Muslim Minorities in Southeast Asia and Africa

ASSESSING MUSLIM MINORITiES ALONG AFRICAN AND INDIAN OCEAN COASTS AND ISLANDS   May 2013

                                                                                By John Paul Maynard, Harvard University

There are times when Muslims need rally against outside foe, but this is not now, even when under attack. Better to lay low and not say much. Minority Muslim communities are widespread along the Africa coast, along the Indian coast, and throughout Southeast Asia, including China. There are also some 50-odd islands in the India Ocean each having a Muslim community. These include Madagascar, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Zanzibar, the Lakshadweep Islands, the Maldives and , usually, the Muslims are in the minority.

The Arakan coast, and inland, minority Muslim communities have been attacked. Bombs and assassinations continue is Southern Thailand. There are false dawns, in Thailand and in the Philippines.  Along the east coast of Africa, Muslim communities are also under pressure. The Wahhabi sect has used oil money to place narrow clerics in Mombasa, Nairobi, Dar as Salam, Beira, Maputo, even Durban. Out in the Indian ocean, on islands, there is also tension. But it would be incorrect to say all these and tensions and tragedies are the same in all cases.

For one thing, these mixed trading societies have been co-existing synergistically for over a thousand years.  Madagascar, for example, has seen some turmoil – a duopoly – but the Muslim minority in Toliara and Mahajanga has seen no deterioration of its status, as far we can tell. We know they are there but we never hear of them, so assume they can survive without desperation.

India is also doing well. Seven years ago, some 3,500 Muslims and Hindus were killed in Ahmedabad, in Gujjarat. The  Muslims, laying low, are pushing no irredentist claims to any part of India, including Kashmir. They can use Al Shar’ in the courts. They mix during the day, and as India becomes more prosperous, it will likely become more tolerant, more inclusive. But the rising tide of war in the Middle East and Central Asia, threatens to alter this peaceful synergy.

The Buddhist, like the Muslims, were, are, a trading civilization, quite unlike Byzantium and the West. They have experienced short periods of tensions before. Using Google Earth, the reader might explore the sections of coast running from Chittagong to Sitwe – the Arakan coast. In the villages and towns of Myanmar, one can see the mosques, as well as Buddhist pagodas, temples and stupas. If one follows the coast up into Bangladesh, one sees the Buddhist institutions sprinkled amongst the mosques. Buddhists can't drive out Muslims in Myanmar, because the Bangladesh's can easily drive out the Buddhists and Hindus in its eastern coastal region south of Chittagong.

One is shocked that the new Burmese authorities, led by Aung San Su Chih are not prosecuting the several Buddhist bigots who instigated a slaughter of Rakhingas – that is, former citizens of the very old Rakhine Sulktanate. Hinduism had earlier penetrated Southeast Asia, no doubt on the back of trade.  Hindu kingdoms of Chola and Vijranakar were counterweights to the Turkic period of North India: even before Mahmud of Ghazni, there were Turks and Persians coming down through the Frontier passes, debauching into Indus then the Gangetic Plains  Then there were the Ghorids (from Central Afghanistan) and the Lodi, then in the early 16^th C., Babur, the founder of the Mogul Dynasty, entered India, defeated its Turkic kings, and set up an enlightened national society. Akbar, Shah Jehan - at first the Moguls were very tolerant of other faiths, and cultures, but successive emperors became more and more aggressive, fostering an aggressive Islam bent on dominance. Such intolerance had Areabia (Wahhabi) roots back then as well as today. 

But as for the people, they co-existed in a synergistic way, just as Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jains, Buddhists do today. All the contact regions are different: there is no threat to Islam, as the mullahs keep preaching. And no Jihad in the Qur'an, that is to say, no theory of war in that book.

The Muslim minorities on the Indian and African coast, along rivers, on the islands of the India ocean, and in Southeast Asia, are too many to list. Often they are just single neighborhoods in larger towns. But business-wise, they are tied tightly, one group to the other. They are smart to lay low. Even if the communities experience prejudice, they then close in on themselves, to deal with each other for basic commodities. But that free trade, necessary for survival, can be clinched, by the government(s), and by extremist groups, like we saw in Mechtila and in the Arakan coast. And some of  these Muslim merchants do maintain long-distant trading relations.

Those trading links were once very long-distance: from Zanzibar to Ghuangzhou.  Muslims settled in all parts of China (the Hui or Hua),  and over in the Philippines, where some ten thousand have perished in inter-ethnic , inter-sectarian strife.

It may be totally incorrect to call the tragedies in Gujjarat, Thailand and the Philippines examples of Muslim-Hindu –Christian –Buddhist tensions.  But each case is different, and it hard to call murderers and robbers Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims or Christians.

Do not use my name to commit evil. If you do, I will punish you with especial severity..

Exodus 20:7.