Arakan, Displaced
Conflict in western Burma’s Arakan state has displaced thousands of Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Arakanese. From the Burmese border, Francis Wade examines the complex origins and motives behind the violence. Continue Reading →
Tag: religious conflict
Religious Ghettoization of Egypt
From Marc Michael’s “Is liberalism killing the copts?” at Al Jazeera:
Imperial liberalism not only reinforced lines of fracture in local social fabrics, but often engineered them, by inventing traditions and mythological pasts, linguistic and ethnic groupings. To this day a majority of Copts subscribe to the “Hamitic Hypothesis”: that Copts are a separate race with a separate language, that they are not Arabs but descendants of the pharaohs, the original Afro-Nilotic people of the land; in biblical terms, the accursed progeny of Ham rather than Sham.