Original sentence: According to Southeast Asian Buddhism history scholar and an ordained Buddhist monk Ashon Nyanuttara, there is scant historical data and archeological evidence about the early political and religious history of the Arakan people and the Rakhaing region.According to Syed Islam – a political science scholar, the Arab merchants had been in contact with Arakan since the third century, using the Bay of Bengal to reach Arakan.According to Syed Islam, the earliest Muslim settlements in the Arakan region began in the 7th-century.According to this view, this Rohingya history is not based on any evidence, rather is based on "fictitious stories, myths and legends".Besides these locals converting to Islam, Arab merchants married local women and later settled in Arakan.Further, the term "Rohingya" does not appear in any regional text of this period and much later.Muslim community's expansion and the growth of Islam into the region came much later with Bengali Muslims from the region that is now a part of Bangladesh.That term was adopted by "a few Bengali Muslim intellectuals who were direct descendants of immigrants from Chittagong district [Bengal]" in the 20th-century, states historian Aye Chan.The Arab traders were also missionaries and they began converting the local Buddhist population to Islam by about 788 CE, states Syed Islam.The alternate view contests that Islam arrived in the Arakan region in the 1st-millennium.The limited evidence available suggests that Buddhism, possibly the Mahayana tradition, was well established by the 4th-century in the region under the Candra Buddhist dynasty
Edited sentence: Arab merchants had been in contact with Arakan since the third century, using the Bay of Bengal to reach Arakan.Besides locals converting to Islam, Arab merchants married local women and later settled in Arakan.Modern day Rohingya believe they descended from these early Muslim communities.Some researchers have speculated that Muslims used trade routes in the region to travel to India and China