Buddhism and Islam in Asia:
A Long and Complicated History
Akhilesh Pillalamarri
October 29, 2017 The Diplomat
Demography and history
explain troubled attitudes toward Islam in Buddhist-majority Asian
regions today.
A cursory glance at world
news today may suggest that the fault-line where Buddhism and Islam
meet in Asia is increasingly characterized by conflict between the
two religions. Of course, in broadest sense, this is not true, as
religions are made up of numerous individuals and leaders, who are
generally of differing opinions. Yet, there is an unusually high
level of tension between Buddhists and Muslims in regions where the
two groups share space, including Rakhine state in Myanmar,
southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Ladakh, the eastern part of the
Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
At the root of this tension
is the fear among Buddhists — not completely exaggerated — that
Muslims will swamp them demographically. Many Buddhists also fear
that their countries will lose their culture and become Muslim, as
had been the case in many parts of modern day Central Asia,
Xinjiang, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which were majority Buddhist
before the arrival of Islam in the 7th-11th centuries. Often,
the arrival of Islam went hand-in-hand with the destruction of
Buddhism. When the Muslim Turkic Qarakhanids captured the
Buddhist city of Khotan in Xinjiang in 1006 CE, one of their poets
penned this verse: “We came down on them like a flood/We went out
among their cities/We tore down the idol-temples/We shat on the
Buddha’s head.” In the Islamic world, a destroyer of idols came to
be known as a but-shikan (بت شکن), a destroyer of but, a corruption
of the word Buddha, as Buddhism was prevalent in much of what
became the eastern part of the Islamic world.
Unfortunately, this
history, and demographics, have lead to great fear of Islam among
Buddhists, which in turn has led to genocide in Myanmar, and
violence in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Ladakh. If all Rohingya
refugees were to be repatriated to Rakhine in Myanmar for example,
they would outnumber the local Buddhist Rakhine people. And in
Ladakh, the Buddhist proportion of Leh district fell from 81 to 66
percent over the past three decades (relative to Muslims and
Hindus). In Ladakh as a whole, which also includes Kargil district,
Buddhists are 51 percent of the population, and Muslims 49 percent,
a fact of great concern to the region’s Buddhists.
Attitudes reported from
Burmese Buddhists in a recent New York Times piece sum up views
commonly held among both hardline monks and the lay-population of
Myanmar. One monk said of the Rohingya: “They stole our land, our
food and our water. We will never accept them back.” A Rakhine
politician said: “All the Bengalis learn in their religious schools
is to brutally kill and attack… It is impossible to live together
in the future.” A local administrator elsewhere in Myanmar said,
“Kalar [a derogatory term for Muslims in Myanmar] are not welcome
here because they are violent and they multiply like crazy, with so
many wives and children.”
Meanwhile, extremist
elements in Myanmar, such as the 969 Movement, have pledged to work
with Buddhist extremists elsewhere, such as in Sri Lanka, home to
the Bodu Bala Sena, a Buddhist extremist organization that lead
anti-Muslim riots in that country in 2014. Ladakh was recently the
scene of communal tensions between Buddhists and Muslims after the
marriage of a Muslim man and a Buddhist woman, something seen as
threatening to the region’s demographics. A head lama from a local
monastery said, “The Muslims are trying to finish us off,” also
adding that Buddhist women ought to have many more
children.
Buddhism was arguably the
world’s largest religion a century ago, if one counts everyone who
also followed Chinese folk religion, Shinto, Muism, and other East
Asian religions. In the modern era, Buddhism has been particularly
vulnerable, however, to both secularism and evangelism from other
religions. According to a Pew survey, alone among the world’s major
religions (including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Chinese
folk religion), Buddhism and its adherents are projected to decline
both in terms of raw numbers, and as a percentage of the world
population. The world Buddhist population is projected to fall from
488 million to 486 million people, and from 7 percent to 5 percent
of total share. Christianity and Islam are still growing; in
particular, the latter will grow from around 23 percent of the
global population to 30 percent by 2050. Put another way, there
will be six times as many Muslims as Buddhists by then.
The nature of Buddhism may
be related to the issue of the religion’s decline: there is a huge
gap between the religion’s lay practitioners, who have adopted a
set of customs associated somewhat with Buddhist mythology, and the
monastic community, which follows the Buddha’s example. While there
is an element of elite-popular division in all religions, in few
other religions is the gap so stark. After all, the community, the
sangha, founded by the Buddha himself was monastic.
State patronage was also
important to the survival of the sangha, as in many Buddhist
countries, monks beg, do not produce food, and do not engage in
warfare. When a territory was conquered by non-Buddhist powers, or
Buddhism was patronized less by certain rulers, the sangha
inevitably declined and the lay people merged their folk customs
into whatever other religions were dominant.
By the Middle Ages, after a
thousand years of growth, Buddhism was sidelined as the elite
religion throughout much of its former dominion, except in mainland
Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. Neo-Confucianism and Shinto prevailed
in East Asia, partially due to state policies. In 845 CE, China’s
Tang Dynasty launched the great anti-Buddhist persecution,
stimulated in part by the fact that too many people were entering
tax-free monasteries. Neo-Confucianism thereafter became the
dominant philosophy among the elite in China; a similar process
unfolded in Korea with the rise of the Joseon Dynasty in 1392, and
in Japan, where the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) promoted
Neo-Confucianism and Shinto at the expense of Buddhism, mostly for
political reasons.
Buddhism also all but
vanished in South Asia, as folk Buddhism was reabsorbed into
Hinduism, with the Buddha being acknowledged as an avatar of the
god Vishnu. Hinduism was simultaneously less dependent on state
promotion for its survival, and more attuned with the ritual and
political needs of kingship, as well as being more aligned with
folk beliefs. The destruction of the great Buddhist university at
Nalanda in 1193 by Muslim Turkic invaders sealed its fate.
Throughout South Asia, after the establishment of Muslim dynasties,
conversion to Islam occurred fastest in the heavily Buddhist
regions of Afghanistan, Swat, Sindh, western Punjab, and eastern
Bengal, compared to other areas where Hinduism was more
prevalent.
This history informs
Buddhist attitudes toward Islam, regardless of the actual doctrines
of Buddhism, or Islam for that matter. History and demographics
have created a sense of siege that is unlikely to be resolved soon.
Unfortunately, ideas such as education, development, spreading
awareness of family planning, or autonomous regions for Muslim
minorities are taking a back seat to hysteria throughout numerous
Buddhist-majority countries with Muslim-minorities.