Abstract
In recent years, a global tilt toward rightist majoritarianism has made Muslim and Christian minorities of Asia more vulnerable to violence and displacement. China’s program of “de-extremification” among the Uyghurs, Myanmar’s military operations against the Rohingya, and Hindutva-inspired violence in India illustrate strong-handed homogenizing impulses, even by governments that profess to embrace diversity. By examining these different contexts through a common lens, it becomes possible to recognize recurring patterns and think beyond the nation-state as the only framework for addressing minority vulnerability. After comparing Muslim and Christian vulnerability across a variety of Asian contexts, the essay explores the possibility of “Islamo-Christian” solidarity in the face of majoritarian violence. This new alignment defies a longstanding imperialist framework, whose geopolitics pits a Christian West against a Muslim other. It also embraces an ethic of empathy that transcends the language of “religious freedom” – a principle arising from the same geopolitics that manufactured majority-minority distinctions to begin with.
The twentieth-century decolonization in South Asia (1947–48) and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949) led to consolidated notions of “a majority” – whether Han, Hindu, Burmese Buddhist, or Muslim – upon which national identities were constructed. Since the 1980’s the movement toward market-driven economies only accelerated homogenizing processes that privileged a dominant culture while marginalizing others. As adherents of two transnational religions, Muslim and Christian minorities increasingly find themselves bearing the brunt of this quest for national purity. Uyghurs of China’s Xinjiang province, Rohingyas of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, and Muslims and Christians of India all present instances of minority vulnerability in the face of ethnic or religious nationalism. Their stories also illustrate the plight of peoples who occupy frontier zones between modern nation states and whose loyalty is called into question because of their liminality. Examining Chinese and South Asian contexts together places us in a position to interrogate the knowledge systems that have created powerful notions of “national races” or “national culture” and have underwritten violence against minorities.1 But what exactly is the common framework that links the beleaguered Uyghur of Xinjiang to the Rohingya of Myanmar’s Rakhine state and to Muslim or Christian victims of violence in India? Tempting as it may be to group all of these classes of people under the common banner of “religiously persecuted minorities,” this phrase inadequately captures the different variables that have shaped their experiences.
Being a “minority” is not a given, but is the result of a historical process. A historical lens explains how Uyghurs, Rohingya, Indian Christians, or Kashmiri Muslims became minorities – or were “minoritized” – within their national contexts.2 That history often describes a transition from their status within more porous landscapes of early modern empires, to life under the influence of British colonial knowledge and policies, and finally to their status within independent states. For post-colonial nations of South Asia, strong notions of a Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim majority accompanied the push toward de-colonization and the demand for national sovereignty. The recovered “true selves” (ethnic or religious) that were suppressed under colonialism became the hallmark of the majoritarian identities of postcolonial Asia. Muslim, Christian, and other minorities were then regarded as an unwanted residue of the past, or, as Arjun Appadurai has observed, a “great betrayal of the classical national project” and its quest for collective purity.3 When minority groups respond to adversity by becoming radicalized, it fuels violence against them that is often disproportionate, far-reaching, and sometimes genocidal. This is more evident in the case of Uyghurs or Rohingya than of Christians in South Asia, who are far fewer in number and have tended to avoid radicalization.
The idea that Christians are loyal to Christian lands and Muslims to Muslim lands derives from a profoundly imperialist mapping of the world, which presumes that Christians and Muslims do not belong beyond their territorial domains. This logic legitimates discrimination and violence toward Muslim and Christian minorities in postcolonial India, Myanmar, and China’s Xinjiang region. What would it mean to challenge the knowledge systems – specifically, the geopolitics of religion – that underwrite violence against Christians and Muslims?4 An important aspect of this project is to imagine inter-religious solidarities that defy an older, imperialist mapping of the world. As Christians and Muslims face adversity under authoritarian regimes in South Asia and Xinjiang, the notion of “Islamo-Christian” solidarity and cooperation becomes a real possibility. It must contend, however, with a deep history of Islamophobic attitudes among Christians and resentment of the West among Muslims – both anchored in periods that predate the emergence of the modern international order. After summarizing developments in Xinjiang, Myanmar, and India, this essay explores Islamo-Christian solidarity as a site for an alternative imagination; one that destabilizes an imperialist mapping of the world that pitted a Christian West against an Islamic Middle East or a Hindu, Buddhist, or Confucian Asia. Against a deep history of anti-Semitism, the geopolitics of Anglo imperialism found ways of consolidating the notion of “Judeo-Christian” to advance an agenda in the Middle East.5 Might an alternative, anti-imperialist logic work against the history of Islamophobia to conceive of “Islamo-Christian” solidarity? What might this notion deliver in contexts where Muslims and Christians find themselves on the same side of violence? The essay approaches this possibility from the standpoint of the Church in Asia, drawing resources from theological perspectives of the twentieth century. The idea of “Islamo-Christian” arises from the contexts discussed in the following sections and presents a possible starting point for a project requiring much more consideration.
China’s Uyghurs
The Peoples’ Republic of China (prc) describes itself as a united multi-ethnic nation of 56 ethnic groups of which the majority Han comprises roughly 92% percent.6 Of the remaining groups, the Muslim Hui and Uyghur groups are among those possessing more than one million people and are minorities both by ethnicity and religion. One might imagine this official recognition of Hui and Uyghur as minorities as contributing to a stable existence in the prc, but this is not the case. Increasingly, the Government has adopted more direct methods for assimilating these groups by reducing their sense of cultural and religious difference from the Han majority. Of the two groups, the Uyghurs are subject to the most extreme forms of forced assimilation. The Uyghurs occupy the Western region of China known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (xuar), which shares a border with Afghanistan and Kashmir to the southwest, and Kyrgystan and Tajikstan to the west. The xuar’s proximity to concentrated Muslim populations in neighboring countries is among the reasons why the Government polices this frontier zone with greater severity.
As noted from the outset, “minorities” are made, not a given. The entity we now call China, in which Uyghur and Hui Muslims are now considered minorities, was significantly shaped by imperial expansion under the Qing Dynasty (1643–1911). During the early modern period, many varieties of ethnic groups resided near the frontiers of Central Asian, Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese empires. The confrontation between Russian, Qing, and Zungharian/Mongolian empires played a huge role in fashioning the boundaries of the Chinese imperial regime under the Manchus. As China “marched West,” it confronted and eventually conquered Mongolia. Through this westward territorial expansion, a range of Central Asian pastoral and tribal peoples, including the Uyghurs, were brought into the orbit of the Qing Empire.7 Qing policies toward the Uyghurs were rather straightforward: As long as they paid a tribute to the emperor and did not rebel, they enjoyed a high degree of local autonomy. They were permitted to maintain their practice of Islam and cultural traditions.8
With the fall of the Qing in the early 20th century and the rise of the prc under Mao Zedong, this local autonomy in Xinjiang steadily declined. It was not enough for the Uyghurs to pay taxes; they had to demonstrate a strong devotion to prc and embrace the language and traditions of its Han majority. Since the reforms initiated under Deng Xiaoping, China has greatly expanded its means of connectivity: Like never before, surveillance technologies, the use of mobile phones and WeChat, bullet trains, and other infrastructural developments have integrated the vast territories that comprise the prc. These accelerations have expanded the reach of Beijing into the affairs of the xuar and greatly diminished Uyghur autonomy.
Some Uyghurs have responded to their shrinking autonomy by becoming radicalized and committing terrorist acts. Since 2013, the state’s intrusion and repression elicited more organized forms of violence by Uyghurs, including terrorist acts directed against civilians in public spaces. In October 2013, three Uyghurs drove a truck into a crowd in Tiananmen Square. In 2014, a group of masked Uyghurs stabbed 33 people with knives at a train station near Kunming, and not long after Uyghurs were involved in a bombing incident in Urumqi and a slaughter of Han coal mine workers. A steady increase in violent acts by Uyghurs in 2015 and 2016 resulting in more than 700 deaths contributed to a growing sense among Han Chinese that Uyghurs were a threat to society.9 In response, Beijing has embarked on a massive “re-education” campaign in order to stem the tide of radicalization among Muslim minorities, particularly those who occupy the Western region of Xinjiang. By re-educating the many, Beijing hopes to de-radicalize the few. They have sent hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs to “re-education camps” in an attempt to pacify the Muslim population, engender loyalty to the prc, and preempt their radicalization through cross border contact with zealous Turkic or Pakistani Muslims.10 The prc’s infringement on Uyghur autonomy goes back many decades, but their efforts to assimilate the Uyghurs intensified after the events of September 11. China capitalized on the Global War on Terror by drawing international attention to terrorist elements in its Xinjiang region. The prc succeeded at convincing the United States and the United Nations to identify a relatively unknown Uyghur group, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, as a terrorist organization. Gradually, the prc came to associate the Uyghur population as a whole as potential terrorists and attempted to neutralize the threat through a sweeping campaign of “de-extremification,” which as we shall see, is virtually synonymous with “de-Islamization.”
As Beijing encountered more and more resistance to this encroachment, sometimes in the form of terrorist acts, it ramped up surveillance and greatly expanded the presence of armed police in the xuar, particularly in cities such as Kashgar and the regional capital, Urumqi. Under the oversight of Chen Quanguo, the ccp secretary in Xinjiang, “convenience police stations” staffed with as many as 31,000 recruited officers were charged with monitoring the Uyghur population. Quanguo implemented an ambitious program of “de-extremification,” which associated terrorist tendencies with visible expressions of Muslim identity. Police were assigned to visit family homes and monitor their practices, usually looking for anything appearing “too Muslim.” They identified the growing of long beards by men, mosque attendance, the recitation of prayers, and the presence of Islamic literature as indications of potential terrorist leanings.
The scholar Sean Roberts describes the terrorist label as amounting to a form of biopolitics, whereby Uyghurs as a whole are treated as a threat to Chinese society “akin to a virus that must be eradicated, quarantined, and cleansed from those it infects.”11 The notion of biopolitics seems most applicable if the state’s policies were centered on Uyghur ethnicity; but in this case, they seem centered on the practice of Islam to no casual degree. On their face, religious beliefs and practices seem more fluid than ethnicity, but have become the focal point of the ccp’s interventions in the xuar. The elimination of mosques or conversion of prominent mosques into museums or tourist attractions are among the methods adopted by the prc to de-extremify its Muslim minorities.
Do not say dirty words, do not watch porn or you will become a kafir (non-believer) if you don’t pray and watch porn, your soul will not be clean for 40 days and God will not accept your prayers. If you eat without praying, you will become a kafir. If you do not pray you will be in hell and God will not forgive you. All people who do not pray are Han Chinese kafirs. You cannot eat food from women who do not pray. You cannot eat food from people who smoke and drink alcohol.14
What is most revealing about this trial excerpt is not simply the criminality assigned to religious strictures, but also the reference to “Han Chinese kafirs,” something clearly contributing to a sense that such language threatened the Han majority. This is why the accused was also indicted for “incitement of ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination.” Whether or not the public prosecutor inserted the phrase to establish a clear link between religion and anti-Han “ethnic hatred” is unknown. In response to these charges, the accused is recorded as having admitted his guilt and attributed his actions to his “low legal awareness and low level of education.” His confession resembles the public confessions of students in Mao’s revolutionary schools, who publicly confessed to ccp officials and peers their sins of lacking revolutionary consciousness or of being too bourgeoise.15
Burma’s Rohingya
In August and September of 2017, the Burmese military forced 500,000 Rohingya to flee Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh in what international observers have called ethnic cleansing. The events of 2017 were preceded by a military campaign in 2016 in which 70,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar. In 2012, the rape of a Buddhist woman sparked mass violence between Muslims and Buddhists in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, resulting in the displacement of more than 100,000 people, the burning of homes, and deaths. The vast majority of those killed were Muslims. International forums and media tend to portray these events as instances of religious persecution or genocide against the Rohingya, and employ the designation “Rohingya” paying sparse attention to the valences and controversy surrounding it.16 Without a doubt, those designated “Rohingya” are stateless people who have become victims of atrocities on a grand scale; and yet, to understand their unfolding crisis, it is necessary to examine how colonial rule and the Burmese government have identified a “majority” culture in Burma and have recognized some groups as national minorities (who are accorded the rights of citizenship), while designating others as “migrants.”
The Burmese Government shares with the prc an interest in portraying its country as a unity in diversity, or as a state that has produced an effective scheme for accommodating ethnic and religious minorities. And yet, Burma emerged from colonial rule vexed by these differences and constantly contending with rebel movements by one ethnic group or another. Burmese society consisted of many language groups, ethnicities, and religions. Much of this rich heritage traces back to pre-colonial times, when Persian, Hindu, and Buddhist elements along with a wide range of linguistic groups formed a cosmopolitan society in parts of the western coastal region of Arakan (now part of Rakhine state), such as its ancient capital of Mrauk-U.17 Colonial and missionary classifications, however, played a significant role in making ethnic and religious differences more pronounced and more inclined towards conflict. During the nineteenth century, the British gradually consolidated their rule, first by their conquest of Lower Burma (1826), and later by annexing upper Burma (1886). Scholars and ethnographers identified as many as 57 tribes and races in Burma. In their quest for administrative ease, the British reduced this cultural complexity to manageable blocks. They devised policies that distinguished the “Burmese Buddhists” of the Irrawaddy Valley from migrant tribes of the north and Indian Hindu and Muslim migrant laborers. By the 1940’s, the division between Europeans, Indians, Burmese, and “minorities” was firmly intact.18
Today, Myanmar is divided into “seven regions, where ethnic Burmese form the majority, and seven states, each of which is associated with the ethnic group considered to be a majority in that area.”19 The question of which groups are officially recognized as national minorities lies at the heart of the crisis associated with the Rohingya, who are denied such recognition. They reside in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, whose western coast faces the Bay of Bengal, and whose northwestern border is shared with the Chittagong District of neighboring Bangladesh, which is predominantly Muslim. The traffic between Chittagong and Rakhine state greatly expanded under British rule, when the British actively recruited hundreds of thousands of Muslim laborers from Chittagong to work on Burma’s lucrative rice plantations.
The back-and-forth movement between the regions since colonial times contributes to the “perpetual foreigner” perception of Muslims of Rakhine state. This is despite the fact that many Rakhine Muslims – known as “Burmese Muslims” and who speak Burmese as their mother tongue – have a history in the region tracing back centuries and are not Bengali-speaking “migrants” as are many Rohingya.20 Muslims comprise only a third of Rakhine state’s total population. The majority of “ethnic Rakhines” are Buddhists who in recent decades have come to regard Muslims as a threat. Prior to Burmese Independence in 1948, the Burmese army waged war against the British. During this time, Bengali-speaking Muslims tended to support the British, whereas Buddhists aligned themselves with the Japanese and the Burmese army.
After Burma liberated itself from both Japanese rule (1942–45) and British rule (1948), there was a strong push to send Indians and Chinese across the borders to their purported places of origin. Some Rakhine Muslim leaders had asked Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first prime minister, to integrate their region into the neighboring East Pakistan (which in 1972 became Bangladesh), but he was unwilling. As a result, many Muslims of the northwest region of Rakhine state remained in a perpetual state of limbo. Under General Ne Win’s military dictatorship (1962–74), stronger notions of “national races” were crystallized in the concept of taingyintha. Originally, the term was a generic reference to all things native – handicrafts, medicines, local commodities, etc. This is not unlike the notion of swadeshi (“of one’s own country”) which became a cornerstone of Indian nationalism. Burmese nationalism, however, gradually infused taingyintha with connotations relating to Burmese ethnicities and Burma’s profession of unity in diversity. This is evident in Ne Win’s Union Day address:
Every one of the taingyintha needs to accept that the amity and unity of all taingyintha are fundamental to the building of an economically and socially prosperous state that is stable and united. To speak of unity and amity among taingyintha is to say that Kachin, Karenni, Karen, Chin, Burman, Shan and other taingyintha inhabiting the Union of Burma need to be resolved to stick together for life, through weal and woe. Only then will taingyintha be able to join hands with each other and work trustingly for the good of the Union and the good of all its inhabitant races.21 The preamble of Burma’s constitution employs the term several times to convey, according to Nick Cheesman, a mythical unity that has never been realized and in fact, a repudiation of ethnic diversity.22 The Union Citizenship Act of 1948 had defined national races as those groups who had resided in Burma prior to the outcome of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824). This stipulation made it possible for Rohingya to become citizens, if they could demonstrate a lineage tracing back before 1824. As the notion of taingyintha acquired greater traction in Burmese political discourse, it became increasingly evident that many fell beyond the pale of its enumerated insiders. Hundreds of thousands of Indians fled Burma after Ne Win’s military takeover. Ne Win’s administration named 135 ethnic groups as belonging to Burma’s taingyintha. From this list, several classes of Burmese Muslims were omitted, including the Rohingya. A Citizenship Law of 1982 outlined different categories of citizenship (e.g., full, associate, and naturalized), and from these Rohingya were similarly disqualified.23
As with the Uyghurs of China’s Xinjiang province, some Rohingya responded to their statelessness by becoming militarized and openly rebelling against the Burmese Government. The activities of militarized Rohingya placed them into conflict with Buddhist Rakhines who enjoyed the backing of the Government and its army. As with the situation in Xinjiang, the violence of the few triggered sweeping measures by the Burmese army to extirpate the many. Buddhist clergy and politicians portray military campaigns against the Rohingya as a necessary means of suppressing rebellion. The violence tapped into a deeper history of vilification and exclusion, tied to the liminal space occupied by Muslims of northwestern Rakhine state. Buddhists often refer to the Rohingya as Bengali migrants, refusing to call them “Rohingya.” They regard them as a “foreign group with a separatist agenda, fueled by Islam, and funded from overseas.”24 In step with the Burmese Buddhist majority, the Nobel Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi refused to use the term “Rohingya” when discussing events of 2017, and denied that genocide was taking place.25
Amidst the extreme measures adopted by the Burmese army since 2012, the term “Rohingya” became the preferred self-designation for Muslim leaders of Rakhine state, for Rohingya in diaspora, and was employed in international media networks. The name formed the basis of group solidarity and advocacy for their rights to be recognized and included within the Burmese state. The massive and violent displacement of the Rohingya to Bangladesh and other countries has made the matter of repatriation to Myanmar a central concern of the United Nations and other human rights organizations. The Burmese Government, however, has been slow to follow through on repatriation plans made with Bangladesh. Moreover, many Rohingya are reluctant to reenter a country that has subjected them to such degrees of indignity and trauma. They remain a stateless people.
Muslims and Christians in bjp-Ruled India
After independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set out to establish India as a secular, socialist democracy. A constituent assembly, chaired by none other than Dalit leader, B.R. Ambedkar, staged roughly four years (1946–50) of debate and deliberation. The assembly yielded a highly progressive constitution for the new country. Article 15 prohibited discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. Article 25 upheld the principle of freedom of religion. It guaranteed that “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practice, and propagate religion subject to public order, morality and health.”26 In a land of such immense diversity and riddled with a history of caste oppression and religious strife, such guarantees held out the promise of a more equitable and humane future.
Since the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), instances of anti-Christian and anti-Muslim violence have surged in India. Much of this violence, but not all, arises from Hindu nationalist anxieties about the numerical growth of Christians and Muslims through conversion, immigration, or reproduction. From 1964 to 1996, the country registered only thirty-eight instances of anti-Christian violence. This number increased dramatically after 1998, when the bjp headed a coalition government. By 1998, instances of anti-Christian violence had gone up to ninety; from 2001 to 2005, there were as many as 200 documented instances of anti-Christian attacks,27 and the numbers have increased significantly over the past decade – to 365 in 2015 and roughly 500 in 2022.28 Hindu activists claim that Christian conversion threatens the unity and integrity of a Hindu nation. Quite often, it was the poorest and most vulnerable Christians in remote areas who suffered the brunt of the violence.
Advocates of the Hindutva agenda in India portray Christians and Muslims as members of “foreign religions” who require “re-conversion” to Hinduism or other forms of pacification.29 This is despite the fact that the vast majority of India’s Christians and Muslims are ethnically South Asian and are not the descendants of immigrants. The Burmese army’s campaigns against the Rohingya are similarly based on claims about their exogenous origins. The Uyghurs are largely indigenous to their region, but carry the stigma of possessing foreign and/or terrorist inclinations because of their proximity to Muslim lands. In each of these instances, the drawing of national borders has been crucial in fomenting antipathy toward groups who became minorities because of them.
In addition to Hindutva-inspired vigilante violence against Muslims and Christians, interreligious riots also have become salient in bjp-ruled India. In 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots erupted at the Godhra train station in Gujarat, when Hindus were returning from a pilgrimage to their holy city of Ayodhya; and in 2007 and 2008, riots erupted between Hindus and Christians in Kandhamal, a village in the state of Odisha. These riots, which have been written about extensively, involved acts of violence against Hindus which were met with overwhelming violence directed against Muslim or Christian minorities whose death count vastly exceeded that of Hindus. In a speech shortly following the Godhra riots, the prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, insisted that it was Muslims who had initiated the conflict by conspiring to burn alive the Hindu passengers. To this he added, “Wherever Muslims live, they don’t like to live in co-existence with others, they don’t like to mingle with others … they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats.”30
In recent years, Hindus have attacked Muslims for their alleged beef consumption: from 2010 to 2017, so-called “cow vigilantes” committed as many as sixty-three attacks on Muslims, resulting in twenty-four deaths and 124 injuries, according to a report by Reuters.31 The Indian media often describe these attacks as acts of “lynching.” Anti-Muslim rhetoric increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. A Muslim missionary organization, the Tablighi Jamaat, held a huge gathering in Delhi in March 2020 in breach of lockdown orders. After the government blamed them for contributing to the spread of the virus in Delhi, a surge of Islamophobic rhetoric followed along with attacks against Muslims in and around the city.32 Hindus have also vilified Muslims for alleged “love jihad,” a scenario where a Muslim man entices a Hindu woman to marry him in order to convert her to Islam. In Kerala, which possesses a sizeable Muslim and Christian population, some Christian clergy have imbibed into the love jihad narrative and joined Hindus in propagating these allegations against Muslims.33
Like the Muslims of Xinjiang, India’s Muslims are not foreigners whose ancestors had migrated to India; they are the descendants of those who have resided in the subcontinent for centuries. Most of their ancestors converted to Islam long before India became an independent nation. The deep history of Muslims in South Asia is rooted in the subcontinent’s connections to a wider world – through oceanic ties to Arabia and Southeast Asia and overland routes to Central Asia, Persia, and China. These corridors provided avenues for trade, conquest, and the propagation of Islam by various Sufi orders. They also provided avenues for invasion, conquest, and the establishment of Islamicate regimes in north India. Historians of South Asian Islam have highlighted the role of the Mughals in forging a more eclectic and accommodative, Indo-Islamic civilization. The rise of British power in the subcontinent, however, severely strained the Indo-Islamic synthesis that was achieved and maintained under the Mughals. The violence through which the British conquered India and their role in drawing the borders of new states carried lasting implications.
Kashmir is a Muslim majority state located in the far north of India, lodged between Pakistan to the west and China to the east. Until August 2019, Kashmir enjoyed a degree of local autonomy, partly due to its Muslim majority, partly to terms established when Kashmir acceded to the Indian Union following the 1947 Partition of India. Under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, Kashmir was assigned a special status by which it was entitled to its own constitution, a separate flag, and freedom to make laws, including laws pertaining to permanent residency and the ownership of property. They could prevent Indians from other parts of the country from buying property and settling in Kashmir. All of this changed in August 2019 when the Government revoked the special status accorded to Kashmir under Article 370 and divided the state into two Union Territories, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Now, Indians from other states are able to start businesses, purchase land, and settle in Kashmir and the Government is able to greatly expand its military presence in the region. Kashmiris themselves decried the manner in which the Government enacted this measure through a massive deployment of troops and curtailing all communication of Kashmiris with the outside world. The political scientist Srinath Raghavan observes that since the 1950’s, India’s central government has steadily shrunk Kashmir’s autonomy through various measures; and that the bjp’s actions in 2019 are a culmination of this longstanding pattern, not a radical breach.34
The bjp made its move under the pretext of developing Kashmir and integrating it more fully into the fabric of India. This logic resembles that of the prc with regard to Xinjiang. Both states also believe that they can reduce the threat of terrorism by curtailing the autonomy of these peripheral regions which share borders with adversaries. Kashmiris, however, find it difficult not to view the move as part of the bjp’s project of Hinduizing India.35 This is because of how the bjp has pursued its Hindutva agenda through other avenues at roughly the same time as its revocation of Article 370. In November 2019, India’s Supreme Court issued an historical verdict which allowed disputed land at Ayodhya to be used for the construction of a Ram temple and an alternative five acres to be used for a mosque. The campaign to reclaim the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 were center pieces of the bjp’s rise in Indian politics.
In December 2019, the Government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which created a path to Indian citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who migrated to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The Government’s rationale for the Act was to address the persecution of minorities in neighboring states. The Act included no provisions for Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar who are in dire need of asylum. Moreover, the omission of Muslims from this list presumes that Muslims cannot be persecuted in officially Muslim countries, a fallacy evident in the persecution of members of the Ahmadiyya Sect of Islam in Pakistan and Bangladesh or of Muslim intellectuals or writers who criticize their governments or Islam. The Act finds a precedent after the Partition of India, when Muslims who tried to return to India after having migrated to West Pakistan were classified as “evacuees” who were often unable to retrieve their original properties. Hindus and Sikhs who returned, however, were considered “displaced” persons.36 A Permit System was established to stem the tide of Muslim evacuees returning back to India. This revealed how anti-Muslim biases were even part of so-called “secular” India, long before the bjp made this bias more explicit.37
The formation of borders under colonialism in the aftermath of the Partition of India gave rise to the current predicament in Kashmir and hotly contested notions of citizenship embodied in Citizenship Amendment Act. Prior to the establishment of such borders (the Durand Line, which separated Pakistan from Afghanistan and the Radcliffe Line, which separated India from Pakistan, and the McMahon Line, separating Chinese Tibet and Assam in northeast India), the subcontinent maintained far more breathable and fluid ties to Muslim populations of the Punjab and Central Asia. The question of who was foreign vs. who was indigenous to the Indian empire depended entirely on how the boundaries of that empire were conceived at any given phase of history. The Citizenship Amendment Act is meaningful only because of borders that were drawn under colonialism; borders that separate Hindu majority India from its Muslim majority neighbors.
Conclusion: In Quest of an Alternative Imagination
Only when the very idea of the nation-state is sufficiently interrogated – when it is de-universalized – can Christian theology point to what is transcendent and yield an ethics that acts on behalf of the oppressed. Theology needs to foster an alternative imagination that decenters the nation and disrupts its notions of ethnic or religious purity. In conclusion, this essay reflects on the possibility of “Islamo-Christian solidarity” as an expression of such an imagination. It was the German theological Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote, “only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.” How far away are Christians from applying the same lens to the plight of Muslims? A rich tradition of counter-cultural theology has taught Christians of many traditions to challenge the violence and ethno-centrism of empires and nation-states. A range of contemporary theologians have provided tools for de-centering ethnicity, extricating the Church from worldly political agendas, and opposing nationalism, war, and systemic racism.
Sadly, such contrarian perspectives have taken a back seat to a far more prevalent influence in the life of the Church, namely, that of Christian realism. During the early twentieth century, the American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr sharply distinguished individual ethics from corporate ethics or, as he would put it, the potential altruism of individuals from the “selfishness” of nations. Niebuhr’s Christian realism aligns itself with the logic of majoritarianism prevalent in the prc’s policies in Xinjiang and those of many South Asian states. In each case, the “self” of Niebuhrian self-interest is not an identity-less collectivity, but a Hindu, Han, or Burmese self that sets the agendas of the prc, the Burmese military, or proponents of Hindutva and their treatment of minorities. The quest for a pure national heritage premised upon majoritarian notions, according to Arjun Appadurai, “underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or to eliminate minorities.”38
For twentieth century Christians to reach a point where they would empathize with the plight of the Jews – and many did not – they had to come to terms with a long history of anti-Semitism. For Christians to act on behalf of Muslims, they must undergo a similar kind of introspection specifically in connection to their history of imperialism, violence, and Islamophobia. Since medieval times, Portuguese and Spanish empires viewed Muslims as objects of holy war or commercial competition. From the Victorian era through the Cold War, Protestant Evangelicals viewed Muslims as objects for evangelism. Since 9–11, they became objects of anti-terrorism. In each context, a geopolitics that pits a Christian West against a Muslim Other legitimated violence against Muslims and framed this violence in terms of a defense of liberty or Christian civilization.39 The same realism espoused by Niebuhr legitimates the targeting of Muslims for either eradication or containment, often in breach of commitments to due process or the rule of law. Today, as Muslims (Rohingyas, Kashmiris, Uyghurs, etc.) face instances of marginalization or genocide, Christians will need to move beyond the framework of Christian realism to formulate a vision of solidarity and empathy. In India, a degree of interfaith cooperation was present in the Shaheen Bagh protest in New Delhi, where persons of many faiths engaged in non-violent protests of the caa along with the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register.40 The latter two were measures adopted by the bjp to expose illegal migrants.
What is called for is the cultivation of non-sectarian empathy, one that does not deny differences of belief, but nevertheless finds solidarity with Muslims in duress. The theologian, Peniel Rajkumar, explores the possibility of Christian-Muslim solidarity and empathy in response to Hindutva aggression. He observes how the possibility of an intersectional solidarity encompassing Christians, Muslims, and Dalits is often thwarted by the carefully plotted politics of disruption and cooption by the forces of Hindutva. Still, he points to a history of Christian-Muslim dialogue – tracing back to the Jesuit missions to the courts of Akbar – and shared theologizing as a valuable source of solidarity and empathy.41 More recent examples of dialogue include initiatives of the Islamic Study Association (isa),42 the conferences of the Bishops’ Institute for Religious Affairs (bira) of the Federation of Asian Bishops and the continuous work of the many national inter-religious organisations for inter-religious dialogue.
Currently, the language of religious freedom and human rights provides the vocabulary for protests against state actions in India and China. For Christians to speak for the religious freedom of Muslims and their constitutional protections is a positive development. And yet, a subtle self-interest underlies such appeals: The fear that the loss of Muslim rights ultimately will be extended to Christians. Invoking the ideals of liberal, constitutional democracy to secure Muslim minority rights is motivated by the hope that the same principles will apply to Christians. This approach makes sense in India, but it is losing its effectiveness as the bjp continues to undermine those aspects of the Indian Constitution, which extend protections to minorities. The rights-based approach is less effective in challenging China’s authoritarian, Communist regime.
Speaking out against atrocities committed against Muslims, attending to the victims of hateful violence, and sharing information and resources to protect places of worship or other religious institutions are examples of how Christians and Muslims can assist each other in the face of adversity. At a time when Muslims are subject to genocide, existing platforms for interfaith dialogue need to serve the cause of stopping state-backed violence. This may require petitions to international organizations or structures of power – media networks, human rights groups, or diplomats of sympathetic nation-states who can pressure Burmese, Chinese or Indian authorities to reign in hate-based demagoguery and hold perpetrators of human rights violations accountable for their actions. These measures need to be recognized as ways of pushing back – not simply against authoritarian violence, but also against the imperialist frameworks that rendered Christian-Muslim solidarity impossible.
What would it mean to move from a language of rights to one of empathy and solidarity? Here, lessons from the Middle East might be instructive. According to the late Edward Said, peace between Arabs and Israelis requires the self to cease to define itself in opposition to the Other. The goal should be the creation of a unitary identity that includes the Other, without compromising difference (Said on Orientalism, 34:59). Since the end of the Cold War, a geopolitics that distinguishes Christian nations from Muslim ones – inspired by Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilization” thesis – has created a huge hurdle for the development of this kind of unitary identity. And yet, this aspiration carries untapped potential for Christian-Muslim relations in India, Myanmar, and China. What scope might there be for the development of an Islamo-Christian solidarity? Might conditions in India and China provide fertile soil for a shared, reciprocal ethics in the face of Hindu, Burmese, or Communist authoritarianism?43
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Scholars of early modernity draw attention to the porous boundaries and “connected histories” of migrants, travelers, and traders that predate the formation of nation-states. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘One Asia or Many? Reflections from Connected History’, Modern Asian Studies 50:1 (2016), 3–43. More recently, On Barak describes the minoritization of Jewish and Parsi migrants within Ottoman and Mughal contexts. On Barak, ‘Infrastructures of Minoritization’, Comparative Studies of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East 41:3 (2021), 347–354.
Arjun Appadurai, The Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 43.
For a detailed examination of religious persecution centered on Christians, see Daniel Philpot and Timothy Shah, eds, Under Ceasar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
An excellent treatment of the shift from anti-Semitism to Zionism among Christians is found in Daniel Hummel, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations (Philedelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
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See Peter Purdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 324–53, 518–49.
A more detailed overview of China’s policies toward the peoples of Xinjiang even predating the Qing period are provided by Konuralp Ercilasun, ‘Introduction: The Land, the People, and the Politics in a Historical Context’, in Guljanat Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun and Konuralp Ercilasun, eds, The Uyghur Community: Diaspora, Identity and Geopolitics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), p. 1–16.
Sean Roberts, ‘The Biopolitics of China’s ‘War on Terror’ and its Exclusion of the Uyghurs’, Critical Asian Studies 50:2 (2018), 244–45.
A detailed description of the concept and lineage of “reeducation” in prc policy is provided in Adrian Zenz, ‘Thoroughly Reforming them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude: China’s Political Reeducation Campaign in Xinjiang’, Central Asian Survey 38:1 (2018), 102–128.
Sean Roberts, ‘The Biopolitics of China’s “War on Terror” and its Exclusion of the Uyghurs’, Critical Asian Studies 50:2 (2018), 234.
Ibid, 246.
Adrian Zenz, ‘Thoroughly Reforming them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude: China’s Political Reeducation Campaign in Xinjiang’, Central Asian Survey 38:1 (2018), 103.
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For more on the similar tropes of repentance and confession in Maoist and current “reeducation” programs, see Adrian Zenz, ‘Thoroughly Reforming them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude: China’s Political Reeducation Campaign in Xinjiang’, p. 113.
For instance, see Berkeley Forum, “Religion and the Persecution of Rohingya Muslims,” October 24, 2017: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/religion-and-the-persecution-of-rohingya-muslims; and.
Muhammad Shahabuddin, ‘Postcolonial Boundaries, International Law, and the Making of the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar’, Asian Journal of International Law 9 (2019), 349.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 243–44.
Adam Burke, ‘New Political Space, Old Tensions: History, Identity and Violence in Rakhine State, Myanmar’, Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs 38:2 (August 2016), 262.
Ibid, 265.
Ne Win’s Union Day address of 1964, p. 308. Quote is taken from Nick Cheesman, ‘How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship to Exclude Rohingya’, Journal of Contemporary History 47:3 (2012), p. 464.
Cheesman, ‘How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship to Exclude Rohingya’, 470; the point about repudiation of ethnic diversity comes from I. Holliday, ‘Addressing Myanmar’s Citizenship Crisis’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 44:3 (2014), 410.
Jobair Alam, ‘The Current Rohingya Crisis in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 39:1 (2019), 9.
Krishnadev Calamur, ‘The Misunderstood Roots of Burma’s Rohingya Crisis’, The Atlantic, September 25, 2017https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/rohingyas-burma/540513/.
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Constitute Project, ‘India’s Constitution of 1949 with Amendments through 2015’, pp. 29–30 at https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/India_2015.pdf?lang=en.
These figures are drawn from Sarbeswar Sahoo, Pentecostalism and the Politics of Conversion in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 5.
Each incident is carefully documented in, “Hate and Targeted Violence Against Christians in India, Yearly Report 2021,” Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India.
Rajeev Mani, ‘Won’t let Minorities Vote’, Times of India, August 13, 2022: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/allahabad/wont-let-minorities-vote-hindu-rashtra-statute-draft/articleshow/93531180.cms; See also Christopher Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 144–189.
Quote taken from Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 29.
Zeba Siddiqui, Krishna N. Das, Tommy Wilkes, and Tom Lasseter, ‘Emboldened by Modi’s Ascent, India’s Cow Vigilantes Deny Muslims Their Livelihood’, Reuters, November 6, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-politics-religion cows/#:~:text=Separately%2C%20Reuters%20surveyed%20110%20cow,after%20Modi’s%202014%20election%20win.&text=But%20of%20the%20110%20cattle,from%20the%20Hindu%20vigilante%20groups.
Jeffrey Gettleman, Kai Schultz, and Suhasini Raj, ‘In India, Coronavirus Fans Religious Hatred’, New York Times, April 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/world/asia/india-coronavirus-muslims-bigotry.html.
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Srinath Raghavan, ‘J & K: Autonomy and After’, Seminar 725 (January 2020). https://www.india-seminar.com/2020/725/725_srinath_raghavan.htm.
Tarushi Aswani, ‘They Want to Hinduise Kashmir: Saifuddin Soz on Delimitation Proposal’, The Wire, December 22, 2021. https://thewire.in/government/saifuddin-soz-jammu-and-kashmir-delimitation.
Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook, eds, Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 184.
David Emmanuel Singh, ‘Emerging Cooperation among Minorities in Defense of Indian Secularism since the Adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act (caa) under the bjp’, in Richard Young, ed, World Christianity and Interfaith Encounters (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), pp. 37–38.
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, p. 43.
On how Muslims became the other of Anglo liberalism, see Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
David Emmanuel Singh, ‘Emerging Cooperation among Minorities in Defense of Indian Secularism since the Adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act (caa) under the bjp’, pp. 39–43.
Peniel Rajkumar, ‘Christian-Muslim Engagement in Contemporary India: Minority Irruptions of Majoritarian Faultlines’, in Douglas Pratt, et. al. eds, The Character of Christian-Muslim Encounter: Essays in Honor of David Thomas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2015), pp. 326–42.
See Embrogio Bangiovanni, Victor Edwin, eds, A Call to Dialogue: Christians in Dialogue with Muslims (Rome: Aracne, 2021).
I am grateful to participants at a 2020 Symposium on ‘Minorities in Europe and Asia’, where an earlier draft of this paper was presented. I must also thank my research assistant, Chloe White, for compiling materials that aided my research.