government Printing. vol. B, 1912); R. B. Smart, ed., Burma Gazetteer
Akyab District (Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, vol. A, 1917). In 2014, thetotal percentage of Muslims was estimated at 34 percent (Ministry of Immigration and
Population, The 2014 Myanmar Population and Housing Census—The Union Report
Census Report, vol. 2 (Yangon: Ministry of Immigration and Population, Department ofPopulation, 2015).
(16.) One must note that Indians in Burma, independent of their historical presence in the
country, were classified as “foreigners” in the census reports. Chittagonian migrants who
spread throughout Burma during the colonial period did not adopt the name Rohingya
after independence. British census 1921 and 1931. Leider, “Rohingya: The Name, theMovement, the Quest for Identity.”(17.) A relevant source for this issue is James Baxter’s Report on Indian Immigration(Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1940), an investigation meant to address
the “widespread uneasiness about Indian penetration into Burma” (p. 6). For an early
indication of ethnoreligious tensions, see Major C. M. Enriquez, A Burmese Wonderland:
A Tale of Travel in Lower and Upper Burma (Calcutta/Shimla: Thacker, Spink, and Co.,
1922), 58; see also Moshe Yegar, Between Integration and Secession: The Muslim
Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/
Myanmar (Lanham/Oxford, UK: Lexington Books, 2002).

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(18.) The author of this article hypothesizes that such organizations existed at a local
level, and that the absence of information does not mean they did not.
(19.) Jacques Leider, “Conflict and Mass Violence in Arakan (Rakine State): The 1942
Events and Political Identity Formation,” in Citizenship in Myanmar: Ways of Being in andfrom Burma, ed. Ashley South and Marie Lall (ISEAS/ CMU, 2017), passim. The article
lists the sparse available sources.
(20.) An exact written source is hard to come by for the allegation that the British hadpromised a “Muslim National Area,” which is an expression currently found in Rohingyarelated entries on Wikipedia. The allegation is made, for example, in the “Rohingya
People” article, but without a precise source. Aman Ullah, a Rohingya historian, hasrepeated the same without providing any source (“The Traditional Demand of the Muslim
Rohingya of North Arakan.” There is a faint hint of such in Anthony Irwin, Burmese
Outpost (London: Collins, 1946), 25, a British officer who wanted to see that the Arakan
Muslims who had fought for the British were rewarded. The 1947 petition of Muslim
elders (“Representation by the Muslims of North Arakan Claiming for an AutonomousState in the Buthidaung and Maungdaw Areas,” February 24, 1947, Government of
Burma Home Department), while referring to the de facto recognition of local “peacecommittees” as an “administrative body,” concludes: “And this Administrative Body was
given many pledges towards self-determination, on the model of autonomous Muslim
State, in New Burma.” As the petitioners made reference to D. C. P. Phelps, the militaryadministrator, and A. A. Shah, the civil advisor to Phelps, one may surmise that oralpromises had been made, but without any written commitment by their superiors.
(21.) For a discussion of the secessionist aspects of the contemporary conflict, see
Anthony Ware, “Secessionist Aspects to the Buddhist-Muslim Conflict in Rakhine State,
Myanmar,” in Territorial Separatism and Global Politics: Claims, Methods, and Problems,ed. Damien Kingsbury and Costas Laoutides (London: Routledge, 2015).
(22.) Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1972).
(23.) Arakan Muslim Conference, “Open Letter to the Leaders of the Burmese
Government and the Democracies. Charter of the Constitutional Demands of the Arakani
Muslims,” 1951.
(24.) Robert H. Taylor, The State in Myanmar (Honolulu: Hawai’i Press, 2009), 269.
(25.) The search for unity was a matter of political concern (Mohamed Akram Ali, “Unity
Among Ourselves,” The Guardian 1960, 31–32). Therefore, the newly found unity wasdemonstrated in the names chosen by Rohingya organizations, such as the Rohangya
Muslim United Front of Burma, United Rohingya National League, and United Rohingyas
Organization, which published booklets (in Burmese) to explain the indigenous characterof the Rohingya population during the early phase of the Mayu Frontier Administration(1961–1964).

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(26.) Moshe Yegar, an Israeli diplomat posted in Burma in the 1960s, used Rohinga in his
authoritative The Muslims of Burma. Prime Minister U Nu used the term in a speechbroadcast on September 25, 1954, when he pleaded for the political support of moderate
Rakhine Muslims in Buthidaung and Maungdaw against the Mujahids and the Rakhine
nationalists.
(27.) Mohammed A. Tahir Ba Tha, “Shah Shujah in Arakan (Origin of Muslims in Arakan),”
The Guardian 6, no. 9 (1959): 26–28; Ba Tha, “Roewengyas in Arakan,” The Guardian 7,
no. 5 (1960): 33–36; and Ba Tha, “Muslims in Arakan (Burma): A Brief Study of theRohingyas, a Muslim Racial Group of Arab Descent in Arakan,” Islamic Review (April
1966), 25–30, are a few examples of his work.
(28.) Yegar notes that “as a matter of fact, the same group is active in all of them” (Yegar,
The Muslims of Burma 102). A contemporary observer of Burma Muslim affairs, Yegar
used only the spelling Rohinga.
(29.) Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 102.
(30.) Mohammad Yunus, A History of Arakan Past and Present (Chittagong, Bangladesh:
Magenta Colour, 1994), 71.
(31.) “The immediate effect of the creation of the Mayu Frontier District is theeradication of insurgency, and of suppression of smuggling etc. by effective and efficient
Administration offering the Rohingyas varied opportunities in life to improve their lots inconsonance with the spirit of Burmese Way to Socialism. The object for which the Mayu
Frontier District is created is manifested in all round activities of the Frontier
Administration and it is hoped that a new Era of the Rohingyas with new life and new
outlook will usher in no distant future.” Extract from “Address Presented to Professor Dr.
Luce by the United Rohingya Organisation of Mayu District,” May 3, 1963 (National
Library of Australia, MSS Collection, Papers of Gordon Luce, MS6574/1/37).
(32.) Both Urdu works were never published and exist only in manuscript form. They havebeen quoted by Rohingya and Bangladeshi authors. For Hasan’s work, see Mohammed
Akhtaruzzaman, “Introduction to an Unpublished Manuscript on Myanmar,” in Myanmar
Two Millennia: Proceedings of the Myanmar Two Millennia Conference 15–17 December
1999, Part III. Yangon: Universities Historical Research, 94–103.
(33.) Nick Cheesman, “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenshipand Exclude Rohingya,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (2017), 3.
(34.) Mohammed Tahir Ba Tha, Rohingyas and Kamans (Myitkyina, Myanmar: United
Rohingya National League. 1963).
(35.) On the expansion of Islam in Bengal, see Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam andthe Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993).

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date: 04 May 2019

Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(36.) Daniel G. E. Hall, “Studies in Dutch Relations with Arakan in the SeventeenthCentury,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 26 (1937), 1–31; Arthur P. Phayre,“Account of Arakan,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1841), 679–712; for recent
scholarly insights, see d’Hubert and Leider, “Traders and Poets.”(37.) Yunus, History of Arakan. Yunus was the founder of the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (1982).
(38.) Abdul Karim, The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture(Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society, 2000), 5.
(39.) Most of this work is in Burmese and has been self-published. Abu Anin (U Kyaw
Min), “Towards Understanding Arakan History (A Study on the Issue of Ethnicity in
Arakan, Myanmar),” Yangon 2002 (unpublished manuscript); U Kyaw Min, A Glimpse into
the Hidden Chapters of Arakan History (Yangon: Khin Ma Khyo, 2013); U Kyaw Min, Ruihaṅ gyā samuiṅ kui chan. cac khraṅḥ (Examination of Rohingya History) (Yangon: Kyaw
So Aung, 2015).
(40.) Jacques P. Leider, “Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of theRohingyas,” in Metamorphosis: Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar, ed.
Renaud Egreteau and Francois Robinne (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015).
(41.) Cheesman, “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship,” 14.
The concept of “national race” (taingyintha) became the benchmark for membership of
the political community during the Ne Win regime (1962–1988) and led to the civic
exclusion of the Rohingyas under the subsequent SLORC/SPDC rule (1988–2012).
(42.) Andrew Selth, Burma’s Muslims: Terrorists or Terrorised? (Canberra: Australian
National University, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 2003).
(43.) Bohmu Hla Myaing, Taṅ pra khyak Nuiṅṅaṁ khyāḥ sāḥ myāḥ vaṅ rok hmu nhaṅ.
rakhuiṅ prañnay mha phrac rap akhre ane akhyui (Report on the Arrival of Foreigners
and Certain Events in Rakhine State). November 1, 1983. . The perception of a migratory
threat persisted over the following decades. Plans announced in 2002 to build a roadbetween Dhaka and Yangon were shelved because of fears that development could triggera further increase in the Muslim population, which has frustrated Bangladesh’s desire to
expand its economic relations with Myanmar. See also Helal Mohammed Khan, “Threat
Perceptions in the Myanmar-Bangladesh Borderlands,” Conflict in Myanmar War, Politics,
Religion, ed. by Nick Cheesman and Nicholas Farrelly, 333–352 (Singapore: ISEAS Yusof
Ishak Institute, 2016).
(44.) Mohamed Saflullah Munsoor’s study, “A Qualitative Assessment of Successful Local
Organizations (LOs): A Critical Study of Northern Rakhine State (NRS),
Myanmar” (Reading, UK: University of Reading, Department of International and Rural
Development, Faculty of Life Sciences, PhD diss., 2003), provides rare insights into local
Muslim social hierarchies.
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(45.) Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within (London: ZED Books, 2017), 69–97.
(46.) Alice Cowley and Maung Zarni, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s
Rohingya,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 681–752; Fortify Rights andAllard K. Lowenstein International Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, Persecution of theRohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State? A Legal Analysis(2014),(47.) The monthly Burma bulletins of ALTSEAN offer detailed figures with references.
Different numbers of internally displaced persons were quoted over the months as figureschanged according to the movement or relocation of people.
(48.) This figure was quoted in Bangladesh media: http://www.dhakatribune.com/
bangladesh/2018/01/09/number-rohingyas-leave-camps-work-illegally-across-bangladesh/.
(49.) Nausheen H. Anwar, “Negotiating New Conjunctures of Citizenship: Experiences of‘Illegality’ in Burmese-Rohingya and Bangladeshi Migrant Enclaves in Karachi,”Citizenship Studies 17, nos. 3–4 (2013), 415.
(50.) Kazi Fahmida Farzana, “Forced Migration and Statelessness: Voices and Memories
of Burmese Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh” (Singapore: National University ofSingapore, PhD diss., 2011), has explored refugee accounts.
(51.) One fascinating source to track the adaptive change of names in recent years is thelog of revisions attached to Wikipedia entries. The following example concerns the pageon Rohingyas in Pakistan. A page called “Burmese People in Pakistan” was created in
January 2010, and the first author noted that “a lot of the Burmese immigrants toPakistan are Rohingya Muslims from western Burma.” On September 13, 2012, anothercontributor changed the expression “Burmese people in Pakistan” to “Pakistan Burmese”
in the page content. Then, on December 31, 2017, the page “Burmese People in Pakistan”
was changed to “Rohingya People in Pakistan”; the category “Pakistani people ofBurmese descent” was switched to “Pakistani people of Rohingya descent”; and theexpression “Pakistan Burmese” became “Rohingya people in Pakistan.” Nonetheless, toconclude that the descriptor “Burmese Muslims” has only functioned as an exonym would
be misguided because there is actually a Muslim community in Pakistan that hails fromBurma proper, not from Rakhine State, which claims the appellation “Burmese
Muslims” (see Faiza Rahman, “Invisible Pakistanis Neither Here nor There,” Express
Tribune, August 20, 2013).
(52.) In his famous article on “Burma’s exiled Muslims” in Saudi-Arabia, Syed Neaz
Ahmad uses the phrase “thousands of Burmese Muslims from Arakan—often called
Rohingyas …” (The Guardian, October 12, 2009, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/12/burma-muslims-rohingya-saudiprisons). Such complementary expressions are also not infrequently found in humanrights and UN reports before 2012. Although the name Rohingya has come increasingly

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
into use, the local legacy of “Burma/Burmese” may live on in toponyms such as “Burmee
Colony,” in Landhi Town (Karachi).
(53.) See “Bangladesh Plans to Move Rohingya Refugees to Island in the South,” The
Guardian, May 27, 2015.
(54.) UNHCR statement for the period between October 9, 2016 and February 2017,quoted by Oliver Snow (“‘Perplexed’ Dhaka Wants Closer Cooperation on Security andRefugees,” Frontier Myanmar, May 18, 2017).
(55.) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mission Report of OHCHR
Rapid Response Mission to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 13–24 September 2017. The
document states that 519,000 people fled to Bangladesh between August 25 and October
8, 2017 (2), but at the time of the report’s release, on October 30, that number had grown
to more than 600,000. By orders 75/2017 (September 12, 2017) and 83/2017 (October 9,2017), the Office of the President established a fifteen-member Committee for
Implementation of the Recommendations (of the Kofi Annan Advisory Commission) on
Rakhine State (“Establishment of the Committee for Implementation of the
Recommendations on Rakhine State,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, October 12,2017). Regarding the Rohingya refugees, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, in a speech
on September 19, linked their repatriation to a verification process. In another movelinked to the situation in Rakhine State, the government formed the Union Enterprise for
Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement, and Development in Rakhine (UEHRD) to further
the cooperation between national organizations and the international community for
Rakhine’s recovery (“Military Sanction ‘Very Specific’,” Myanmar Times, October 19,2017).
(56.) Danish Immigration Service (DIS), Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh and Thailand.
Fact-Finding Mission to Bangladesh and Thailand (Copenhagen: Danish Immigration
Service, 2011), 12.
(57.) Samuel Berthet, “Les Rohingya à Chittagong (Bangladesh): Enjeux d’une
invisibilité,” Moussons 22, no. 2 (2013), 75–86.
(58.) For a detailed review of these developments, see Jacques P. Leider, “Transmutationsof the Rohingya Movement in the Post-2012 Rakhine State Crisis,” in Ethnic and Religious
Identities and Integration in Southeast Asia, eds. Ooi Keat Gin and Volker Grabowski(Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2017), 191–239.
(59.) The shift from historical accounts is evident by comparing the content columns of
Rohingya websites. Websites that were set up before 2011 frequently contain historical
articles, sometimes from the colonial period—for example, the “Scholar’s Column” of
www.kaladanpress.org, a Rohingya news agency founded in 2001. Although post-2012
websites may still have a “History” section (for instance, the popular
www.rohingyablogger.com, founded in 2013), they tend to feature little historical content.

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(60.) Broadly speaking, Rohingya writers laid claim to an Islamic and Islamicized
heritage. In the 17th century, several Bengali poets flourished at the court of Mrauk U.
The most famous was Alaol, taken prisoner during an Arakanese naval raid and deported
to Mrauk U. Alaol’s poetry forms part of the canon of classic Bengali literature that
educated people would have been familiar with. During the early 20th century, interest in
this cross-cultural heritage seems to have been limited to Bengali or Burmese writers. An
exception was Bisvesuar Bhattacharya [“Bengali Influence in Arakan,” Bengal Past andPresent 33 (1927), 139–144]. The authors mostly quoted by Rohingya writers after WorldWar II were D. G. E. Hall, Arthur Phayre, G. E. Harvey, and Maurice C. Collis. Both Phayre
and Harvey had published what were seen as “national” histories of Burma based on thechronicle accounts and on Western sources; Arthur P. Phayre, History of Burma (London:
Trübner, 1883) and Geoffrey E. Harvey, History of Burma (London: Frank Cass, 1925). By
explaining the legend of King Min Saw Mwan’s exile in Bengal during the early 15th
century in a rational way, Phayre and Harvey lay the groundwork for the generally
accepted belief in Myanmar that Muslim mercenaries settled in Mrauk U when the capital
was founded (1430 CE). For a criticism of this belief, see Jacques Leider and Kyaw Minn
Htin, “King Man Co Mvan’s Exile in Bengal: Legend, History, and Context,” Journal of
Burma Studies, 19.2 (December 2015), 371–405. Maurice Collis, a judge and prolific
writer who brought chapters of regional history to a broad public by romanticizing fact
and fiction, had a lasting influence on both Buddhist and Muslim minds. His popular book
The Land of the Great Image, Being Experiences of Friar Manrique in Arakan (London:
Faber and Faber, 1943) transformed the apologetic account of an Augustinian monk into aseemingly objective description of Arakan in the middle of the 17th century. Collis’s
influential academic paper “Arakan’s Place in the Civilization of the Bay (A Study of
Coinage and Foreign Relations),” Journal of the Burma Research Society 15 (1925), 34–
52, praised the Muslim influence on Arakan as a marker of cultural progress.
(61.) Cresa L. Pugh, “Is Citizenship the Answer? Constructions of Belonging andExclusion for the Stateless Rohingya of Burma,” Compas Working Paper 107 (2013), 4–24.
(62.) Candamālālaṅkāra, Rakhuiṅ rājavaṅ sac (New Chronicle of Arakan) (Mandalay:
Hamsavati Pitakat, 1931–1932). Ṅa Mañ rājavaṅ, British Library (Arthur P. Phayre
Collection), OR 3465A. A critical discussion of arguments related to the Muslim presencein 15th-century Arakan is found in Leider and Htin, “King Man Co Mvan’s Exile in
Bengal,” 371–405.
(63.) Sebastião Manrique, Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique 1629–1643 (vol. 1, Arakan)(Oxford, UK: Hakluyt Society, 1927). A critical discussion of Manrique and other
Portuguese sources is found in Ana Marques Guedes, Interferência e Integração dos
Portugueses na Birmânia, c. 1580–1630 (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente: 1994). De OostIndische voyagie van Wouter Schouten, ed. Michael Breet (Zutphen, Netherlands:
Walburg Pers B.V., 2003). Schouten is best read against the background of Arakan-Bengal
relations presented by van Galen, Arakan and Bengal.

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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar(64.) Thibaut d’Hubert’s Histoire culturelle et poétique de la traduction—Alaol et latradition littéraire bengali au XVIIe siècle à Mrauk-U, capitale du royaume d’Arakan,
thèse de doctorat (Paris: Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, 2010) contains an appendix
of more than 400 pages of translations from Alaol’s poetic work. A eulogy of the Buddhist
court is found in d’Hubert and Leider, “Traders and Poets,” 108–111.
(65.) Four of the most widely quoted sources for this period are Francis Hamilton, “A
Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire,”
Asiatick Researches, 5 (1799): 219–240; Paton, “Historical and Statistical Sketch of
Arakan”; Phayre, “Account of Arakan”; and Comstock, “Notes on Arakan,” 219–258.
(66.) The collection contains key documents such as “Representation by the Muslims ofNorth Arakan Claiming for an Autonomous State in the Buthidaung and Maungdaw
Areas,” February 24, 1947, Government of Burma Home Department; “Address Presented
by Jamiat Ul Ulema North Arakan on Behalf of the People of North Arakan to the Hon’ble
Prime Minister of the Union of Burma on the Occasion of His Visit to Maungdaw on the
25th October 1948,” Government of the Union of Burma, Foreign Office; “Open Letter tothe Leaders of the Burmese Government and the Democracies. Charter of theConstitutional Demands of the Arakani Muslims,” Arakan Muslim Conference of 1951;
Reginald B. Pearn, “The Mujahid Revolt in Arakan. 31 December 1952,” National
Archives, British Foreign Office, FO 371/101002—FB 1015/63; and “Brigadier General
Aung Gyi’s Speech, 4th July 1961.” Khit Yay Journal, 12, no. 6 (1961), 9–26.
(67.) East Pakistan District Gazetteers, Chittagong, ed. S. N. H. Rizvi (Dacca: Governmentof East Pakistan, 1970); Report on the Progress Made in the Arakan Division from 1826 to1869 (Rangoon: Government Stationery, 1870); British Burma/Foreign Department,
Administration Report for 1869–1870 (Rangoon: Secretariat Press. 1871); Report on the
Progress Made in the Arakan Division from 1865/66 to 1874/75 (Rangoon: Government
Stationery, 1876); British Burma Gazetteer (Rangoon: Government Printing andStationery, 1879); Imperial Gazetteer of India (Provincial Series) 1908, Burma (Calcutta:
Superintendent of Government, 1908); Burma Gazetteer, Akyab District Including Town
and Village Census Tables (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, 1912); Burma
Gazetteer, Hill District of Arakan Including Town and Village Census Tables (Rangoon:
Office of the Superintendent, 1912); Burma Gazetteer, Kyaukpyu District Including Town
and Village Census Tables (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, 1912); Smart, Burma
Gazetteer, Akyab District; W. B. Tydd, ed., Burma Gazetteer Sandoway District (Rangoon:
Government Printing and Stationery, 1921); G. E. R. Grant-Brown, ed., Burma Gazetteer
Northern Arakan District (or Arakan Hill Tracts) (Rangoon: Government and Printing
Stationery, vol. A, 1960); James Baxter, Report on Indian Immigration (Rangoon:
Government Printing and Stationery, 1941).
(68.) United Rohingyas Organization Headquarters, Prañ thoṅ cu I tuiṅḥ raṅḥ sāḥ lūmyuiḥ ta myuiḥ phrac so “Ruihaṅgyā” lū myuiḥ cu i rājavaṅ akyañ: khyup (A Short History
of “Rohingyas”: An Indigenous Race of the Union of Burma) (Rangoon, 1960). Two otherseminal documents are Rui haṅ gyā mvat ca laṅ ñī ñhvat reḥ tap poṅ cu aphvè. khyup/
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Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar
Rohangya Muslim United Front of Burma. Prañ t[h]oṅ cuṁ (read: cu) sāḥ rui haṅ gyā lūmyuiḥ cu sui. rājavaṅ akuiḥ akāḥ nhaṅ. pan krā: acī raṅ khaṁ khyak (Report Submitted
and Historical References Regarding the Rohangyas, an Ethnic Group of the Union)(Rangoon: Pali Pitaka Publishing Press, 1961); and M. A. Tahir Ba Tha’s Rui haṅ gyā nhaṅ.
Kaman lū myuiḥ cu myāḥ (Rohingyas and Kamans) (Myitkyina, Myanmar: United
Rohingya National League, 1963). Ba Tha’s work was translated into English by Ahmed F.
K. Jilani, A Short History of Rohingyas and Kamans of Burma (Chittagong, Bangladesh:
Institute of Arakan Studies, 1999). The next generation of Rohingya historiography isrepresented by Mohammad Yunus, the founder of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization,
who published A History of Arakan Past and Present. The most important recent author is
U Kyaw Min, a prominent political leader since the 1990 elections. His works include“Towards Understanding Arakan History,” written in English under his pen name Abu
Aneen, as well as A Glimpse into the Hidden Chapters of Arakan History and Rui haṅ gyā
samuiṅ kui chan. cac khraṅḥ (Examination of Rohingya History), both written in Burmese.
Zaw Min Htut’s The Union of Burma and Ethnic Rohingyas (Tokyo: Maruyama, 2001)
merits a special mention because it provoked the strongest reactions among educatedRakhine.
(69.) Among his articles, the following are of particular relevance for Rohingya
historiography: Tahir Ba Tha, “Roewengyas in Arakan”; “The Coming of Islam to Arakan(A Brief Study of Islamic Civilization in Arakan),” The Guardian 12, no. 3 (March 1965), 9–
13; and Ba Tha, “Muslims in Arakan.”(70.) Muhammad Noor, Barrak Adams, and Diana Wong, The Exodus: A True Story from aChild of a Forgotten People (Kuala Lumpur, self-published: 2012); Robert Mole, The
Temple Bells Are Calling—A Personal Record of the Last Years of British Rule in Burma(Bishop Auckland, UK: Pentland Books, 2001).
(71.) A few of ARNO’s Monthly Arakan—News and Analysis of the Arakan Rohingya
National Organisation issues from 2009 and 2010 are downloadable as PDF files on the
Web under various addresses; for example, burmalibrary.org/docs08/
mag_arakan01-05.pdf.
(72.) Unlike numerous reports written after the violence in 2012, which display a poor
understanding of the Rohingya refugee context, a DIS delegation produced a report oflasting interest about the Rohingya refugees: Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh andThailand. Fact-Finding Mission to Bangladesh and Thailand 4 to 17 February 2011
(Copenhagen, Danish Immigration Service: May 2011).

Jacques Leider

École française d’Extrême-Orient - Myanmar Office

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