When we last read about Burmese monks in the Western press, it was in the context of mass protests against Burma's brutal military junta and their visit to Aung San Suu Kyi's home in homage of the courageous pro-democracy activist. It is surprising then, shocking even, that Burma's monks have come down on what is so blatantly the wrong side of a humanitarian crisis.
One photograph shows a Burmese monk in saffron robes, looking austere and intelligent in wireframe glasses. On his palm are the words "ROHINGYA NO," written in English. The Rohingya Muslims are an ethnic minority in Burma's western Rakhine state, and are considered by the United Nations to be among the world's most persecuted minorities. Since ethnic violence erupted last month, state-sanctioned and publicly supported oppression has driven thousands of Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh, where they are treated not as refugees but as illegal asylum seekers. Interviews with survivors in unofficial refugee camps describe how the Burmese army has systematically gone through villages, murdering men and raping women. To justify their actions, the Burmese government has attempted to portray the Rohingya as Muslim radicals, despite consistent lack of evidence, but the "anti-Rohingya campaign [also] wraps itself in calls for ethnic purity, defense of sovereignty, and protection of Buddhism."
Hannah Hindstrom at The Independent writes, "In recent days, [Buddhist] monks have emerged in a leading role to enforce denial of humanitarian assistance to Muslims, in support of policy statements by [Burmese] politicians." The same monks who campaigned against the brutal former regime are advocating against a stateless people, for what appears to be no other reason than their race and religion, "[failing] to practice compassion for all victims of violence." How can we make sense of this, and where do we go from here?
The history of eastern religions in the West is a strange and serendipitous one, where the experience of those faith traditions is often divorced from the cultural, historical, political and even religious contexts from which they emerged. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and other faiths transformed in the crucible of cultural revolution that began half a century ago, taking on new relationships with race and class in the United States. Pop-spirituality, the secularization of meditation and yoga, and the democratization of spirituality have both enhanced our religious and spiritual landscape while simultaneously limiting what we know about global religion and culture.
At the same time, Islam and Muslims are frequently portrayed as the new enemy, Islamic law creeping into our courts, the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating our government -- despite hard evidence indicating that American Muslims seek neither to impose sharia on Americans nor are they fomenting revolution. While this is evidence of a greater need for religious literacy, it also suggests some of the processes by which we construct categories of religions that are "good" and religions that are "bad."
The cognitive dissonance produced by Burmese monks actively preventing humanitarian aid from reaching one of the world's most persecuted minorities is real, and is worth picking apart. In the West, we conceive of certain religious groups as being inherently more "violent" or more "peaceful" or more "compassionate" than others. The victimization of Buddhists in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese state and the popularization of the Tibetan cause in American culture have uni-dimensionally reinforced the notion that Buddhists are, and can only be, nonviolent actors at the mercy of their oppressors.
My point is not to say that Buddhists aren't or can't be those things, but that all religious groups -- simply because they are made up of human beings -- are all of those descriptors while being none of them. The history of Buddhism is bloody, too. If we choose to frame history in terms of violent conflict and oppression, then the same can be said of Islam or any other belief system, including secularism.
Naturally, we can lob back and forth accusations of one religious group causing more suffering than another all day long and to no effect, entirely missing the point that the best of religious thought -- in Buddhism, Islam and elsewhere -- persistently demands compassion. Both Islam and Buddhism underscore that human nature and ego must be overcome through self-discipline and practiced compassion in order to become our best selves.
Cognitive dissonance generates questions. Ideally, stories like this can challenge us to think about one another in less monolithic, more nuanced ways. It allows us as news readers and members of pluralistic societies to complicate our understandings of The Other, whether that "Other" lives in another country or across the street. With greater attention, we can begin to be attuned to diversity and debate within religious traditions, both contemporary and historical, and to acknowledge that they are just as complicated as our own. The case of the Burmese monks also creates room for dialogue between Buddhists and Muslims, and reminds Muslims to be sensitive to the needs of vulnerable Muslim and non-Muslim ethnic and religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries. Lastly, the story opens spaces for Buddhists worldwide to put their faith into action on a global level, and to be a voice for compassion in Burma.
Follow Krystina Friedlander on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@yallayagirl
Andrew Lam: Monks Gone Wild: When Buddhism Derails in Myanmar
Azeem Ibrahim: Olympics Are a Great Forum to Call for an End to Religious Persecution
Lewis Richmond: Buddhism And Meditation: Why Most Buddhists In The World Don't Meditate
Jack Healey: Towards a Sustainable Peace: Demilitarization and Nonviolence in Burma
An Open Letter from the Buddhist Community on IslamophobiaBy Danny Fisher,
http://buddhistletteronislamophobia.wordpress.comJuly 31, 2012
San Francisco, CA (USA) -- As disciples of the Buddha who live in the West, we would like to take the holy month of Ramadan as an opportunity to express our growing concern about Islamophobia, both within our governments and within the Buddhist community worldwide.
In our own countries, we ask law enforcement agencies to stop targeting Muslim communities with indiscriminate surveillance and profiling. And we call on Americans to see their Muslims neighbors as fellow citizens, bound together with them through the shared values of democracy, equality, and freedom.
In the wider Buddhist community, we ask our fellow Buddhists to refrain from using the Dharma to support nationalism, ethnic conflict, and Islamophobia. We believe that these values are antithetical to the Buddha’s teachings on loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
The vast majority of Muslims the world over are peaceful, law-abiding people who share much the same dreams, hopes, and aspirations as their non-Muslim neighbors. They are our friends, our relatives, our colleagues, our neighbors, and our fellow citizens. Most importantly, they are our fellow sentient beings, all of whom, the Buddha taught, have loved and cared for us in the past. We stand with them during this holy month of Ramadan and denounce Islamophobia unequivocally.
"We wrote a letter to Suu Kyi regarding the violence but we got no reply. My representative in [New] Delhi even met the Burmese Ambassador here but it has been four weeks and we have not heard from them. There is no channel for us to approach," the Dalai Lama said, according to the Press Trust of India."
The truth is that it seems to be the jihadists who are persecuting Buddhists, then claiming victim status for themselves: http://seanrobsville.blogspot.com/2012/06/muslims-massacre-buddhists-in-burma.html
But the sanitized, Westernized, livingroom-meditation style of Buddhism can be a far cry from the actual political machinations that we in the US believe Buddhists disdain.
That said, some Buddhists, such as Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, have continually tried to bring together in quiet discussion and retreat groups of people know to disagree or be at war. TNH has held one such gathering for Israelis and Palestinians. Of course, people have to self-select to join such gatherings -- they are not forced to. But his intentions are very good, in my opinion.
In addition, he continues to be very respectful of other religions, such as Christianity.
But monks are a different case-- they must be forced to stay out of petty political fracas. For the benefit of their monastic order and their faith.
Which I find unfortunate, but understandable.
Religion is only one of the means which they use to do that. Politics is another. Ideological education and institutions are another. In fact, selective thinking of any kind is already on the way to creating another division, isn't it? So let's not continue being naive. We like to refer to "religion" or "science" or "politics" as if they are somehow independent of human agency. Naive!
At the end of the day, a positive stereotype is STILL a stereotype and therefore just as WRONG as a negative one.
So what are you going to do now?
Give me a solution and we will go from there, but so far you havent come up with any solutions.
Myanmar People see the dangers of Rohingyas swallowing-up the whole nation. Rohingyas do not want to be called Myanmar. They just want the citizen status and then cuase more trouble for Myanmar which is still one of the most undeveloped countries below Bangladesh.