REe faces of the Rohingya crisis: Religious nationalism, Asian Islamophobia, and delegitimizing citizenship

Abstract

© 2018 Gedung Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (PPIM) UIN Jakarta. All rights reserved. Myanmar is a non-secular Buddhist majority country born out of the ashes of the murder of their leader of independence struggle, General Aung San, was assassinated on July 19, 1947, a few months before the independence of Burma on January 4, 1948. His failed legacy in integrating Myanmar into a multicultural nation which contains of Burmans as ethnic majority and non-Burman minorities continues to obsess Myanmar’s people. e Rohingya crisis is not a religious conict between Islam and Buddhism because both of them have a long-shared history of peaceful coexistence. Furthermore, it is also not only a case of Buddhist persecution against Muslims as recognized by the Rohingyan nationalists. Actually, it is a clash between two views of nationalism over the claim to Myanmar citizenship. e conict invokes Buddhist and Muslim nationalist in order to protect and preserve national ethnicities as religious identities in turn causing the rise of the new phenomena of Asian Islamophobia.