OPINION: I don’t know about you but when I think of Buddhism, I think about saffron-robed peaceful monks with shaven heads. What I don’t think about is religious extremism – but the truth is Buddhism, like all other religions, is not totally free of violence.
The world was horrified when, in August 2017, some soldiers in the Myanmar military gang-raped Muslim women and girls and tortured and murdered Muslim members of their community known as Rohingyas. They did this mostly because of an anti-Muslim discourse, which regards Rohingyas as illegal immigrants and therefore a threat to Buddhist nationalism.
If you haven’t heard of Rohingya Muslims, it’s because they haven’t been the ongoing focus of Western media’s attention, even though this group of Muslims have, for years, been subjected to one of the worst human rights atrocities in the world.
The limited media coverage of Rohingyas is, in part, due to the fact that some of the people who perpetrated genocidal crimes against them are from a religion that enjoys a superb reputation in the yoga-loving West.
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Buddhism’s brand success, which portrays it more as a philosophy and way of life than a proper religion, means that it doesn’t suffer the same scrutiny as Islam every time some of its adherents turn violent. For this reason, no world leader (thankfully) is likely to ever declare Buddhism “in crisis” as French President Macron recently said about Islam.
Not surprisingly, our perception of every religion is largely shaped by what we read and hear in the media. For this reason, we are not surprised to hear about the savagery of Muslim jihadists, but we are very surprised, shocked even, when some people who happen to be Buddhists turn violent despite ample historical and contemporary examples of violence in Buddhist societies (think China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, etc).
So what does all this tell us? It tells us that the assumption that every Buddhist is peaceful is just as erroneous as assuming every Muslim is violent. In fact, no religion has a monopoly on non-violence. As an example, consider the violence caused by the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and its effect on the marginalised Muslim minority there.
Making false assumptions about people’s religion prevents us from understanding the real root causes of violence and disharmony.
So why do we buy into these false assumptions in the first place? Because they serve our preference for a simplistic narrative that clearly identifies who is good and who is bad.
But the real world is rarely as black and white as that, and we should not judge people according to their religious affiliation or what they are supposed to believe. We should judge people by the way they behave, which may not always be consistent.
Take the democratically elected leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi (ASSK), whose recent detention by the Myanmar military has been justifiably condemned. Suu Kyi showed extraordinary civil courage in her long non-violent struggle for democracy, for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, but was later widely condemned for her handling of the genocide of Rohingya Muslims under her leadership. Helen Clark tweeted, “Rohingya have been very badly treated on ASSK’s watch”.
As far as I know, all of the world’s religions claim to seek unity and peace.
The problem with imagining one religion to be distinctively tolerant and another to be inherently violent is that it blinds us to the sociopolitical dimensions of violence.
For instance, many people ignore the role of imperialism and colonisation in the Middle East and imagine the ongoing violence there to be caused by in-fighting between Shia and Sunni Muslims who have actually lived together peacefully for generations.
Similarly, to understand contemporary events in Myanmar, one has to understand the role British colonists played in making religious affiliation the prime marker of identity in that country.
In 2017, it was the threat of dilution of this entrenched religious identity that contributed to a genocidal attack against Rohingyga Muslims. The United Nations later described it as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fled across the border into Bangladesh, where as many as 100,000 Muslim children have been born in squalid camps in recent years.
It is important to recognise that the global narrative that vilifies immigrants and Muslims continues to play an important role in creating violence in Myanmar and elsewhere.
If we are to dismantle misguided world views, we have to reject all assumptions that have no foundation in reality, including the assumption that some religions are totally free of violence and some are not.
In general, we should be wary of any narrative that categorises people based on their religious beliefs rather than their behaviour. All religious traditions are human affairs and as such are subject to the same range of human failings evident throughout history.
