Theorizing Buddhist anti-Muslim nationalism as global Islamophobia

ABSTRACT In the wake of anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist majority states in Asia, increased scholarly attention is paid to anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism. These studies have paid particular attention to historical legacies within the confines of state borders, be they colonial or post-colonial. However, as this paper shows, the concerns raised in Buddhist anti-Muslim nationalism are not only shaped by local contexts. On the contrary, they are very much informed by global discourses and concerns. Drawing on media and globalization theory, this paper explores the transnational and global aspects of anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism, arguing that it needs to be understood as a constituent element of global Islamophobia(s). Moreover, the paper shows that Buddhist Islamophobia cannot be reduced to being the result of Western export of Islamophobia globally. Rather, Buddhist Islamophobia has to be understood as a global as well as a globalizing phenomenon, contributing in its own right to global Islamophobia(s).


Introduction: Buddhist Islamophobiaan unexamined issue
The impact of Islamophobia on Muslim minorities in the Buddhist majority states such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar is enormous, rivalled only by the treatment of the Uighurs by the People's Republic of China.The 2017 mass atrocities against the Rohingya population in Myanmar (forcing 650,000 to flee the border to Bangladesh) and the systemic attacks on Muslim life and properties across Sri Lanka in 2014, 2018 and 2019 make the scale of anti-Muslim violence unprecedented globally.The violence has largely been committed directly by the state or by state-backed groups and institutions.Before, during, and after mass anti-Muslim attacks, government and state agencies in both countries have passed legislation that appears to specifically target Muslims.Such anti-Muslim legislation includes the 2015 "race and religion" laws in Myanmar (including regulation of conversion from one religion to another, restrictions on Buddhist women marrying non-Buddhist men, and birth control in specific regions), and in Sri Lanka, anti-niqab legislation, restrictions on Islamic literature, state control of Islamic educational systems, as well as forced cremation of dead bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2Anti-Muslim atrocities and anti-Muslim legislation are clearly linked to multi-scalar Islamophobic discourses, vociferously articulated by leading Buddhist monks and lay persons, associated with radical Buddhist monastic groups such as the MaBaTha 3 in Myanmar, and the Bodu Bala Sena 4 in Sri Lanka.While the political motivations of such groups differ across contexts (Schonthal and Walton 2016), it is beyond doubt that they gravitate around fears of Islamization.
Given the massive anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist majority states 5 it is surprising that Buddhist Islamophobia has escaped the attention of mostif not allpost-colonial and de-colonial theorizing emerging out of Europe and North America.By and large, Islamophobia as research object is confined to the West, often analysed as a form of colour and cultural racism, and furthermore, as denial of Muslim political agency within (supposedly) secular modern nation states (Abbas 2020; Modood 2019).Even in volumes that take on a global perspective (Salman and Vakil 2010) the theorizing of the concept remains imbedded in a Western-Islam dichotomy and with reference to "whiteness".Bakali and Hafez (2022) point out that the "War on Terror" paradigm pushed a new era of anti-Muslim bias and racism globally, and moreover, that Islamophobia "exists as an extension of a global colonial expansion rooted in a colonial heritage of classifying people" (Bakali and Hafez 2022, 6).As will become very clear, this "securitization of Muslims" paradigm is highly relevant in the case of Buddhist Islamophobia.However, the second claim is far more problematic because theorizing Islamophobia exclusively along Western colonial and Orientalist lines fails to recognize non-Western subordination of Others.Ironically, this approach only re-enforces Western-centric theorizing.
This article seeks to broaden the horizon of the academic study of Islamophobia beyond the West, in order for us to see how Islamophobia as a global and transnational phenomenon concerns social group formation beyond European colonialism and racism in Europe, or in white settler colonies (Ganesh, Frydenlund and Brekke 2023).Importantly, the aim is not to argue against the importance of European colonial classifications or racialized hierarchies, but to show that Islamophobia qua phenomenon cannot be reduced to European epistemological categories.As such, this article seeks to "provincialize Europe" as Chakrabarty ((2000) 2009) famously phrased it.This impliesamongst other thingstheorizing based on empirical data outside of Euro-America.
If we look at Asia, we see increased attention to Islamophobia in China (Stroup 2023).In the case of India, Hindu Islamophobia now constitutes a sub-field in its own right, particularly after Narendra Modi's rise to power in 2014 (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019; Sen 2023; Menon 2023). 6Furthermore, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to transnational nationalism, both in terms of direct contact between fascist Europe and the nascent Hindutva movement in 1930s India, as well as to contemporary transnational exchanges between Hindutva groups in diaspora and far-right groups in the UK and the US (Leidig 2019).Studies of Islamophobia in the Indian context are most frequently concerned with Hindutva.The existence of Buddhist Islamophobia in India or in neighbouring countries is often met with surprise, as Buddhism is largely seen as an emancipatory force against Hindutva. 7n fact, Buddhist Islamophobia is hardly ever brought into discussions about Global Islamophobia(s), and there are few attempts to theorize it. 8Why has Buddhist Islamophobia largely been left out?I think there are (at least) three answers to this question.First, it can be explained as a general result of "positive orientalism" in which Buddhism is constructed as a nonpolitical pacifist philosophy (Frydenlund 2017), implying that "true" or "authentic" Buddhism can never result inor contribute tode-humanization, xenophobia or violence.Second, as we have already seen in the case of India, modernist reform movements have viewed Buddhism as an emancipatory force against social injustice (Fuller 2021).Third, despite a growing interest in Buddhist-Muslim relations in Asia in the context of recent anti-Muslim violence (Crouch 2016; Foxeus 2023; Frydenlund and Jerryson 2020; Holt  2016; Kyaw 2016), this scholarship is largely confined to area studies that focus on country-specific historical legacies rather than broader studies in Islamophobia.The few studies on anti-Rohingya violence that engage with a larger Islamophobia Studies audience, such as the work of Naved Bakali  (2021) or Azeem Ibrahim (2016), are surprisingly detached from scholarship on Burma/Myanmar.It is mentioned briefly by Tahir Abbas (2020, 499) who writes that in Myanmar "there are issues of hate towards Muslims not necessarily because they are Muslim, but more because of questions of hypernationalism, economic opportunism and state violence bordering on population elimination".While these factors are important, and although the suffering of the Rohingya is more rooted in state codification of "national races" 9 than in religious persecution per se, it is precisely the religious identity of Muslim minority populations across Buddhist Asia that is at stake.The empirical weaknesses of those contributions with regard to Buddhist Islamophobia run the risk of making Islamophobia Studies irrelevant for country specialists.Furthermore, theoretical universalisms do not always travel smoothly, and therefore require a nuanced and context-sensitive application.This begs the question: whatif anythingdo we gain by conceptualizing Buddhist anti-Muslim hatred and violence as "Buddhist Islamophobia"?Furthermore, what analytical and empirical insights may case studies from the Global South contribute to Islamophobia Studies, which is dominated by theorizing from the Global North?
Following Eric Bleich's definition, Islamophobia is here understood as the "indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims" (Bleich 2011).As will be discussed later, social constructions of "race" and racialized difference are indeed crucial to Buddhist Islamophobiathough this is played out differently than in Euro-Americabut so also are Buddhist historiography and Buddhist notions of alterity, particularly with reference to claimed moral superiority vis-à-vis religious others (Frydenlund 2019).We therefore miss an important element of Buddhist Islamophobia if we ignore its theological and historical rationale.Such theologically informed concerns refer to notions of a shrinking Buddhist world and fears about the decline of Buddhism.As this article will discuss in detail, Buddhist Islamophobia can be seen as the deep fear about the existence of a coordinated global Islamic plot to eradicate Buddhism and thus the imminent danger of "Buddhist extinction".In this narrative, local Muslims are seen as representatives of such global conspiratorial forces, and as such, Buddhist Islamophobia is a form of nativist conspiracy theory, gravitating around subversion myths that blame clearly-defined "enemies within" (Frydenlund 2019).Building on existing research, as well as on my own field work 10 and online studies, this article seeks to theorize the recent anti-Muslim turn of Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.The aim of this article is two-fold: first, to analyse core elements of Buddhist Islamophobia, and second, to theorize Buddhist Islamophobia as part of Global Islamophobia(s).I argue that while historical genealogies and local contexts are of utmost importance to understand Buddhist anti-Muslim sentiments, it is equally important to recognize Buddhist Islamophobia as both a global and a globalizing phenomenon.

Buddhist nationalism and the rise of the postcolonial ethnocratic state
The last 50 years of scholarship on Theravada Buddhist nationalism in Asia has shown the ways in which Buddhism became a crucial mobilizing force against British colonial rule (Turner 2014), and in the case of Thailand, became an instrument for building a modern nation-state (Thongchai  1994).It has also shown how ethnic majority identities have conflated with Buddhist identities in majoritarian and exclusivist ways (Tambiah 1992).This vast literature has mainly focussedand rightly soon the nexus between the postcolonial state, ethnic majoritarianism and Buddhism, and the growth of specific forms of Buddhist ethnonationalism.Most of this literature regards Buddhist nationalism as a modern construct following racialized colonial logics, although some strands of research with regard to Sri Lanka emphasize the historical legacies of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism as a form of proto-nationalism (Bechert 1966).
Buddhist nationalism is here understood as a specific modern ideology and identity-building process based on a symbiosis of Buddhism and ethnicity, and furthermore, on ressentiment vis-à-vis dominating Others (Foxeus  2019).Notably, the specific identity of the assumed "Dominant Other" in Buddhist nationalist discourses is contingent upon political and economic realities: in Sri Lanka, the Tamil and Christian minorities have been excluded from the Buddhist "body politics" while in Myanmar, the Christian, Indian, Muslim and Chinese minorities have been the "Other".The sharp anti-Muslim turn of Buddhist nationalism from 2011 onwards has received scholarly attention within area studies (Crouch 2016; Frydenlund and Jerryson  2020; Holt 2016; Kyaw 2016; Schonthal and Walton 2016).Important studies have demonstrated that historical legacies of colonial-era anti-Indian and anti-Muslim ideas and practices have had significant impact on the current anti-Muslim mobilization (Egreteau 2011; Kyaw 2020; Walton  2020).Other scholars have emphasized how contentious politics produce forms of "scapegoating" of Muslim minorities (van Klinken and Thazin Aung 2017).However, as rightly pointed out by Nyi Nyi Kyaw  (2020), this scapegoating theory does not in itself explain why Muslims (and not other minorities) seem to be the preferred target by the parties in power.Rather, he suggests that in the context of Myanmar we should look at the role of myth-making.In colonial and post-colonial Burma/Myanmar, myths of deracination of country and race have surfaced and re-surfaced at specific points in time, particularly before and during anti-Rohingya violence in Rakhine in 2012 and 2017, showcasing the role of elite actors in the (re)activation of myths of deracination.
Yet, as pointed out by Frydenlund and Jerryson (2020), there are important differences between colonial era anti-Muslim sentiments and contemporary anti-Muslim campaigns.In colonial Burma, for example, the question was about Indians in general, and specifically Indian Muslims, but in contemporary Myanmar (as well as Sri Lanka) Islamophobia targets all Muslim ethnic minority groups.This conflation of Muslim ethnic diversity into an essentialized Muslim religious identity is at the core of all forms of Islamophobia, and goes in tandem with an accentuated Buddhist religious identity.Such transformation into an essentialized Muslim identity cannot be understood without reference to global discourses on Islam and Muslims.Likewise, one misses an important dimension of Buddhist identity formation if one overlooks Buddhist concerns which transcend ethnic/racial boundaries.I therefore prefer the term "Buddhist protectionism", defined as political and legal activism aimed at protecting Buddhism from perceived external threats, including measures to maintain in-group purity, to capture the specifically religious dimensions of Buddhist Islamophobia.For example, when Buddhist monks in Myanmar root their identity in racial notions of being descendants from the Buddha's Shakya clan, this points to a racialized Buddhist identity, which strategically conflates ethnic difference.While not ignoring the importance of ethnic identity, recent discursive transformations indicate a stronger religious/pan-Buddhist identity across the region, facilitating transnational connectivity and solidarity.
Still, the global aspects of the current rise of anti-Muslim Buddhist activism are yet to be systematically explored.By bringing in perspectives from globalization theory, I hope to shed new light on current Buddhist nationalist formations, arguing that they should not be reduced to locally constituted phenomena.I take this approach cautiously, being fully aware of the many pitfalls and dangers of lumping the groups together, as both Gravers  (2015) and Schonthal and Walton (2016) have warned.The need for empirical accuracy, "thick description", deep historical understanding, as well as knowledge of contemporary politics cannot be overestimated, and of course country-specific analysis is at the heart of any analysis of religious-nationalist groups.Nonetheless, as Berkwitz ( 2008) has rightly pointed out, "Buddhist nationalisms are not solely the products of unique cultural spaces and therefore only knowable in light of their cultural particularities".Rather, as this article seeks to demonstrate, it is possible to see that anti-Muslim Buddhist discursive formations whose rhetoric of identity and difference, or belonging and otherness, depend as much on the global as the local for their form and content.

Buddhist Islamophobia from a global perspective
Mark Juergensmeyer (2008) suggests that we conceptualize the global rise of religious-nationalist groups as a "global rebellion", that is, as local resistance to globalization itself.This perspective fits well with the self-understanding of Buddhist anti-Muslim movements, for example as the need to protect local Buddhist culture and practice against global forces, but also with academic analyses that view them as responses to fears of the collapse of social and moral orders, the loss of identity, and of all kinds of global risks and insecurities (Foxeus 2023; Gravers 2015).
However, the aim of this article is not only to demonstrate that Buddhists protectionist movements react to globalization, but that their reactions and responses are in themselves deeply informed by global discourses.In this regard, theoretical perspectives on globalization focusing on mediatization and movement can reveal important discursive shifts in Buddhist nationalism.Building on the works of anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas (2009) and of media philosopher John Durham Peters (2015), I suggest that we break down and operationalize "religion and globalization", arguing that the global environment of migration, mobility and digital mediatization create new forms of knowledge, perceptions and orientations among Buddhist groups.While not ignoring pre-modern or colonial transnational Buddhist connections, it cannot be denied that the last decades of hyper-globalization have intensified such connections and movements, facilitated by new forms of technologies, migration and global economy.
Following the theoretical approach of Csordas, that any exploration of religion in a global context should address the empirical determination of its condition, this study seeks to identify what "travels well" across geographical and cultural space.This can be summarized in two broad aspects of religion, namely "portable practice" and "transposable message".Portable practice refers to "rites that can be easily learned, not held as proprietary or necessarily linked to a specific cultural context".Transposable message refers to the "appeal contained in religious tenets, premises, or promises that can find footing across a diversity of linguistic and cultural settings" (Csordas 2009,  261).My aim here is not to look into the global export of Buddhist practice (such as "mindfulness") or Buddhist import of protestant religious practice (such as Sunday Schools) although such practices in some contexts indeed serve as platforms for Buddhist Islamophobia, but rather to use "portable practice" and "transposable message" as analytical tools for analysing exactly those transnational elements of Buddhist Islamophobia, and to explore to what extent radical Buddhist groups are informed by global practices and portable messages beyond their confined ethno-linguistic boundaries.Global Islamophobia(s) can be read as one example of such transposable messages that finds roots in diverse settings, and should be analysed as one, highly visible, element of global culture.As discussed above, while recent research can trace anti-Muslim sentiments back to the British colonial period, the global transposability of Islamophobia radically alters local anti-Muslim sentiments.Thus, the notion of transposability is consciously chosen because it "includes the connotations of being susceptible to being transformed or reordered without being denatured, and the valuable musical metaphor of being performable in a different key" (Csordas  2009, 261).
In its early beginnings, the study of religion and globalization was concerned with local engagements with global culture, as a centrifugal process.Later, more attention has been paid to other modalities of religious globalization such as movements from the periphery to the centre, as a centripetal process, or as a multi-directional process of variations.As I will argue below, digital mediation facilitates exactly this multi-directional process, which means that Buddhist actors are active contributors to global Islamophobia(s).Or put in another way, Buddhist Islamophobia is neither a global import nor a homegrown cultural product, but rather the result of the multidirectional movement of portable and transposable ideas and practices, which can be analysed according to means of travel, such as migration, mobility and mediatization, and content.

Buddhist Islamophobia: portability and movement
In order for us to understand how Buddhist Islamophobia is globally informed, we need to look at migration, mobility and mediatization, that is, how content may travel.Let me first start with an ethnographic vignette that testifies to the importance of transnational mediation.When I first visited the famous Burmese Buddhist monk U Wirathu at his New Masoyein monastery the day prior to the anti-Muslim violence in Mandalay on 1 July 2014, I was struck by two things.First, pictures from the funeral of the raped and murdered Arakanese Buddhist woman Thida Htway, in addition to pictures of numerous corpses, all presumably Buddhist victims of Muslim violence in Rakhine, Bangladesh and Southern Thailand.Second, I was struck by the careful and professional media strategy carried out by U Wirathu's media support team, who filmed and recorded our meeting, and who immediately posted this on U Wirathu's Facebook site, at the time with around 250 000 followers.This post was then shared among Burmese followers of U Wirathu, but also by non-Burmese Buddhist international networks throughout the globe, including Europe.Of all my experiences carrying out field research in Myanmar and Sri Lanka between 2014 and 2019, my visit to U Wirathu's templeand its subsequent media disseminationmost clearly exemplifies the new forms of anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism in the region: transnational concern for co-religionists and new forms of mediation.

Mediatization
Buddhist protectionist groups have long been effective users of mass-communication media such as printed magazines, books, video and tape recordings, in addition to more traditional means of religious communication such as sermons, or blessing rituals.In recent years digital media has become fundamental for most such groups, and although anti-Muslim Buddhist groups such as 969 11 and MaBaTha were slightly slower in their adoption of digital media compared to the BBS in Sri Lanka, this changed almost overnight in 2012 with the explosion in the use of digital media in Myanmar.
Here, I employ media theory in order to understand the ways in which digital media may have influencedand perhaps even transformed -Buddhist Islamophobia, well beyond the facilitation of information-sharing across long distances.Media are much more than just devices; they are, as John Durham Peters (2015, 2) points out, "vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible".Furthermore, he adds, media are "civilizational ordering devices" (2015,  5).They are therefore fundamental to human existence, they are everywhere, and importantly, they do not only carry messages; they also form and alter the very messages they carry.Previous forms of mass media such as radio and television were often seen as distributors of messages, in a one-tomany direction of communication.With digital communication, however, the situation is far more complex and chaotic, with multi-directional communication, with one-to-many, one-to-one, or one-to-none forms of communication.In the contexts under study here, it can be difficult to track the impact of certain sites, or even identify the audience or the producers of the content.Sites and users come and go, and how are we to measure the impact of user-driver content on U Wirathu's many web-pages?Quantitative media analysis may indicate page visits, or Facebook likes, or even user traffic across states, but only a qualitative analysis can give us any substantive analysis about the concerns raised on these digital platforms.My own analysis of digital platforms run by Buddhist groups shows that (as with most digital communication) visual communication takes priority over longer texts.Such visuals may show graphic and highly disturbing pictures of Eid ritual slaughter of cattle, ISIS beheadings, or public executions in Iran.Occasionally, they contain pictures of dead Buddhist bodies, serving as "documentation" of the dangers posed by Islam, although it should be noted that some of these pictures actually depict victims of the 2015 Nepali earthquake.Such sites also contain pictures from the most gender conservative sides of Saudi-Arabian society, equating wahabism with Muslim practice in general, often presenting a dichotomy between the "unfree and violent Islam" and the "free and nonviolent Buddhism".
Analysis of social media posts in Myanmar in the period from the 2020 elections to the first weeks after the 2021 coup illustrate an important point about how global flows of anti-Muslim visual content are used and made meaningful in local contexts. 12Illustrative of this process is a Facebook post showing images of the truck attack in Nice in 2016, which were reposted on anonymous Facebook accounts in Myanmar. 13In the comment section to one such post (from October 2020), anonymous users posted comments relevant not to the attacks in France or to global jihadism, but on party political rivalries prior to the 2020 elections.These were not written statements, but rather manipulated photo-images showing leading National League for Democracy (NLD) politicians greeting Muslim leaders inside a mosque, with the title "Friendship between NLD and Muslim leadership".Zaw Myint Maung, the leading NLD politician, is shown wearing a Muslim skullcap.The skullcap appears to be photoshopped onto the politician's head.Another user posted (in the same thread) an image of Aung San Suu Kyi in lively discussion with a Muslim leader.On the image a caption is added, depicting her as saying "We will give our country to you".A third picture shows a Muslim candidate running for the NLD in Yangon.Together, the visuals in this threadalmost in the form of memesdiscursively connect global jihadism (the Nice event), accusations of the NLD betraying Myanmar (Aung San Suu Kyi), and Muslim political agency (the Muslim candidate running for elections).Digital flows of content regarding global jihadism are directly connected to local Muslims and local politics, as a strategy for moral panic that can be activated for electoral mobilization.
Furthermoreand crucial to my argument about globalizing forms of Islamophobia -Buddhist Islamophobia is mediatized beyond the Buddhist world, most significantly to India.For example, in 2020 and 2021 U Wirathu gained massive attention on the YouTube channel Lallantop. 14The programme introduces U Wirathu, 969 and the conflict in Rakhine to a Hindi-speaking audience.Within a year it had millions of views and over 30,000 comments, showing overwhelming support for U Wirathu in his "fight against Islam" (Frydenlund 2021, 15).Therefore, Buddhist activists are not only passive consumers of global Islamophobia; they are also active producers of content, and contributors to the constant flow of digitally mediatized Islamophobia.

Migration and mobility
How connected are Buddhist protectionist groups across the borders of the nation state?On the one hand, such groups are imbedded in their local political, cultural and linguistic realities and are, at the operative level, mostly concerned with domestic affairs.On the other hand, one cannot ignore the fact that there are well-established patterns of monastic and lay mobility across the Buddhist world and that improved travel facilities have further increased transregional and global mobility, including large numbers of Buddhist monastics who stay for longer periods at Buddhist universities in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.We know of several meetings between MaBaTha and Thai monks in Bangkok, but the most famous example of anti-Muslim Buddhist transnational mobility concerns a visit of the 969/MaBaTha to Sri Lanka in 2014, by invitation of the BBS, where they signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the protection of Buddhism, to massive media coverage across the region.
Buddhist protectionists also meet in a number of international Buddhist organizations (which do not necessarily promote an anti-Muslim agenda), such as the UN Day of Vesak, or the International Buddhist Confederation, the latter being under the protective wings of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party.The new alliances now evident between Buddhist actors in Asia and Hindutva activists in India are of particular interest in this regard.In 2017 Yogi Adityanath, BJP chief Minister of Uttar Pradeshlong-time yogi, Hindutva activist and anti-love jihad campaignervisited Myanmar, and the fact that he chose Myanmar as his "maiden visit" abroad after his election was widely reported in Indian media. 15He was invited by the Vivekananda Mission (linked to the BJP), but, importantly, also by Ven.Sithagu Sayadaw, a senior MaBaTha monk, who has a wide international network.Therefore, while Buddhist protectionism in Myanmar very much revolves around local concerns, it is also true that leading MaBaTha monks have ties with Hindutva activists in India, as well as with Buddhist associations in Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Finally, in a world of hyper-connectivity, and with new technologies that facilitate contact between country of origin and country of settlement, it should come as no surprise that "diaspora" communities are engaged in "long-distance nationalism".The exact role of Buddhist diaspora communities in shaping the Buddhist protectionist agendas back in their country of origin needs further exploration, but what seems clear is that Sinhala Buddhist communitiesfor example, in Australia and the UKare active consumers of, and contributors to, Facebook pages of Sinhala Buddhist organizations (like the BBS).Postings and re-postings from diaspora communities end up on Facebook pages run in Sri Lanka.Also, Sinhala Buddhist communities in the UK in 2012 set up a Buddhist version of the British Defence League, the socalled Buddhist Defence League, whose aim is to "Fight against Islamization in Buddhist countries, Promoting Democracy and The Rule Of Law By Opposing Sharia".A picture of Thida Htwe (discussed above) figures as the group's visual representation on Facebook.In addition to Facebook pages run by specific monks or organizations that connect ethno-linguistic communities across the world, there are other websites that are broader, reaching out to the global Buddhist community.One such page is the "Persecution of Buddhists" blog. 16ars of "Buddhist extinction" and tropes of the "Muslim other" At the heart of Buddhist Islamophobia is the concern that Islam will eradicate Buddhism, a concern that resembles discourses on "white extinction" among far-right groups in the West.In recent years, such fears of "Buddhist extinction" have increased dramatically in the region, largely reducing centurieslong, complexbut by and large peaceful -Buddhist-Muslim interactions to a question of Muslim imperialism and Islamization (Frydenlund and Jerryson 2020).Such fears are made meaningful to their audiences with reference to traditional Buddhist eschatology (Foxeus 2019; Frydenlund 2019), a historical reservoir of anti-colonial tropes and myths of deracination (Kyaw 2020), economic competition (Haniffa 2017) and, in the case of Myanmar, what the Burmese military has produced of anti-Muslim propaganda to consolidate its power (Egreteau 2011).As the analysis below will show, old and new, local and global concerns and issues are interwoven into one coherent narrative of Islamic expansionism, and with subsequent calls for the protection of Buddhism.
In the following section, I analyse six central tropes in Buddhist Islamophobia. 17The first two -Muslims as non-national/local representatives of global conspiratorial forces, and Islam as a security threatare interconnected.They present minority identities and transnational Muslim networks as threats to the ethnocratic state, often with references made to the Global War on Terror.The third trope concerns capitalism and market competition, while the fourth refers to the so-called "Demographic Jihad", or the idea that there is a plot to spread Islam around the world through population growth.The fifth trope is the notion of Buddhism as "free" vs. "unfree" Islam, and furthermore, how global human rights discourses feed into and influence such discourses.Finally, I include in my analysis COVID-19-related Islamophobiaparticularly strong in Sri Lanka (and India)which conceptualized the virus as being imbued with a specific Muslim quality.

Local Muslims as non-national
The notion that Muslims do not belong to the nation is a recurrent theme, often expressed in a language of Buddhist "host" and Muslim "guest", which ultimately denies equal citizenship status and Muslim political agency.Furthermore, the politics of identity and belonging is discursively connected to nativist notions of "race", but how one identifies "race" varies across the region.In South Asia (Sri Lanka as well as India), Muslims are racialized less according to phenotype as they are to cultural markers, such as clothing and hairstyles (Sen 2023).By contrast, in Myanmar phenotype racism is widespread, particularly with regard to the Rohingya population.The use of the pejorative term kalar lu-myo ("the dark people") is a racial slur for Rohingyas 18 and South Asian-looking people in Myanmar are seen as colonial intruders.

Islam as violence and securitization of Muslims
Securitization of Islam refers to a post-9/11 security agenda constructed around a perceived threat from Islam, which is translated into new political discourses, institutions and state policies (Fox and Akbaba 2015).In Buddhist Asia, securitization of Muslims has been particularly prevalent in Southern Thailand since 2004, in Myanmar during the years of political liberalization (2011-2021), and in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the 2019 Easter bombings.In the case of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi repeated during the court hearings in the Hague in 2019 the stance of the Burmese military that the "clearance operations" in the Rakhine state was a legitimate counter-terrorist operation, thus re-framing local conflicts in Rakhine to suit the global discourse on the "war on terror".In the previous years, the Burmese public had been fed with sermons and speeches by monks who claimed that mosques were "enemy bases" and that even Muslim children posed "a security threat". 19In Sri Lanka, the horrific Islamist terrorist attacks on Easter Day 2019 were followed by increased securitization of local Muslims such as closing of Islamic schools, "screening" of Islamic books by defence ministries and closing of mosques.While securitization of female Islamic dress (burqa and niqab) and controversies over its use in public schools and universities had been high in public debate since the end of the civil war ( 2009), it was only after the 2019 attacks that female Islamic dress was temporarily banned, and only in 2021 that the government fully banned the burqa.According to Minister of National Security the burqa is a symbol of religious extremism, posing "a direct threat to national security". 20

Islamic economic expansionism
Buddhist Islamophobia also gravitates around economic competition between Muslim and Buddhist businessmen, and grievances are frequently made about alleged Muslim exploitation of the Buddhist majority.It should come as no surprise, then, that a great number of anti-Muslim attacks in Sri Lanka have involved violence against Muslim-owned slaughterhouses, supermarkets, and shops.Muslims, particularly in urban contexts, are seen as wealthy.This trope of the "Rich Muslim", it is to be noted, is not unlike anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish dominance over the world economy.In both cases, it can be argued, the assumed rich minority is seen as a local representative of trade monopolies, transnational networks and above all, as representatives of global capitalism.As Farzana Haniffa (2017) has pointed out, in Sri Lanka, this economic grievance has led BBS monks to be particularly concerned with halal-certification and halal-slaughter.In 2012, BSS chief monk Ven.Gnanissara claimed that the halal-certification system implied unfair treatment of Sinhala shopkeepers as Muslims would avoid shops without halal certification.The BBS chief monk went on to argue that This is a Sinhala Buddhist country (…) from ancient times the Sinhalese have dominated and assisted the business society to build up and carry out their business.Now these businesses are threatened by these Muslims with the Halal symbol and certification just so they could make a business out of it. 21rthermore, BBS monks argued that offerings to Buddhist temples contained goods with halal-stamps on them, potentially jeopardizing the ritual purity of the offering.In 2013 one BBS monk even went so far as to self-immolate over the halal issue, the first self-immolation by a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka's history (Frydenlund 2019).Finally, we see that economic grievances and concerns over global jihadism meet in the anti-halal campaign.For example, memes with texts saying "Halal-food funds terrorism" were widely circulated on social media sites run by the BBS.In the context of transnational flows of Islamophobia, it is noteworthy that one of the most circulated memes was originally made by the Australian political party called "Restore Australia", which wants to ban Islam in Australia.
As I have argued elsewhere (Frydenlund 2019, 293), the question of economic competition also played an important role in the anti-Muslim campaigns in Myanmar in 2012 and 2013, a period marked by foreign investments and economic uncertainties.For example, in 2012, Yangon's market stalls were decorated with 969 stickers, indicating to the customers that the shopkeepers were Buddhists, and Buddhist monks explicitly asked the general Buddhist public to be loyal to their "race" by buying their goods from Buddhist vendors only.As pointed out by Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016, 195), "according to 969 preachers, the emergence of the mythical symbol 969 was inspired by the Islamic symbol 786 used by Muslim shops in Myanmar".The 786 numerical sign is widely used in Myanmar to indicate halal-certified foods.
While economic grievances certainly are at the heart of Buddhist Islamophobia, to what extent business competition can explain anti-Muslim violence is an open question.On the one hand, in the most severe case of anti-Muslim violence in the region, namely the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, the notion of the "Rich Muslim" is not at stake as the Rohingyas are seen as a destitute community.But if we look at other anti-Muslim attacks, like for example in Meiktila in 2013, we see that the massive violence started as a dispute in a gold shop and involved Buddhist actors who had ongoing disputes with the local Muslim gold trader and Muslim taxi drivers. 22uddhist concerns over halal and alleged trade monopolies have recently also found their way to Thailand.Anti-halal campaigns were organized in 2022, where protesters expressed fears of unfair economic treatment of non-Muslims. 23Also, a halal industrial complex planned in Chiang Mai was suspended on the grounds that the plant would result in massive Muslim migration, resulting in calls for protecting Buddhism and the "Lanna lifestyle". 24Halal has traditionally been widely accepted in Buddhist Asia, but has now become a gravitation point that combines economic competition and fears of Islamization.

"Demographic Jihad"
The alleged growth of the Muslim population is perceived as an existential threat to Buddhism, and crucial to Buddhist Islamophobia are questions about gender, sexuality and reproduction, as well as notions of Buddhist women as reproducers of the "nation".To prevent a Muslim demographic "takeover", radical Buddhist groups have called for family planning policies, even legal regulation of women's reproductive health.At the BBS inaugural meeting in 2012, BBS leaders demanded that the government shut down all family planning units in the country so that Sinhala Buddhist women could reproduce the Buddhist nation.Furthermore, allegations surfaced accusing Muslim shopkeepers of distributing sweets containing sterilizing medicaments to Sinhala Buddhist women (Silva 2016).
A slightly different aspect of demographic jihad is the idea of jihad through rape.The point here is less on the possibility of Muslim reproduction, but on intrusion and violation of the Buddhist female body.In 2012, violence between Rohingyas and Buddhists erupted in the Rakhine state in Myanmar, after allegations of rape and murder of Thida Htway, which was "soon turned into a symbol of what was now portrayed as general male Muslim aggression against Buddhist women" (Frydenlund 2019, 295), turning the female Buddhist body into an object for Buddhist protection.The MaBaTha communication team also produced a "documentary" film, re-enacting the sexual violence and murder of Thida Htway by Muslim men. 25 Furthermore, prior to incidents of anti-Muslim violence U Wirathu has posted on social media allegations of rape of Buddhist women by Muslim males.In fact, he has taken a special interest in rape cases, and in his view, all Burmese rape cases are carried out by Muslims. 26nother aspect of the alleged "Islamization" through reproduction and sexuality relates to interreligious marriage and the idea that Muslim husbands force their Buddhist wives to become Muslim.This, what is often referred to as "Love Jihad", refers to the idea that Muslim men allure non-Muslim women into marriage as a means to spread Islam.It is well known in Hindutva ideology but is also a globalizing trope beyond the Indian context (Frydenlund and  Leidig 2022).From this perspective, "mixed marriages are conceptualized as a means of conversion and thus represent a danger to the very survival of Buddhism" (Frydenlund 2019, 296).This trope differs from rape jihad in that it nurtures a picture of Muslim men as deceitful: they might appear soft and caring, but once marriage is a reality, the Buddhist woman will be tortured if she does not become a Muslim, according to Buddhist Islamophobic discourses.In Myanmar, MaBaTha organized a series of public events to document the dangers of Buddhist-Muslim marriages, through the presentation of "real life stories". 27Such storiesoften testimonies of severe domestic violenceare conceptualized within a Buddhist-Muslim dichotomy, where Islam is constructed as violent and misogynist, while Buddhism represents freedom.

Buddhism as freedom
In Buddhist Islamophobic discourses, Islam is consistently constructed as violent, unfree and against women, and Buddhism is portrayed as guaranteeing peace, freedom and women's rights.In an interview with U Wirathu in 2015 he explained that: There are so many stories of Buddhist women being beaten because of their Buddhist worship.We have documentation of that.One woman was beaten to death while her family held her.They even beat her vagina.In order to give Buddhist women freedom of worship, this law has to be passed.The point is that in Muslim families, unless you keep to the Islamic practice, you are considered a whore. 28is points to a widespread concern for sexual violence among women in Myanmar, which explains why many women supported U Wirathu and his campaign for the "race and religion" laws (Walton, McKay, and Mar Mar Kyi  2015).Furthermore, at the height of MaBaTha activity, religious freedom issues came into central view with reference to religious freedom of (female) Buddhists, in the context of (perceived) forced conversion of Buddhist women to Islam.The aim was to protect Buddhism from Islam using a particular language of religious freedom, which became a tool for majoritarian interests to secure their position (Frydenlund 2018).Thus, Buddhist Islamophobia is informed by the human rights paradigm, but in ambiguous ways.On the one hand, protectionist monks view human rights as a western neo-colonial instrument to bring down Buddhism and the "national races".On the other hand, elements of human rights thinking are blended into such discourses; the very conceptualization of "Islamization" of Buddhist women in mixed marriages in terms of religious freedom exemplifies this.

"Corona jihad"
COVID-19-related Islamophobia became massive in Sri Lanka (and India) during the pandemic, and "corona jihad memes" went viral in the subcontinent and were even adopted by far-right groups in the UK. 29In addition, social media was filled with Tweets like "Corona was born in China, raised in Italy, finished high school in the U.S. and became a Muslim in Sri Lanka finally" (Twitter 4 April 2020).In Sri Lanka, the massive COVID-19 anti-Muslim discourse resulted in a "cremation only" policy, which implied compulsory cremation of dead bodies. 30This affected Christian and Muslim minority communities, but was particularly painful for the Muslims as Islam demands burials of the dead.Buddhist monks were active in public space in Colombo, showing posters saying "The virus is alive … dangerous.If this land is to be a holy land for future generations do not bury Corona deaths in this land". 31Even when the ban was lifted, burials were permitted in only a few places.Furthermore, then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa also tried to convince the Maldives to accept dead Muslim bodies from Sri Lanka. 32Muslim minorities could not have received a clearer message about their exclusion from the nation.
Buddhist Islamophobia: transcending the nation?Implications for notions of self and other At the heart of Buddhist Islamophobia is the deep-seated "fear of small numbers" (Appadurai 2006).There is a strong sense of a shrinking Buddhist world, under constant threat from "Global Islam".The six tropes I have identified reflect fears of Islamization through demographic growth and Muslim global capitalism.Furthermore, seeing Muslims as a virus indicates that Muslims are seen as external to the racialized Buddhist body politic, "outsiders" that must be expelled, or subdued; Muslim minorities are reminders of the impossibility of a "pure" Buddhist state.At one level, one could read the importance of rape in Buddhist Islamophobic discourse as a metaphor for what many Buddhists see as a Muslim intrusion from the outside.Also, when allegations of rape occur in Rakhine, they function as catalysts for geopolitics in the region regarding stateless persons, illegal immigration, refugees and border disputes.Connected to the notion of aggressive Muslim male sexuality, then, is the notion of Rakhine as a frontier state between the Muslim Bangladesh and the Buddhist Myanmar.Rape of Buddhist women in Rakhine by Muslim men (who are seen as illegal immigrants) is considered indicative of Muslim expansionism into the pure Buddhist heartland.Tropes of Muslim hypermasculinity and violent intrusion are all too familiar themes in global Islamophobic discourses (Bangstad 2014; Frydenlund and Leidig 2022; Gupta 2016).
I have argued in this paper that hyper-globalizationparticularly migration, mobility and digital mediatizationhas contributed to a radical change in the ways that Buddhist nationalism is constituted, articulated and consumed.This opens up the question of how these new environments and changed modalities of Buddhist nationalism may change Buddhist nationalism itself.Or, put differently, how is Buddhist nationalism affected by globalization and what are the consequences for boundary-making and group identities?This paper has shown that although Buddhist fears of Islam can at least partially be traced back to British colonialism, and although such fears might fit into cosmological imaginaries and religious syntax, they are also strongly influenced by recent global discourses on violence, terror, jihad, and gender discrimination, all of which are new tropes not found in the earlier anti-Muslim Buddhist formations.Furthermore, we can also discern influences from global ideological paradigms such as human rights, particularly religious freedom.
Research on right-wing populism and extremist groups in Europe shows that their response to globalization (e.g.increased migration and increased presence of Islam) differs across the continent.Rogers Brubaker (2017)  argues that within the space of variation, the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe constitute a "distinctive cluster".They are distinctive, he argues, in construing the opposition between "Self" and "Other"not in narrowly national but in "broader civilizational terms".This partial shift from nationalism to "civilizationism" has been driven by a striking convergence in the last fifteen years around the notion of a civilizational threat from Islam.The Christianity invoked by the national populists of Europe is not, however, a substantive Christianity, Brubaker claims; it is a "secularized Christianity-as-culture", a civilizational and identitarian "Christianism".Crudely put, if "they" are Muslim, then "we" must, in some sense, be Christian.The value of comparing the most secularized part of the globe with one of the most deeply religious is limited; in Buddhist Asia it is not a question between "substantive" and "identitarian" religiosity.Nonetheless, Brubaker's main argument, namely that the "Nationalist Self" is constituted with reference to a "Global Islamic Other", is crucial to our discussion of contemporary Buddhist nationalism.What does the re-orientation, or the shift in focus of Buddhist nationalist agendas imply for the conceptualization of the Buddhist community itself?If one of the major threats to Buddhism is defined as Global Islam, then what, exactly, is the identity or community to resist this danger?Based on concerns for co-religionists in Muslim majority societies, notions of "Buddhist persecution", fears of global jihad and, last but not least, the fear that the Buddhist world will eventually fall under the sword of Islam, calls for Buddhist awareness across ethno-national boundaries.
This, I argue, does not imply a downplaying of notions of "race", but rather that a broader and more outward-looking Buddhist identity formation is taking place, in which linguistic and cultural nationalism of the post-colonial era is toned down.This transnational orientation, I argue, opens the question of scalability.I suggest that we can analyse this new transnational transcendence at three levels of transnational orientation.
The first level concerns "trans-ethnic Buddhist engagement" within Buddhist majority states themselves, which have Buddhist communities belonging to numerous ethnic communities, and belonging to both minority and majority ethnic nationalisms.In Myanmar, for example, MaBaTha appeals to Buddhist solidarity across ethnic groups and is strong in ethnic minority areas such as in the Karen state.What exactly the "nation" points to in the Myanmar context is constantly negotiated, rendering the term "Buddhist nationalism" somewhat inaccurate.
The second level concerns "international Buddhist engagement", carried out through digital media, but also through direct engagement across state borders, as exemplified by the 969-BBS Memorandum of Understanding.We also have examples of BBS monks staging protests in Colombo against Rohingya refugees in Sri Lanka, as an act of solidarity with Buddhists in Rakhine, in their fight against the "Islamization" of Rakhine.
To protect Buddhism from the perceived global threat of Islam therefore requires international engagement, through mobility of activists and crossnational co-operation, but it also requires engagement with non-Buddhist actors.I refer to this third level as "transnational non-Buddhist engagement", capturing monastic support to Donald Trump and Benjamin Nethanyahu, in their fight against Islam.More important to local realities, however, is monastic engagements in public space that speak to a global audience and media, such as demonstrations outside of foreign embassies, or demonstrations against international organizations such as the UN or the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.Furthermore, there is a new engagement between Hindu and Buddhist activists across Asia.During post-war Sinhala Buddhist triumphalism, Narendra Modi was received as a great hero when he visited Sri Lanka.Modi also gave his unconditional support to the Government of Myanmar during the 2017 "clearance operations" in Rakhine.Buddhist activists from around the world participate in Hindutva-oriented conferences in India, and the question of ritual slaughter of cattle and the Muslim female veil are shared concerns for Hindutva and Buddhist activists alike.As previously discussed, Yogi Adityanath visited MaBaTha monks on his first visit abroad, and U Wirathu is received as a true anti-Muslim hero by Hindutva audiences.Thus, Islamophobia serves as a shared platform for new Hindu-Buddhist alliances that would have been unheard of in colonial Burma or colonial Ceylon.
By way of conclusion, Buddhist Islamophobia is not limited to the confines of local politics and specific ethnic in-groups, but does in some ways transcend them.Furthermore, the case of Buddhist Islamophobia shows how Islamophobic discourses are constituted through multi-directional flows, and that it should not be reduced to being a Western (neo) colonial export, which most theorizing of Islamophobia has been concerned with until now.

Notes
1. Personal interview, translated from Burmese to English, 2015.2. The ban on burials lasted from 1 April 2020 to 26 April 2021 and caused an uproar among Muslim communities worldwide.3. MaBaTha is an acronym for Ah-myo Batha Thathana Saun Shaung Ye a-Pwe, or the "Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion".4. "Buddhist Force Army" in Sinhala. 5. Due to space limitations, this article focuses on Theravada Buddhism.6. Hindu-Muslim contestation undoubtedly goes back to the colonial era and later to Partition, but current Hindutva attempts at building a Hindu state have created new forms of anti-Muslim majoritarianism.7.This is an observation made based on engagements with Buddhist scholars and activists in the Ambedkar tradition in India.8.For example, Buddhist Islamophobia has not so far been discussed in any substantial way in leading journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, or Journal of Islamophobia Studies.9. Referred to as thaingyin-tha in Burmese language.10.The fieldwork has been carried out according to the guidelines of the National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities in Norway.