Rohingya

Rohingya Muslims practise Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school, with a strong devotional layer expressed in the visiting of shrines, the observance of mawlid and the reciting of poetry in praise of the Prophet. The religious infrastructure of northern Rakhine State before 2017 included mosques, madrasas and Quran schools in Rohingya villages, and religious teachers held authority in community life alongside village elders.

The Rohingya language is Indo-Aryan and closely related to Chittagonian, and it has been written at different times in Arabic script, in a Latin orthography, and in a purpose made script devised in the twentieth century. Religious instruction has generally been conducted in Arabic and in Urdu or Bengali, and the absence of a settled writing system for the language itself is one reason so little of the tradition has been recorded in it.

Rakhine, historically Arakan, has been a Muslim and Buddhist frontier for centuries. The Mrauk U kingdom, Buddhist and ruling from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, used Persian court titles and issued coins carrying the Muslim declaration of faith, which is clear evidence that a Muslim presence there is old, however sharply the question of who descends from whom is now argued.

The 1982 citizenship law of Myanmar recognises a list of national races that does not include the Rohingya, and its effect has been to leave the great majority of them stateless in the country where they were born. Restrictions on movement, on marriage and on access to education and health care followed, and successive waves of people left for Bangladesh from the late 1970s onward.

In August 2017 military operations in northern Rakhine drove more than seven hundred thousand people into Bangladesh within weeks. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, reported in 2018 that the operations included killings, sexual violence and the burning of villages, and recommended the investigation and prosecution of senior military figures for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Gambia then brought proceedings against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, and the court ordered provisional measures in January 2020.

The atlas states these as the findings and orders of the bodies that made them. Around a million Rohingya now live in camps near Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, where religious life continues in temporary mosques and madrasas the community built, and where the destruction of mosques and shrines in Rakhine has removed the places that anchored it.