Absolute power, as they say, corrupts absolutely. There is a reason why power corrupts. It deludes us into thinking we are the reference, we are all that we are because of our own doing. We become to a certain degree gods unto ourselves. The most powerful rulers through history, the most powerful rulers contemporary—and few and far between are those who never abused their powers—all of these people assumed at some level that they were and are indomitable, and that they are in some ways God’s gift to his people. And it usually is the case that these figures were and are men.
Every so often, allegations emerge about famous Muslim celebrity-scholars abusing their power—although, in the case of Nouman Ali Khan, the details are still murky (and in some ways the details don’t matter too much if an abuse of power has occurred). When Muslim celebrity-scholars abuse their power they in a very real sense scar the community, and this applies to any religious community of course—whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or New Age.
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Myanmar is a non-secular Buddhist majority country. The majority of Myanmar peoples are Buddhist, including both ethnic Burmans and non-Burman ethnic minorities. Buddhists make up 89.8 percent of the population, Christians 6.3 percent and Muslims 2.3 percent. In the contemporary climate of Myanmar, Many Buddhists see Islam as a threat to Buddhism; they use Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan as examples of Islam’s takeover of previously Buddhist majority locations. Myanmar was born out of the ashes of the murder of its integrationist freedom fighter leader General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was assassinated on July 19, 1947, a few months before the independence of Burma on January 4, 1948. His legacy of seeking integration and the violence associated with his murder still alludes Myanmar today. These research notes witll set forth the history of Muslims in Mynamar as in attempt to understand the contemporary exclusion of the Rohingya from the modern nation-state of Mynamar and to argue for the continued failure of Myanmar to become a multicultural society of ethnoreligious equality and plurality. |
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