Mandalay's Muslims keep low profile in Myanmar

Win Aung, a 65-year-old retired yarn merchant and trustee at the mosque, wears no symbols of his faith and lacks the Indian features commonly associated with Myanmar's Muslim population. Like other Panthay, Win Aung is descended from Chinese Muslims who emigrated to upper Burma from Yunnan in the mid-19th century after their failed rebellion against the Qing dynasty. 

Other than their religion, Win Aung said he has little in common with the thousands of stateless Rohingya Muslims facing greater persecution in western state of Rakhine. 

"The story here is very different from in Rahkine state. Big difference," he said. 

While the crisis facing the Rohingya shows no signs of abating, Mandalay's Muslims reported generally harmonious interfaith relations, even if sometimes disrupted by a small but vocal crowd of Buddhist bigots. 

In addition to the ethnically Chinese Muslims, Mandalay also has a community of Burmese Muslims, whose presence in the country datesb ack to a Persian migration wave in the 9th century, and whose ancestors include a range of ethnicities from Pashtuns to Malays. 

But Tun Lwin, a 49-year-old electronics dealer in downtown Mandalay who attends the city's Shia mosque, said the distinction is lost on many of his fellow citizens.

"All they understand is that Muslims came with the English 100 years ago, so they are foreigners," said Tun Lwin, referring to the colonial-era resettlement of the Rohingya from British India to Burma. 

Tun Lwin's own family tree is a mixture of Buddhist Burmese, Indian and, less commonly for the area, Turkish blood. His great-grandfather, he said proudly, was among the thousands of Ottoman prisoners of war interned in the country by the British during the First World War. Two Ottoman military graveyards from the war, which were renovated in2012 with Turkish funding, are still maintained in Myanmar's Magway and Mandalay regions.

"We have multiculturalism in this country," Tun Lwin said. "You can even find Afghan blood buried in Myanmar," he added, noting that his Turkish ancestor opted to stay after marrying a local woman. 

Win Aung added that most Buddhists treat Muslims with respect. Families of both faiths, he said, regularly mingle at the playground near his mosque while Buddhist and Muslim merchants at the city's markets enjoy good business ties. But religious harmony in Mandalay came under greater threat around the time of the 2012 national by-elections. Both men said that the rise of the Buddhist ultranationalist 969 Movement, and more recently the Ma Ba Tha group, have made Muslims increasing targets of bigotry. 

"Everywhere, all the time, I'm called 'kolar'," said Tun Lwin, referring to a Burmese word for Indians often used derogatorily to describe all Muslims. 

The incumbent United Solidarity Development Party (USDP) adopted an explicitly anti-Muslim position in the last election cycle. Ye Aung Myint, who sits on the party's executive committee in Mandalay, said there is no place for Muslims in politics. 

"To be representative of the people, candidates can't be Muslim, because we want to protect our religion," he said. 

The opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the parliamentary poll by a landslide, also decided not to field any Muslim candidates. 

Win Aung said he agreed with the move. "If NLD had Muslims in the election, then USDP and Ma Ba Tha would attack the NLD. We understood that they would get blamed very severely," he said. 

But many Mandalay Muslims said they were hopeful that the recent surge of anti-Muslim sentiment will die down once the new NLD-dominated parliament convenes early next year. Across town at a 200-year-old mosque nestled among pagodas, imam Law Shwe said he was hopeful that democracy would be beneficial to his community, despite having no Muslims in parliament.

"There might be some problems, but I look at it in a good light," he said. The mosque's congregation includes several local celebrities, including an 81-year-old man said to be the grandson of Haji U Kaalu, who first translated the Koran into Burmese in 1912. Another is Khin Maung Thein, Mandalay's sole candidate for a small Muslim party called United National Congress, which won no seats. 

He acknowledged that discrimination was rampant, but said he thought it was mostly limited to hollow hate speech, and then only from a minority of Buddhists. He calmly dismissed the anti-Muslim vitriol of pamphlets anonymously scattered on the city's streets two nights before the poll.  "Most Buddhists wouldn't write this," he said. 

 

- DPA