Die Welt bereisen – und zerstören
Extremist monks use their spiritual authority to attack Muslim minorities.
GINTOTA, Sri Lanka — The Buddhist abbot was sitting cross-legged in his monastery, fulminating against the evils of Islam, when the petrol bomb exploded.
But the abbot, the Venerable Ambalangoda Sumedhananda Thero, barely registered the blast. Waving away the mosquitoes swarming the night air in the southern Sri Lankan town of Gintota, he continued his tirade: Muslims were violent, he said, Muslims were rapacious.
“The aim of Muslims is to take over all our land and everything we value,” he said. “Think of what used to be Buddhist lands: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Indonesia. They have all been destroyed by Islam.”
Minutes later, a monastic aide rushed in and confirmed that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a nearby mosque.
The abbot shrugged. Muslims, who make up less than 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s population, were not his concern.
Incited by a politically powerful network of monks like Sumedhananda Thero, Buddhists — long known for their pacifism — have entered the era of militant tribalism, casting themselves as spiritual warriors who must defend their faith against an outside force.
Their sense of grievance might seem unlikely: In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Buddhists constitute overwhelming majorities.
Yet some Buddhists, especially those who subscribe to the purist Theravada strain of the faith, are increasingly convinced that they are under existential threat, particularly from an Islam struggling with its own violent fringe.
Over the past few years, Buddhist mobs have waged deadly attacks against minority Muslim populations. Buddhist nationalist ideologues are using the spiritual authority of extremist monks to bolster their support.
“The Buddhists never used to hate us so much,” said Mohammed Naseer, the imam of the Hillur Mosque in Gintota, which was attacked by Buddhist mobs in 2017. “Now their monks spread a message that we don’t belong in this country and should leave. But where will we go? This is our home.”
In June in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist monk went on a hunger strike that resulted in the
resignation of all nine Muslim ministers in the cabinet. The monk had suggested that Muslim politicians were complicit in the Easter Sunday attacks by Islamic State-linked militants on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, which killed more than 250 people.
In Myanmar, where a campaign of ethnic cleansing has forced an exodus of most of the country’s Muslims, Buddhist monks still warn of an Islamic invasion, even though less than 5 percent of the national population is Muslim. During Ramadan celebrations in May, Buddhist mobs besieged Islamic prayer halls, causing Muslim worshipers to flee.
“Buddhist monks will say that they would never condone violence,” said Mikael Gravers, an anthropologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who has studied the intersection of Buddhism and nationalism. “But at the same time, they will also say that Buddhism or Buddhist states have to be defended by any means.”
Theravada Buddhists constitute overwhelming majorities in the five countries where their faith is practiced: Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. But Buddhism, whose adherents make up only 7 percent of the global faithful, is the only major religion whose population is not expected to grow over the next few decades, according to the Pew Research Center.
Meanwhile, the number of Muslims, who make up just under one-quarter of the world’s population, is growing quickly, buoyed by youthful demographics and high fertility rates. By 2050, Pew projects that there will be nearly as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians.
“If a man dies, it is acceptable,” Sumedhananda Thero said. “But if a race or religion dies, you can never get it back.”
Thousands of people gathered in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, in May as Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk who has rejected the nonviolent teachings of his faith, praised the nation’s army. “Only the military,” he said, “protects both our country and our religion.”
Since August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh. Behind it all was a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the army and its allies, with Buddhist mobs and the country’s security forces subjecting Rohingya Muslims to slaughter, rape and the complete erasure of hundreds of their villages.
At another protest last October, Ashin Wirathu criticized the decision by the International Criminal Court, or I.C.C., to pursue a case against
Dharisha Bastians and Saw Nang contributed reporting. Myanmar’s military for its persecution of the Rohingya.
Then the monk made a startling call to arms. “The day that the I.C.C. comes here is the day I hold a gun,” Ashin Wirathu said in an interview with The New York Times.
In late May, the civilian government of Myanmar, which shares power with the military, issued an arrest warrant for Ashin Wirathu, who is being accused of seditious comments against Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s civilian leader. Even though Ashin Wirathu has not made much of an effort to hide, the police say they cannot find him and will try him in absentia.
At 82 years old, the Venerable Ashi Nyanissara, known more commonly as Sitagu Sayadaw, is Myanmar’s most influential monk. In 1988, Sitagu Sayadaw was one of a coterie of monks who blessed the nation’s democracy movement, which sent hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in peaceful protest. Myanmar’s military rulers responded by massacring hundreds.
But just as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were fleeing their torched villages, Sitagu Sayadaw sat in front of an audience of army officers.
“There are over 400,000 monks in Myanmar,” he told the commander of Myanmar’s armed forces. “If you need them, I will tell them to begin. It’s easy.”
Daw Khin Mar Mar Kyi, a Myanmar-born social anthropologist at the University of Oxford, said: “When someone as respected as Sitagu Sayadaw says something, even if it is strongly dismissive of a certain group, people listen. His words justify hatred.”
There are some monks, albeit a minority, who are countering the monastic hate speech.
“The extremists are only a small part of Buddhism in Myanmar, but they have loud voices,” said Ashin Sein Di Ta, the abbot of the Asia Light monastery. “We should say clearly that if any monk, even respected ones like Sitagu Sayadaw, advocate killing, they should be defrocked.”
It is not just monks who feel the need to guard their faith.
“There is this idea of a hyperfertile Muslim man with his many wives,” said Iselin Frydenlund, an associate professor of religious studies at the Norwegian School of Theology. “Pure Buddhist women were held up as the symbols of the nation who were in danger of rape by Muslim men.”
One group that has harnessed this anxiety is the Committee for the Protection of Nationality and Religion, or Ma Ba Tha, which runs community events across Myanmar.
In fact, it is Myanmar’s armed forces that have used rape as a weapon of war in its battles against various ethnic insurgencies. The United Nations has blamed the Myanmar military for “sexual atrocities reportedly committed in cold blood out of a lethal hatred for the Rohingya.” Ma Ba Tha monks reject such findings.
Prevailing anti-Muslim sentiment worldwide has heightened prejudice. When suicide bombers linked to the Islamic State blew up churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, Buddhist nationalists felt vindicated.
“We have been warning for years that Muslim extremists are a danger to national security,” said Dilanthe Withanage, a senior administrator for Bodu Bala Sena, the largest of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nationalist groups. “Blood is on the government’s hands for ignoring the radicalization of Islam.”
After a few years of moderate coalition governance, a fusion of faith and tribalism is again ascendant in Sri Lanka. The movement’s champion is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former defense chief who is the leading candidate for president in elections due this year.
Mr. Rajapaksa has pledged to protect religion in the country and is determined to reconstruct Sri Lanka’s security state, which was built during the country’s nearly threedecade-long civil war with an ethnic Tamil minority.
From 2005 to 2015, Sri Lanka was led by Mr. Rajapaksa’s brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, a nationalist who justified the brutal end to the civil war by portraying himself as the nation’s spiritual savior. Temples decorated their walls with pictures of the Rajapaksa brothers. Money flowed for radical Buddhist groups that cheered on sectarian rioting in which Muslims died. One of the founders of Bodu Bala Sena, or the Buddhist Power Army, was given prime land for a Buddhist cultural center.
Last year, Bodu Bala Sena’s leader, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, was sentenced to six years in prison. But in late May, he received a presidential pardon. In early July, he presided over a meeting of thousands of monks intent on making their political presence felt in the upcoming elections.
Before his imprisonment, Gnanasara Thero placed his campaign in a historical context.
“We have been the guardians of Buddhism for 2,500 years,” he said in an interview with The Times. “Now, it is our duty, just as it is the duty of monks in Myanmar, to fight to protect our peaceful island from Islam.”
Using violence to combat a perceived existential threat.