The Rohingyas, a Muslim minority fleeing oppression and hardship in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, have been called one of the most persecuted people on earth. But they have seldom hit the headlines — until recently, that is. More than 500 Rohingyas are feared to have drowned since early December after being towed out to sea by the Thai military and abandoned in rickety boats. The army has admitted cutting them loose, but said they had food and water and denied sabotaging the engines of the boats.

(Photo: Rohingyas in immigration area in soutwestern Thailand, 31 Jan 2009/Sukree Sukplang)

The Rohingyas are becoming a headache for Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia where they have washed up. Indonesian authorities this week rescued 198 Rohingya boat people off the coast of Aceh, after three weeks at sea. Buddhist Thailand and mostly Muslim Indonesia call them economic migrants looking for work at a time when countries in the region, like everywhere else, are in an economic downturn. But human rights groups such as Amnesty International are calling on governments in the region to provide assistance to the Rohingyas and let the UNHCR  have access to them.

Myanmar’s generals have a shabby enough record with their Buddhist majority. The brutal suppression of monk-led protests that killed at least 31 people in September 2007 and the continued detention of opposition icon and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi bear witness to that. But their treatment of ethnic minorities, including the Muslim Rohingyas and the Christian Chin people in the mountainous Northwest — where insurgents have been fighting for autonomy — have been especially brutal. They are not oppressed because of their faith alone, but their faith and ethnicity make them targets. The military government does not recognise them as one of the country’s 130-odd ethnic minorities. They are forbidden from marrying or traveling without permission and have no legal right to own land.

(Photo: Thai policeman with Rohingyas at immigration area in southwest Thailand, 31 Jan 2009/Sukree Sukplang)

Most Rohingyas come from Rakhine State, also known as Arakan State, in northwest Myanmar, abutting the border with Bangladesh.  Their roots go back at least to 1821, when Britain annexed the region as a province of British India and brought in large numbers of Bengali-speaking Muslim labourers. When Burma won independence from Britain in 1948, the Bengali-speaking Muslim population near the border exceeded that of the Buddhists, leading to secessionist tensions. This translated into harassment following the 1962 coup that has led to nearly five decades of military rule by the ethnic Burman majority. Thousands fled to Bangladesh to escape a 1978 military census of the Rohingyas called “Operation Dragon.”

Refugees typically leave Rakhaine state for Bangladesh first before taking off in their flimsy fishing boats to find a new life elsewhere in Southeast Asia. On a recent Reuters visit to a Bangladeshi refugee camp, our correspondent Nizam Ahmed heard harrowing tales of being rape, torture and slave labour. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says 200,000 Rohingyas now live a perilous, stateless existence in Bangladesh. As a result, thousands have fled to try to start new lives, chancing their luck in rickety wooden boats they hope will get them to Malaysia, home to 14,300 official Rohingya refugees and maybe half as many again unregistered ones.

(Photo: Rohingya refugees prepare lunch at a naval base in Indonesia’s Sabang Island, 30 Jan 2009/Tarmizy Harva)

To Myanmar’s generals, the Rohingyas are a suspect lot who support local insurgencies that threaten the unity of the country. To Myanmar’s neighbours, they are fresh wave of boat people in Asia’s endless migrations impelled by destitution. To human rights and religious groups, they are persecuted minorities. As for the desperate and stateless Rohingyas who sail off in flimsy boats hoping to wash up on a friendly shore, they just need somewhere to call home.

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.

Today is Reformation Day, the anniversary of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in eastern Germany and set off the Protestant Reformation. It is a public holiday in the five eastern German states, in Slovenia and — this year for the first time — in Chile.

Chile? Isn’t that traditionally a Catholic country? Even the Catholic parts of Germany don’t celebrate Reformation Day.

Yes, Chile is traditionally Catholic, but now only about 70% so. Like elsewhere in Latin America, Protestant churches — especially evangelicals and Pentecostals — have spread rapidly in recent decades. They now make up just over 15% of the Chilean population, up from 7% in 1970. It’s not a new story, but creating a holiday especially for Protestants is a symbolic step towards recognising the changes in the religious landscape in Latin America.

The holiday is not officially called Reformation Day but Día Nacional de las Iglesias Evangélicas y Protestantes — National Day of the Evangelical and Protestant Churches. President Michelle Bachelet mentioned the Luther link in a speech (here in Spanish) about the new holiday, which she stressed was a sign of equality of faiths in Chile’s secular state. She also called it a form of recognition of the contribution made by the evangelical churches to national progress in all fields, of their preaching of values that enrich our existence and strengthen the culture of tolerance and respect.”

Do you think if other Latin American countries will follow Santiago’s example? Should they?

Apropos Luther, Der Spiegel has an interesting article in English about how Wittenberg — whose population is only 10% Protestant — may be in for a remake to turn it into “a true Protestant Rome” . This is part of the preparations for the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day in 2017. But Calvin Year (“Calvin09″), the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, is coming up soon and Geneva will certainly play up its claim to that title.

Japan installed its first ever Roman Catholic prime minister this week, a milestone that has attracted media attention around the world — but hardly a word in his home country. It is doubtful whether most Japanese citizens are even aware that their flamboyant, manga-cartoon reading new leader, Taro Aso, has any particular religious beliefs.

Mainstream Japanese media have not touched on the fact that Aso is a member of a tiny religious minority — about 0.4% of the population — in a country where both Buddhism and Shinto rituals are a part of every day life for many. Aso himself rarely mentions his Catholicism, except when speaking to foreign audiences.

One of the foreign audiences that noticed was the Vatican daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which enthused: “The nomination of a Catholic as prime minister is a turning point in Japanese politics, where religion has never had a real influence on public life, but the respect for traditions is shared by all sides. Recently, breaking with the proverbial reserve that Japanese politicians have on religious issues, the new prime minister said that his family has been Catholic for four generations.”

Christian-founded schools and universities are commonplace in Japan, and many brides dream of a white wedding in a church. But converts are few.

Aso was born on the southern island of Kyushu, where Catholic missionaries gained a foothold in the 16th century, before being suppressed by a government that feared the conflicting loyalties religious faith might bring. He is the grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, prime minister during the U.S. occupation after World War Two, who is said to have converted on his deathbed, under the influence of his Catholic wife.

Though the first Catholic, Aso is the third Christian to serve as prime minister, following Tetsu Katayama and Masayoshi Ohira. Like Ohira, Aso has attended ceremonies at Yasukuni , a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that honours Japan’s war dead but is seen as by Asian critics as a symbol of the country’s past militarism.

TIKABALI, India (Reuters) - On a starry night last week, as Lal Mohan Digal prepared to go to bed, a mob of raging, machete-wielding Hindu zealots appeared above the hills of his mud house and swarmed over a bucolic hamlet in Orissa. By dawn, Christian homes in the village were smoking heaps of burnt mud and concrete shells. Churches were razed, their wooden doors and windows stripped off.

Krittivas Mukherjee, a correspondent in our New Delhi bureau, recently visited the eastern Indian state of Orissa for a first-hand view of the continuing Hindu nationalist violence against minority Christians there. His eyewitness feature “Christians cower from Hindu backlash in Orissa” paints a vivid picture of the drama unfolding in the ransacked Christian hamlets and makeshift relief centres packed with frightened refugees.

Orissa has a history of religious violence (see our factbox). The Reuters India website archive shows 37 stories since last Christmas from datelines including Bhubaneswar (Orissa state capital), New Delhi, Rome and Vatican City. The United Nations freedom of religion investigator warned back in March about more violence to come. Mukherjee’s harrowing story comes from a hamlet so small it doesn’t show on web maps.

The photo to the right went out with the following note to editors:

ATTENTION EDITOR - VISUALS COVERAGE OF SCENES OF DEATH AND INJURY The charred body of a woman lies in rubble at an orphanage after it was attacked by a mob during a statewide strike protesting the killing of a Hindu leader, in Khuntapali village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa August 25, 2008. Police were ordered to shoot rioters on sight in Orissa on Wednesday to tame rising violence between Hindus and Christians that has killed 11 people so far and left the Pope “profoundly saddened”. Three bodies were found overnight in rural Kandhamal district, where Hindu mobs have damaged more than a dozen churches and attacked Christian homes and an orphanage this week. Picture taken August 25, 2008. REUTERS/Santanu Biswal

The horror of a story like this can be hard to get across, especially without on-the-spot reports like Mukherjee’s. Do you think this violence is being adequately reported in the world media?

“Christians and Muslims routinely mistrust, disrespect and dislike each other, if not popularly and actively rubbish, dehumanize, demonize, despise and attack each other.”
Hmmm … this doesn’t sound like your usual speech at a conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue.

“With such an explosive mix, popular religious conflicts, even unto genocide, are lurking around the corner.” Um, er … the gloves are really off.

“God forbid, a few more terrorist attacks, a few more national security emergencies, a few more demagogues, a few more national protection laws, and then internment camps, if not concentration camps, are not inconceivable in some places.”

The speaker was Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal, sponsor of the Common Word project, at the opening of a public conference of 150 Christians and Muslims meeting at Yale University to discuss love of God and love of neighbor as the core principles of the world’s two largest religions.

Instead of speaking about love, however, his remarks focused mostly on the hate and violence he fears could erupt if the two faiths do not reach a better understanding of each other. Two other quotes give a further glimpse of his fears:

• The Holocaust of six million Jews, then the largest religious minority in Europe 65 years ago and still in living memory, is something that Muslims in the West now should contemplate as seriously as Jews do.
• This is the stage where Hutus and Tutsis, both Christian tribes by their own confessions, were at in Rwanda before the popular genocide by machete of nearly a million people in 1994. How much easier would it be for Muslims and Christians who have been fighting for over a millennium and have viewed each other with the deepest suspsicions since St. John of Damascus to slaughter each other?

See our news report here. Excerpts from Ghazi’s speech are on the next page.

Reactions to the speech were mixed. Several participants said it echoed fears widespread in the Middle East. Some thought it was overdone, but others felt it was a sober assessment of what could happen if … One pointed out it was hard to dismiss the possibility of violent religious strife when one of the leading figures at the conference is Bosnia’s Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric. Although he kept the meeting amused with his witty speech, his mere presence is a reminder of the murder of an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in July 1995.

Relations between Christians and Muslims are often in the news these days. What’s your opinion about the state of understanding or tension between them?

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Turkey’s ruling AK Party, which has its roots in political Islam, has preached a message of religious freedom as a way to expand liberties for believers in the officially secular country. It has assured the European Union it would respect freedoms for religious minorities. There has been some progress for minorities, but it is halting. The government’s focus seems to be more on assuring religious rights for pious Sunni Muslims, as in ending of the university headscarf ban. Religious minorities still face an uphill struggle to practice as they see fit.

Turkey’s Alevis, some 15-25 million whose faith is rooted in Islam but mixed with other traditions including ….shamanism, form the country’s leargest religious minority but they have never been recognised as a formal religion. This means they can be lumped together with Sunni Muslims, as a recent court case about the mandatory religion classes in state schools showed. The classes, taught in all primary schools, serve as an instruction guide to being Muslim, with topics ranging from how to pray in a mosque to fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

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Alevi Hatice Kose took the education ministry to court to win permission to pull her son out of the classes and change the curriculum to include information about Alevis. She won the case, but the government has said it has no power to change the classes, which it says are protected in Turkey’s constitution.

For more on this, see our feature here. And here’s the full slideshow from the Alevi prayer service pictured above.

The rest of the world often forgets that there are Christian churches dotted across the Muslim world and some of those communities date back to the earliest years of the faith. Fredrik Dahl and Reza Derakhshi from our Tehran bureau recently visited a remote medieval outpost of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their report says:

The last priest left the Black Church more than half a century ago and now the picture on the wall of a former monk’s cell is of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, not Jesus.

But Iran says this medieval Armenian Christian retreat in a mountainous region close to Turkey and Armenia shows it is observing the rights of other faiths.

Read the full story here.

Dahl interviewed Sebouh Sarkissian, the Armenian archbishop of Tehran, for the feature. As a FaithWorld extra, here is the Q&A of their talk:

Armenians make up the largest Christian minority in Iran, their presence dating back to the time of the ancient Persian empire, but their numbers have declined since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Sebouh Sarkissian, Armenian archbishop in Tehran for the past eight years, spoke to Reuters at his office next to the Armenian cathedral in the Iranian capital about the situation for his community in the Islamic Republic.

Q. What do you think of Iran’s application for a medieval Armenian monastery, St Thaddeus Church, also known as the Black Church, to become a United Nations World Heritage site?

A. We have the feeling that the government is taking care of our religious heritage, historical churches and sacred sites … This of course makes us happy.

Q. What would it mean in practical terms?

A. It will be supervised by (an) international body … and it also somehow secures the existence of that church.

Q. So you are well-treated by the authorities?

A. In this manner yes; in keeping, maintaining, the spiritual richness and religious sites of this country.

Q. Any problems facing Armenians in Iran today?

A. Generally speaking, as citizens of this country, we are facing the same difficulties that every Iranian is facing nowadays … The Armenians, since they have been living here for
centuries, they have accommodated themselves to the Iranian lifestyle. Despite having said this, sometimes as a Christian community we face difficulties.

Q. Any examples?

A. Well, for instance, the government has prepared a textbook of religion and they have imposed (a rule) on us to teach that text book… Of course they are not familiar with Christian expressions and mentality … so that is one of the main difficulties.

Q. Do you think this book will be removed?

A. Once when I was talking to the (government) minister I asked him: ‘would you accept … that I prepare a text book on Islam, on the Koran, and ask some other Christians to come and teach it in your schools? Would you accept that?’ He started laughing.

Q. Does your community experience discrimination in Iran?

A. Not as such … I think it is an innovation from the West, that people are coming and always asking: is there discrimination in this country? I can tell you that I’ve felt
discrimination even in the United states, even in Europe.

Q. Can you drink alcohol, even though it is banned in Iran?

A. Alcoholic drinks are allowed, not officially of course … we use wine during the mass, the worship, and that’s why they somehow allow us to do (it) … but in general the
usage of alcohol is not good. It is not encouraged.

Q. Have many Armenians left Iran since the revolution?

A. The process of migration regarding the Armenian community started even before the revolution … Immigration and migration, it is a phenomenon all over the world … not
anything peculiar to Iran and Iranian society.”

Q. You don’t believe it is a sign they are not well-treated?

A. No, because even Iranians are emigrating from this country, not only Christians, not only Armenians.

Q. Do you see a future for the Armenian community in Iran?

A. Yes, definitely, our existence is rooted in this soil, in this country … I don’t think we are in danger. If we are in danger it means the whole society is in danger.