The changing religious economy of colonial Burma

Muslims were certainly no strangers to the pre-colonial kingdoms of Burma, having established a presence in such capitals as Mrauk-U, Amarapura and Mandalay.Footnote ⁹ Like other early modern imperial states, those of Burma became religiously diverse through the migration of Muslim and Christian merchants and mercenaries of Deccani, Chinese, Armenian or Portuguese origins. Some of these immigrant Muslims rose to influential positions in Burmese state and society, as in the case of Sayyid Muhammad Sharif ‘Abid Shah Husayni (1776–1814), a Sufi who migrated from the erstwhile Mughal capital of Aurangabad to Amarapura, where he was installed as official leader of the capital's Muslims by King Bodawpaya (r.1782–1819).Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the presence of such non-Buddhist communities and the occasional patronage of their notables by canny or cosmopolitan emperors cannot hide the fundamental character of pre-colonial Burma's religious economy. As in other early modern empires (whether Qing, Mughal or Ottoman), in Burma the tolerance and occasional promotion of religious minorities was underwritten by powerful reciprocal ties between the state and its favoured religion of Theravada Buddhism.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, the tolerant benevolence of Bodawpaya did not shift the fundamental balance of religious power in pre-colonial Burma any more than the temple donations of Akbar alter the favoured position given to Muslims in the religious economy of Mughal India. In regions of state influence at least, whether in terms of debate or conversion, religious exchange was strictly curtailed by the uneven positions (and in many cases, the rights) afforded to different religious communities.

Moreover, as in other pre-industrial and pre-capitalist religious economies, in Burma the most important investors in the religious economy were the state and its affiliates rather than a wage-earning public. As testified by the countless monastic and temple endowments made in Pagan, the preeminence of Buddhist actors in Burma's religious economy was the fruit of courtly gifts of land, slaves, gold, musicians and dancers.Footnote ¹² As late as the second half of the nineteenth century, the court remained at the centre of the Theravada-dominated religious economy through the patronage of the Sangha via the monasteries, the ponna establishment, the Ecclesiastical Council and the Thathanabaing (Primate). King Mindon (r.1853–78), for example, was reported to have supported 217 monasteries with over 15,000 monks to the tune of almost 9,000 rupees per year.Footnote ¹³ This state-dominated religious economy continued right up to the final destruction of Burmese statehood with the Third Anglo–Burmese War of 1885, after which the colonial state followed its avowed ‘principles’ of religious non-interference and left the Thathanabaing and the Sangha at large to fend for themselves.Footnote ¹⁴ While a few decades later, the combined shock therapy of sudden disenfranchisement and intensified competition from non-Buddhist religious firms led to the emergence of new Buddhist religious entrepreneurs and firms, the years directly around 1885 represented a period of religious crisis for the Burmese Sangha. As we will see below in the case study of Sayr-e Barhma, Muslim missionaries followed their rival Christian firms to Mandalay to seek new followers amid the ruins of the shattered former order.

With Burma's monks and monasteries now separated from the state and its support, they too had to turn to the public in the manner of the more diverse religious firms that had already been operating in British Burma for over half a century by 1885. The appeal to the public as religious patrons that was made possible by the technical evolution of a public sphere and made profitable by the development of wage-earning capitalist economies would only emerge in Burma during the nineteenth century. Rather than this appear to be an argument for seeing European colonisers as the initiators of all change, it is important here to recognise the emphasis that the model of religious economy lends to dynamic, two-way exchange. For it was not so much colonial Christians who transformed the religious economy of Burma. Rather, on the larger scale, it was the innovative adaptation of new communication technologies, organisational methods and fund-raising techniques by a whole host of Asian religious entrepreneurs, including Buddhists, Hindus and native Christians as well as Muslims.

As in other unregulated religious economies in which the state commits to a policy of non-interference in religious affairs, in Burma under colonial (as opposed to royal) rule, the separation of the colonial state from religious affairs laid the preconditions for a more diversified but thereby more competitive pattern of religious exchange. In short, the colonisation of Burma saw the replacement of a religious economy dominated by a state/Theravada establishment with a new ‘liberal’ dispensation in which Christianity, Islam and Hinduism could, in principle, compete with Buddhism on equal terms. Shifting as it did the balance of socio-religious power, the social outcomes of this newly ‘liberal’ religious economy were at times far from harmonious. Coupled with the effects of conquest on the undermining of the Burmese Sangha's principal state investors, for several decades the effects of this religious laissez-faire favoured Indian rather than Burmese religious organisations.Footnote ¹⁵

As in other coastal cities around the Indian Ocean from Bombay to Malacca, these policies initially had the effect of encouraging a wide variety of Protestant missionaries to establish franchises in British Burma.Footnote ¹⁶ As in other colonial port cities, these missionary firms acted as catalysts that triggered new cycles of adaptation, innovation and production among, first, immigrant and, subsequently, indigenous religious entrepreneurs. This occurred through the combined effect of the missionary critique of pre-existing local religious firms and establishments; the promotion of an ideology of individual conscience that underwrote free religious choice; the use of the new social and fund-raising organisation of the lay mission; and the introduction of new communication technologies, principally by way of printing in vernacular languages.Footnote ¹⁷ In Burma, the main early entrepreneur in this mould was the American Baptist, Adoniram Judson (1788–1850).Footnote ¹⁸ As early as 1817, Judson had translated the Gospel of Matthew into Burmese and printed 800 copies: it was the first Burmese text ever printed in Burma and was later followed by Judson's publication of the entire Bible in Burmese.Footnote ¹⁹ Within five years, he had converted 18 locals; but by the time of his death in 1850, the great cycle of Karen and Kachin conversions was well under way.

Because the First Anglo–Burmese War took place a decade after the renewal of the East India Company's charter in 1813 opened its territories to Christian missions, the gradual colonisation of Burma saw the influx of many Christian missionary firms. While Catholic missionary activity had begun as early as 1721, the initial administrative capital of British Burma at Moulmein became an important point of religious productivity with the establishment of a franchise of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1859, followed by another in Rangoon in 1862.Footnote ²⁰ Many other Christian religious firms followed, whether funded by American Methodists, French Catholics or Calcutta-based Armenians.Footnote ²¹ Alongside their establishment of schools, as we have seen with Adoniram Judson, local franchises of such transnational firms as the Bible Society, the American Baptist Mission and the Bible and Tract Society were important innovators and investors in printing in Burmese and the vernaculars. The scale of their endeavours was vast. To take just the example of the Baptist mission at Moulmein, between April 1830 and December 1832 it issued a quarter of a million Christian tracts amounting to over four million pages of Burmese text.Footnote ²² With the adaptive logic of religious economy, the Catholic missions began to follow the Protestants' innovations. In 1894, for example, the St Peter's Institute Press in the colonial port of Bassein issued Burmese translations of Revd D'Cruz's ‘Handbook for catechists’ (in 1,000 copies) and ‘Abridgement of Christian doctrine’ (in 2,500 copies).Footnote ²³ From Rangoon and later Mandalay, from the 1870s these missionary innovations in printing were adapted by local entrepreneurs who not only initiated the beginnings of a printed Burmese religious literature, but also the beginnings of modern Burmese literature per se.Footnote ²⁴ Reflecting the diversification of the religious no less than the textual marketplace, other print entrepreneurs established newspapers in Indian and Chinese languages.

However, it was not only such supply side factors as the arrival of new missionary firms that caused the transformation of Burma's religious economy. As in other regions around the Indian Ocean, from South Africa to Malaya, the most significant factor in the transformation of religious exchange was demographic. For in religious no less than more familiar economic terms, colonial migration created massive new demand for different religious service-providers who had not formerly operated in particular markets. In the Burmese case, the immigration of vast numbers of Indians and Chinese, along with smaller numbers of Europeans, Armenians and Sephardic Jews, thus introduced not only new religious consumers but also new religious providers who attended to their needs. The pluralising effect on the religious economy of this demographic change was exacerbated by the colonial and capitalist profile of migration: the newcomers were relatively wealthy officials, merchants and wage labourers who were able to invest more effectively in new religious firms than the peasantry of the Burmese countryside and the disenfranchised Burmese nobility, all the more so after the final conquest of Mandalay in 1885. As a result, Burma's religious economy was rapidly changed into a more capitalistic one spurred by the investments of a far more diverse set of consumers than its pre-colonial counterpart over which the Buddhist state had predominated. Since the colonial immigration of peoples was accompanied by the introduction of new forms of communication technology (such as vernacular printing) and social organisation (such as the voluntary association), what we see here was the creation of a new kind of religious public that acted as consumer and investor in many new religious firms.

The evidence for this transformation could be seen most visibly in Rangoon, where between the 1880s and 1900s this new immigrant religious public rapidly endowed a spate of churches, chapels, mosques, temples, and a synagogue. In 1836, Revd Cephas Bennett described Rangoon as having ‘four or five small brick places of worship’, which comprised three mosques and an Armenian and Catholic church.Footnote ²⁵ When Rangoon became the capital of British Burma after the Second Anglo–Burmese War of 1852, the new city plan that was laid out included spaces set aside for religious institutions for the city's migrant communities. As one visitor to Rangoon wrote in 1903, Mogul Street ‘begins with the funnel of an ocean steamer, rises to the white minarets of a Musulman mosque and ends under the wooden eaves of a native Christian chapel’.Footnote ²⁶ Although the East India Company, and after 1858 the British Raj, was officially committed to its policy of non-interference in religious matters, as we have seen, it did at times interfere in the religious economies of its domains. Thus, in Rangoon, the lots set aside for religious institutions in the plan for the new capital were given as free land grants exempt of taxation, effectively resulting in an act of official investment in outposts for the American Baptist Mission, the Armenian Church, two Chinese temples, a Shi‘a mosque and a synagogue.Footnote ²⁷ Given that the Shwedagon, Rangoon's grandest symbol of Burma's Buddhist identity, had been effectively disestablished as a result of its incorporation into the new military cantonment following the city's conquest, the land grants represented a significant power shift in the religious economy of what colonial immigration was rapidly transforming into Burma's largest city.Footnote ²⁸

Immigrant Muslim religious firms were among the most significant participants in this new religious economy. The investment of such merchants as Mohammed Ibrahim Ispahani and Mohammed Hadi Kabuli saw the construction in Rangoon of numerous significant mosques, which differed from the mosques of pre-colonial Burma and India by being what we might term ‘storefront mosques’ contained within fixed urban lots and aligned to the preordained contours of planned city streets.Footnote ²⁹ In 1885, for example, Muslim shipowners from Chittagong funded the construction of the Chittagonian Arkati mosque, located between the Armenian church and the Methodist chapel; in 1914, wealthy Shi‘a merchants rebuilt their earlier wooden place of worship into the city's most imposing mosque.Footnote ³⁰ Many other mosques were built, catering to distinct immigrant populations from Gujarat, Bengal, the Coromandel coast, the United Provinces and so forth. All of these new institutions were a response to the religious demand created by a massive increase in the Muslim presence in Burma, which was concentrated in Rangoon. In 1872, the city's Muslim population stood at 416; less than a decade later, in 1881, it stood at 21,169 and had increased again to over 29,000 by 1891 and 41,846 by 1901.Footnote ³¹ In proportional terms, Muslims represented the largest population increase of any religious group during this period.

Alongside mosques, the demand for a range of services that was created by this huge demographic growth led to the foundation of a range of different Muslim religious firms whose specialised services ranged from miracles and medicine to providing education and legalising marriages. One set of Muslim religious firms, including the Variav Sunni Vohra Panchayat Trust (founded 1895), the Jamiat Ulama El-Islam (founded 1916) and the Cholia Muslim Religious Fund Trust (founded 1921) thus catered to demand for welfare services.Footnote ³² In 1909, these firms were joined by the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference (founded 1886), which held its large annual meeting in Rangoon, leading the way for the founding of the Burmese Muslim Educational Conference in 1929. Demand for more miraculous services was catered to by the growing number of Sufi shrines that emerged around Rangoon, particularly in its Muslim cemetery, such as the shrines of Shaykh Farid and Baba Fayz Ahmad Shah. This process reflected developments in Bombay at the same time, where the similar influx of a proletarian Muslim labour force stimulated massive demand for miraculous cures and consolations that fed a thriving ‘economy of enchantment’.Footnote ³³

Aside from hosting the institutional presence of these religious firms, Rangoon's integration into the Indian Ocean's steamship networks also allowed it to play host to a multiplicity of visiting religious entrepreneurs, whether Muslim or otherwise. Some of these came from India, as in the case of the Ahmadiyya missionaries spreading word of the Muslim messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), such as Kamal al-Din, and roving Shi‘a preachers such as Mawlwi Kifayat Husayn.Footnote ³⁴ Others came from afar, such as the American convert Alexander Mohammed Russell Webb (1846–1916), who in 1893 delivered lectures on the motivations behind his conversion in both Bombay and Rangoon.Footnote ³⁵ One of the steam age's new globetrotting impresarios of Islam, Webb had the text of his Rangoon lecture translated into Urdu as Isha‘at-e Islam (‘The propagation of Islam’) and printed in Lahore.Footnote ³⁶ Another such convert entrepreneur was the Scotsman, John Yehya-en-Nasr Parkinson (1874–1918), who used his two-year tenure between 1908 and 1910 as deputy editor of a Rangoon newspaper to publish a number of books propagating the benefits of Islam.Footnote ³⁷ On his return to London, Parkinson attempted to take his entrepreneurship from the textual to the institutional level by campaigning for a shrine to be built over the unmarked grave of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor, who was also a noted Sufi.Footnote ³⁸

Once again, the pattern was a more general outcome of the more diversified and productive religious economy that emerged as part of Burma's wider colonial transformation. Thus, the same patterns of religious production saw the emergence of new Buddhist religious entrepreneurs and firms in what Julianne Schober has called a pattern of ‘transnational hybridity’.Footnote ³⁹ The most famous of these new firms were the Thathana Hita Athin (Foreign Mission Society, founded 1905) and the Young Men's Buddhist Association (founded 1906), based in Rangoon, though others, such as the Sasana Nuggaha Athin (Mission Association, founded 1897), were established in Mandalay.Footnote ⁴⁰ As the names suggests, such new firms were indeed hybrid organisations, in many cases formed through associations with Europeans that allowed Burman Buddhist entrepreneurs to adapt European concepts and technologies for their own purposes.Footnote ⁴¹ One such European ‘supplier’ was the early British Buddhist convert, Charles Henry Allan Bennett (Ananda Metteyya, 1872–1923), who in 1903 established the Buddhasasana Samagama (International Buddhist Society) in Rangoon, from where he set out on a circuit of missionary tours, including to Britain.Footnote ⁴² Like Bombay a generation earlier, Rangoon in this way became a new centre of religious production and export, not least through such exported religious products as the English-language journal Buddhism, which was printed from 1903 to 1908 by Rangoon's Hanthawaddy Press.Footnote ⁴³ Bennett was followed by other European religious innovators such as the German Anton Gueth (Mahathera Nyanatiloka, 1878–1957), who converted in Rangoon in 1903.Footnote ⁴⁴ The port city also played host to other impresarios such as Laurence O'Rourke (U Dhammaloka), the mysterious Irish former sailor who similarly promoted the Sangha along the steam routes linking Burma with Ceylon and Japan.Footnote ⁴⁵ As in Bombay at the same time, vernacular printing was central to the communicational outreach of these new ‘hybrid’ firms and entrepreneurs, as in 1891 when the American Theosophical Buddhist Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) had his Buddhist catechism translated into Burmese in Rangoon.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the 1890s vernacular printing was also being adapted to circulate supernatural rumours and prognostications.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other cases, by the 1920s Burman religious entrepreneurs were using new print media and public rallies to gain followers or else draw on traditional quasi-messianic notions of the ‘Future King’ (minlaung) to garner popular support among both rural and urban lower classes.Footnote ⁴⁸

Rangoon also became a centre of new Hindu religious institutions. Tamil Hindu Chettiar merchants and moneylenders funded the construction of the Nattukottai temple in Rangoon as early as 1860, while from at least 1889, when Swami Atma Ananda Saraswati of Benares reached Rangoon, such new Hindu religious firms as the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission dispatched their own representatives to Burma.Footnote ⁴⁹ Little surprise, then, that Baha'i, the greatest Middle Eastern new religious firm of the age, also dispatched representatives, a natural development from the propagation centre they had established in Bombay in the 1850s.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, in 1878, the Baha'i missionaries Jamal Effendi and Sayyid Mustafa Rumi arrived in Rangoon and settled amid the Iranian and Indian community that was already established along the city's famous Mogul Street.Footnote ⁵¹

As is suggested by this short sketch of just some of the new missionary entrants to Burma's diversifying religious markets, the half century of intense immigration to Burma that began in the 1870s resulted in the influx of many entrepreneurs and firms seeking followers and patrons amid what was also a booming colonial economy of conquest and commodification. It was this larger process that surrounded the arrival and activities of Mawlwi ‘Abd al-Khaliq Khan Muwahid, the author of the Urdu Sayr-e Barhma, to which we can now turn.

Sayr-e Barhma: An overview

An Urdu lithographic book of 39 pages, Sayr-e Barhma was published in the Indian city of Lucknow in 1893.Footnote ⁵² We know nothing of its author, ‘Abd al-Khaliq, other than what the text itself reveals: he explained in his foreword (dibacha) that he was raised in the Jahanabad neighbourhood of Rae Bareli and had resided for ‘a long time’ (muddat-e daraz) in Burma in such cities as Rangoon and Mandalay, as well as the town of Minbu, which lay around 500 kilometres north of Rangoon along the Irrawaddy.Footnote ⁵³ Then, having returned to his home town in India, he was encouraged to write a book by a close friend. These meagre details do lend a certain amount of insight. Jahanabad was an old Muslim suburb of Rae Bareli that had been founded in the early seventeenth century by the Mughal notable Jahan Khan, who had built a large mosque, palace and tomb which were all still in good condition in ‘Abd al-Khaliq's day.Footnote ⁵⁴ Till the mid-1850s, the town had still formed part of the Muslim state of Awadh, making it almost certain that ‘Abd al-Khaliq had been alive and perhaps even witnessed the colonial annexation of northern India's last great Muslim state. Like other qasba towns around the former Muslim capital of Lucknow (from which it was less than 50 miles distant), Rae Bareli cherished its traditions of Muslim learning in which Urdu had come to play an increasingly important part during ‘Abd al-Khaliq's lifetime. Indeed, Lucknow — where Sayr-e Barhma was published and to which Rae Bareli was linked by rail in the year of its publication — became India's most important centre of Urdu publishing in this period.Footnote ⁵⁵ Containing India's greatest concentration of educated and erstwhile elite Muslims disenfranchised by colonial rule, during the last few decades of the nineteenth century the surrounding region of the United Provinces produced many new Muslim religious firms and entrepreneurs.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, reflecting what we have seen taking place in Burma, shortly after its own annexation, in 1864 Rae Bareli also saw the founding of an important franchise of the American Methodist Mission.Footnote ⁵⁷ Responding to the many Christian missionaries that entered the United Provinces, new Muslim religious leaders emerged who adopted the missionaries’ strategy of the public debate to create mass public debates of their own in which they challenged Christian, Hindu and other Muslim leaders alike.Footnote ⁵⁸ This background allows us to make more sense of ‘Abd al-Khaliq's concerns in his Sayr-e Barhma with understanding the ‘religion of Burma’ (mazhab-e Barhma) and, in its central section, with defeating the man whom he understood to be its chief representative, the Thathanabaing.

While ‘Abd al-Khaliq gave no details of his occupation during his years in Burma, from both his honorific religious title of Mawlwi (‘Master’) and what we will see below of the text's description of his activities there, it is clear that he was by profession a Muslim cleric (‘alim). This conclusion seems to be confirmed by the linguistic evidence of the text itself, with its multiple Arabicisms and learned phrases, as well as its reference to its author's ‘research’ (tahqiq) in Burma and the Burmese books he had read. Moreover, the main focus of the text was not so much on Burma as a place but on the Burmans as a religious group.

Produced by a commercial press in what was then the leading city of Urdu publishing, the book's title of Sayr-e Barhma (‘Burmese journey’) sought to appeal to the vibrant colonial market for Urdu travel books that accompanied the expansion of industrial travel.Footnote ⁵⁹ But while the book was certainly the outcome of travel to Burma — as we have seen its author explain in his foreword — it did not conform to the usual conventions of the Urdu safarnama (‘travelogue’) genre as either travel guide or travel memoir and its overall purposes were quite different.Footnote ⁶⁰ There was a short section on the urban and rural geography of Burma, but this amounted to only one of its almost forty pages.Footnote ⁶¹ Unlike such guides as its 1892 contemporary, Sayr-e Ajmer (‘The journey to Ajmer’), Sayr-e Barhma gave no practical information on transport, lodgings or sights for the future traveller.Footnote ⁶² In this way it also differed from such Urdu hajj narratives as its 1879 predecessor Jada-e Haqq (‘Boulevard of truth’), which advised the potential pilgrims among its readers about ticket prices, train connections and shipping routes, and its 1934 successor, Sayr-e Afghanistan, which gave readers a clear picture of the practicalities of travelling from Delhi to Kabul.Footnote ⁶³ Quite unlike these travelogues proper, despite its title Sayr-e Barhma was primarily concerned with Burmans as a religious community, devoting most of its contents to the beliefs, practices and formal religious knowledge of the followers of what it called the ‘religion of Burma’ (mazhab-e Barhma).

Before moving on to a more detailed analysis of the text's contents and how they related to the new religious economy of colonial Burma, it is important to address Sayr-e Barhma's likely intended readership. The only explicit evidence is the author's statement in his preface that he had written it ‘for his fellow countrymen (mulki baradar) who were unacquainted (na-waqif) with Burma’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Authorial intentions notwithstanding, given the traffic in texts and persons between the ports of India and Burma in this period, it is quite possible that it also found readers in Burma itself. For despite the presence of many Bengali and Tamil speakers among the Indians in Burma, Urdu was the main Indian language in colonial Burma, used as an educational and literary language between Muslims in its written ‘Urdu’ form and as a lingua franca between colonial officials, Indian residents and ordinary Burmese in its colloquial ‘Hindustani’ form. (As Orwell's Mrs Lackersteen put it, ‘only missionary-women spoke Burmese; nice women found kitchen Urdu quite as much as they needed’.Footnote ⁶⁵) Indeed, Rangoon later had its own Urdu newspaper, Akhbar-e Barhma.Footnote ⁶⁶

Yet despite being written at the height of Indian migration to Burma, Sayr-e Barhma made hardly any mention of the colonial geography of Burma and absolutely no reference at all to Indian settlement and employment there. This is striking, for other Urdu travel accounts of the period that dealt with comparable regions of Indian overseas settlement, such as East Africa, gave the kind of extensive and practical detail of the towns, lifestyles and working practices in which Indian labour migrants and settlers would find themselves. An example is the Safarnama-e Uganda wa Mumbasa (‘Travelogue of Uganda and Mombasa’), written just a few years after Sayr-e Barhma in 1901, which gave such practical detail in abundance.Footnote ⁶⁷ Given that the largest single employer of Indian migrants to Burma was the railway, compared to the Safarnama-e Uganda's abundant detail on the East Africa Railway, the lack of any such reference in Sayr-e Barhma clearly points to quite other purposes than advising the immigrant worker.Footnote ⁶⁸ For the focus of the Urdu text was on an unfamiliar and wholly ‘other’ Burma, neither British nor Indian, which was principally characterised by its distinctive religion. Given ‘Abd al-Khaliq's own words that he intended the book for his ‘fellow countrymen’ and what we will see below of the contents and tenor of his book, there is reason to believe that the book was intended for a readership of Muslim clerics such as himself who, armed with the knowledge of what he had revealed of the ‘Burman religion’, might follow his example of travelling to Burma and debating its religious leaders in public. The case for such a reading can now be made by linking the contents of Sayr-e Barhma to the context we have established of the transformation of Burma's religious economy with the coming of British rule and, most crucially, the conquest of Mandalay less than seven years before the book was published.

Ethnography in Urdu: Knowing the Barhma

In line with its author's concerns, around three-quarters of Sayr-e Barhma is devoted to discussion of religion, including the entire first half of the text. Unlike other Urdu ‘travel’ writings of the period, which provided practical information for travellers, pilgrims and settlers, this religious orientation points again to the purposes of the text as conceived by its author, whom we will see below engaging no less a figure than the Thathanabaing in religious debate. There are striking similarities between Sayr-e Barhma and the techniques of Christian missionary ethnography and orientalism in which knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the religious other was gathered for the purpose of their refutation on the ultimate path to conversion. For while ‘Abd al-Khaliq repeatedly described his investigations into the religion, language, history and ethnography of the Burmans as ‘research’ (tahqiq), he was absolutely clear about the superiority of Islam and his hope that the Burmans would be converted. Not only, as we will see, did he suggest that Buddhist beliefs might be a corrupted echo of Islam, he even more explicitly declared his belief that ‘there is a great need among this community for a guide (hadi) who can show them the difference between idolatry (shirk) and monotheism (tawhid) and so show them the faults of their own religion and make them Muslims’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bearing this agenda in mind, we can now turn to the fruits of his ‘research’ as presented in the text.

To begin with basic categories, while a case might be made for ‘Abd al-Khaliq adopting colonial constructions by framing the Burmans as primarily a religious community, his choice of concept words makes it quite clear that he was drawing on long-standing Islamic categories which ultimately derived from the Quran. The Burmans were thus a qawm (‘people, tribe’) who possessed their own distinctive mazhab (‘religion’) and kitab (‘scripture’). What is most striking about ‘Abd al-Khaliq's primary categorisation of this religion is his constant reference to it as simply the ‘religion of Burma’ (mazhab-e Barhma); that is to say, he had no conception of a more general categorical entity of ‘Buddhism’. Given that he was writing in the early 1890s, a full century into colonial research on the history of Buddhism, this in turn shows that he was working outside of colonial knowledge.Footnote ⁷⁰ Moreover, whether in Urdu or Persian, even by this period hardly any works existed on Buddhism.Footnote ⁷¹ While a couple of Persian accounts of Buddhism had been written during the Mongol period in Iran and later in collaboration with orientalists in colonial India, these texts effectively lay lost in libraries to which small-town clerics like ‘Abd al-Khaliq had no access. As Sayr-e Barhma makes clear, ‘Abd al-Khaliq undertook his research from scratch by purchasing dictionaries, employing a native language teacher, reading core texts and debating with locals. On several occasions, he claimed to have mastered the language of Burma and to have studied the key texts of its religion, naming phonetically several Burmese texts that he had studied, including the Pahasya, his term for the Burmese Buddhist scriptures.Footnote ⁷²

This was no small achievement, for as Thant Myint-U has noted, relying as they did on English and ‘Hindustani’, ‘very few British officials ever learned Burmese until the twentieth century’.Footnote ⁷³ ‘Abd al-Khaliq explained to readers that he had initially tried to learn Burmese through what he referred to as ‘the dictionary of W.H. Sloan’, though had made little progress since it required the reader to already know the Burmese script.Footnote ⁷⁴ He subsequently found a more useful language guide prepared by Munshi Hanuman Parshad in which Burmese words were given in Nagari (i.e. Hindi) script and the translations in both Nagari and Urdu script.Footnote ⁷⁵ But what is revealing about this learning method is that ‘Abd al-Khaliq turned first to a dictionary prepared by a Christian missionary, for ‘the dictionary of W.H. Sloan’ was none other than the updated edition of the pioneering Burmese dictionary of the Baptist missionary, Adoniram Judson, that was published by Rangoon's American Mission Press in 1877.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, while ‘Abd al-Khaliq ultimately had to turn to an Indian book, his first instinct was to adapt a Christian missionary work for his own purposes, pointing again to the similarities between Sayr-e Barhma and Christian missionary orientalism. In employing a native language teacher and reading core texts that he identified as the scriptures of the ‘religion of Burma’ to better confute the claims of local religious leaders in debate, ‘Abd al-Khaliq used the same methods as Christian missionaries in India. As ‘Abd al-Khaliq exported these methods to Burma, we see the same pattern of adaptation and competition that was also exported from India through the western Indian Ocean in the same period.Footnote ⁷⁷

If there was as yet no detailed Muslim conception of Buddhism on which he could draw, ‘Abd al-Khaliq clearly possessed the intellectual drive to move beyond generalisations that the ‘religion of Burma’ was plain idolatry (butt-parasti, ironically a term that etymologically denoted ‘Buddha worship’). He opened his first chapter by explaining that the Burmans worship one God (khoda) and follow one scripture (kitab).Footnote ⁷⁸ Next, following Muslim theological conceptions of the primacy of prophethood, he summarised what he understood to be its counterpart by way of a system in which God manifested himself in various incarnations (pahya).Footnote ⁷⁹ He then cited a Burmese text for which he gave the phonetic title Zi-Na-Tha-Paka-Tani. The text in question was the Zinatthapakathani (from the Pali Jinatthapakāsanī), a famous Burmese-language biography of the historical Buddha written in Burmese by Kyi-thay Le-htat Sayadaw during the reign of King Mindon. According to ‘Abd al-Khaliq's reading of the Zinatthapakathani, there were thousands of these incarnations, but there were only five major ones who brought books with them, whose names (again spelt phonetically and broadly correctly) he gave as Gugatagu, Gunagun, Gataba, Shingutama and A'yi Madi.Footnote ⁸⁰ The era of Shingutama, he explained, was said to be still ongoing, after which the coming of A'yi Madi would mark the end of the world (here he used the Muslim term qiyamat or ‘Day of Judgement’).Footnote ⁸¹

With its emphasis on a sequence of messengers bringing books until a final cosmic reckoning, even the most cursory phenomenological reading of this section of the text would suggest its implications to ‘Abd al-Khaliq's Muslim readership that the ‘religion of Burma’ (mazhab-e Barhma) sounded rather like Islam and such other mazhabs as Christianity and Judaism which were a corruption of the true faith. In any case, the comparison was made more explicit in the following sections in which he gave more detail on several of the pahyas. Among the thousands which he said had existed, he chose Sulamani, Dajalla, Ma Daniga and A'yi Madi, that is, figures whose names or biographies contained clear echoes of Muslim tradition. While ‘Abd al-Khaliq did not give any details on Dajalla, it was presumably enough for readers that his name closely resembled the Urdu and Arabic Dajjal, the name for the false messiah or ‘Antichrist’. In the case of Sulamani, the comparison was made more explicit, noting that since he was said to have been either a great king who ruled the whole world or else a great pahya, Muslims (presumably Muslims in Burma) believed he was none other than the Quranic Sulayman (the Biblical Solomon), who was of course both a great king and prophet.Footnote ⁸² Turning to Ma Daniga, ‘Abd al-Khaliq explained that the author of the Zinatthapakathani wrote that he had been born in the ‘navel of the world’. Furthermore, a Burmese history book (which he phonetically titled Niya Ta Dana Chhun) further explained that Ma Daniga had brought a truthful book (sachi kitab); had once ascended into the heavens; had then returned to earth and killed a great many of his enemies; and had then cut the moon apart.Footnote ⁸³ Once again, for explanation he resorted to what ‘the Muslims say’, which was, predictably enough, that Ma Daniga was the name of Muhammad, because he too had been born in the navel of the world (i.e. Mecca); had brought a book (i.e. the Quran); had made an ascent to heaven (i.e. the mi‘raj); had returned to earth to wage war (i.e. the Prophet's jihads); and had indeed cut the moon in two (i.e. the celebrated miracle of the shaqq al-qamar or ‘splitting of the moon’). Likewise, he went on, ‘the People of Islam (ahl-e Islam)’ say that A'yi Madi is none other than the Muslims' Mahdi who will come at the end of time.Footnote ⁸⁴

What is interesting about this and other such sections of the text is its blend of comparative theology based on the careful collation of sources, the resort to folklore and the utter absence of any reliable external knowledge base. Thus, into the middle of his text-derived summary of the lives of the incarnated pahyas, ‘Abd al-Khaliq interpolated a story he had heard ‘from a respected wandering faqir’. According to this, on Burma's northern frontier there was a small mountain surrounded by vast jungle filled with dangerous predators and in one of the many caves on that mountain was a beautiful marble statue with priceless jewels for its eyes. Above the statue, in the Burmese language, was an inscription which read: ‘No-one will be saved until their every deed is in accordance with the command of Ma Daniga.’Footnote ⁸⁵ If this all sounds like a vernacular counterpart to the tale of a jewel-eyed idol at the core of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, then its rhetorical purpose was nonetheless clear. Since it was in the very next line that ‘Abd al-Khaliq explained that Muslims believe that Ma Daniga is another name for the Prophet Muhammad, the faqir's discovery of the lost inscription confirmed the implication that the ‘religion of Burma’ was, like other mazhabs, a corruption of Islam. For as this ancient item of evidence showed, not even the Burmans could be saved unless they followed the ‘command’ (he had used the Arabic theological term hukm) of Ma Daniga qua Muhammad. This overriding theological purpose also allows us to make sense of the clear factual mistakes that ‘Abd al-Khaliq made through the lack of a reliable body of research in Urdu on Buddhist history. For on several occasions, both in his account of Ma Daniga and his later account of Shingutama (that is, the figure whom we would consider the historical Buddha, Gautama), he claimed that the latter was born after the Prophet Muhammad.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, based on his calculations of dates given in the Burmese calendar, he specified that Shingutama was born on 12 Shawwal 123 Hijri (i.e. 30 August 741) and died some time during the year 203 Hijri (i.e. 818–19).Footnote ⁸⁷ Moreover, ‘Abd al-Khaliq seems to suggest that Shingutama had died in the Burmese city of Moulmein.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet if this appears to be plain error, then it was not meaningless error. For it fitted with the wider theological conceptions of its author: if Shingutama was born after the ‘final Prophet’ Muhammad, then he could not be a true messenger of God.

In noting the factual discrepancies in Sayr-e Barhma, the point is thus to draw attention to its theological purposes rather than undermine its achievements. Given that its author began with no inherited knowledge base about Buddhism, much of what he discovered was impressively accurate. For example, his realisation that Shingutama had left no book of his own, but had rather passed on his teachings orally to disciples who had subsequently compiled his teachings into textual form, among which was a canon of the ten most respected books known as the ‘Pahasya'’.Footnote ⁸⁹ He gave a detailed and accurate account of the monastic rules of the pongyis, including dress, dietary rules and vows of poverty and chastity; of the education of boys by local monasteries; of the forms of lay worship, including the popular celebration of holy days; of the conception of the universe, from its multiple heavens to the relation between the sun, moon and earth; and thence the lunar calendar that unlike the Islamic calendar began with the setting rather than new moon.Footnote ⁹⁰

In having to provide basic information that most world citizens would now take for granted — such as the fact that statues of the Buddha (Shingutama) were in human form (and hence dissimilar from the Hindu gods) — we are also reminded of the sheer alienness of the religious and cultural zone into which over a hundred thousand Indians had migrated by the time Sayr-e Barhma was published. This sense of otherness was emphasised in the ethnographic sections on Burmese ways and women. ‘Abd al-Khaliq dwelt in detail on those classic markers of alterity by way of food and dress. He told readers about the pungent fish pickle that smelt so rotten that none but the Burmans could bear it.Footnote ⁹¹ He described the lungyi-based clothing of men and women, pointing out (in a clear contrast to Muslim norms) that there was only the smallest difference between male and female dress and that men wore their hair the same as women.Footnote ⁹² Moreover, women's dress was such that it often revealed half their thighs.Footnote ⁹³ (Here, then, was the use of gendered ethnography for quite different purposes than in Rameshwari Nehru's later Hindi account of Burman women, which though dealing with similar stereotypes of the ‘free’ Burman woman did so for a distinctly feminist agenda.Footnote ⁹⁴) In similar vein, ‘Abd al-Khaliq wrote of festivals in which people painted their bodies in the form of tigers, goats, monkeys and (ritually unclean) pigs.Footnote ⁹⁵ The people as a whole were in any case described as ‘lazy, indolent and low-minded’ (sust wa kahil wa past-himmat).Footnote ⁹⁶

Even so, ‘Abd al-Khaliq's account of Burmese history from the mid-eighteenth century founding of the Konbaung dynasty through its end under Thibaw was broadly accurate, if confused on certain details. He describes its capital at the time as ‘Inwa’ (that is, Ava), which after forty-five (in fact over a hundred) years was moved to ‘Ambabuya’ (that is, Amarapura) and later to ‘Mandala’ (that is, Mandalay).Footnote ⁹⁷ In outline at least, he was able to summarise the power struggle between the royal brothers Pagan (r.1846–53) and Mindon (r.1853–78). Although his dates were admittedly out by several decades, it would be wrong to belittle ‘Abd al-Khaliq's achievement. After all, the first English history of Burma, by Sir Arthur Phayre (1812–85), was only published in book form a decade earlier than Sayr-e Barhma in 1883 (though Phayre's articles had appeared since the 1840s), and though ‘Abd al-Khaliq lacked the imperial clout that allowed Phayre, during his personal negotiations with King Mindon, to amass the dozens of Burmese manuscripts he later bequeathed to the British Museum, the Indian author sought similar empirical standards through resorting to the Burmese historical and religious manuscripts cited in his text.Footnote ⁹⁸ Like Phayre, ‘Abd al-Khaliq was also a man on the ground rather than an armchair scholar. His account of the buildings that King Mindon built in Mandalay, and of the broader topography of the region, clearly drew on his own observations there, from the ‘ten yard wide’ moat around the Mandalay palace complex to the famous wooden tower inside it and the mausoleum of King Mindon nearby.Footnote ⁹⁹

There was also room for a measure of sympathy in his account of the fall of Mandalay during the Third Anglo–Burmese War of 1885.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ All given their proper dates during that fateful November, ‘Abd al-Khaliq described the rapid British advances along the Irrawaddy; the steamships and superior firepower; the flights and massacres of Burmese soldiers; the looting (ghanimat lut) by the British forces; and the three years of resistance in the jungles and mountains that followed Mandalay's fall. It is not hard to understand the sources of sympathy. As we have seen earlier, ‘Abd al-Khaliq had seen his own home kingdom of Awadh annexed by the British during his own lifetime (and on the similar pretext of moral dissolution among the ruling family). This sense of a parallel fate seems to inform his account of court intrigues in Mandalay as leading up to the war and the final exile of King Thibaw. Yet in this account, Thibaw appears as a king who was so ‘ignorant’ (ghafil) that while the British forces were surrounding his palace he was enclosed in his ‘voluptuary palace’ (‘aysh-mahal) with women to whom he was not married.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, Thibaw was a ‘harshly oppressive pleasure-seeker and whore-monger’ (sakht zalim aram-talab wa zani) whose treatment of his people caused them to curse him, at which point the invasion occurred.Footnote ¹⁰² Here we see the exporting to Burma of a moral historiography in which dissolute rulers received their comeuppance, an Indian Muslim vision that was rising in colonial India with the Muslim reform movements that spread after the Mughal collapse of 1858. It is notable in this respect that Sayr-e Barhma contained no nostalgia nor even account of the last Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah, other than the briefest mention that his tomb stood in Rangoon.Footnote ¹⁰³ This was no time for kings; it was, after all, a time when religious entrepreneurs were emerging as the self-proclaimed leaders of India's Muslim millions.

We have already seen something of the linguistic investigations that underlay ‘Abd al-Khaliq's research, but he also included in his book several sections on the Burmese language, its written forms and key texts, which amounted to almost 23 per cent of his entire book.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Though he warned that Burmese was ‘extremely difficult’ (sakht takhlif), he advised his readers on which dictionary to buy, before then enumerating the mistakes in Hanuman Parshad's Urdu–Burmese dictionary, such as polite Burmese words being translated with harsh and rude Urdu ones (and vice-versa).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He outlined the difference between Burmese and Pali, noting that the latter was not understood by ordinary Burmans.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He then produced eight different tables detailing the Burmese alphabet, numbers, days, months, years, weights and reckoning systems.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The alphabetical table was particularly effective, giving the Burmese letter, its phonetic pronunciation and closest equivalent Urdu letter. While here too ‘Abd al-Khaliq showed the seriousness of his research, his concern with spreading knowledge of the written Burmese language points again to the core religious purposes of his work and further highlights the distinction between Sayr-e Barhma and Urdu travelogues intended for emigrants, pilgrims and tourists. For in a colonial context in which by the 1890s English and Hindustani had come to be the primary languages of government and commerce, an understanding of literary Burmese was hardly necessary for the ordinary immigrant. It was, though, essential for the would-be Muslim missionary who, like ‘Abd al-Khaliq himself, needed to master Burmese to either study and refute the Buddhist scriptures or preach and translate Muslim materials into Burmese.

In this respect, ‘Abd al-Khaliq noted that there existed only a few books in Burmese on Muslim prayers and fasting and that so far only a few short sections of the Quran had been translated.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nonetheless, he added, the Burmese seem to be very interested in printed books (kutub-e matbu‘a).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As we have seen earlier, as in other Indian Ocean cities such as Bombay, the catalytic effect of missionary printing in Moulmein and Rangoon had since the 1870s led a range of non-Christian print entrepreneurs to adapt the new technology to their own purposes. But while scholarship on Burma has so far pointed only to the participation of Burman playwrights, Buddhists and nationalists in this process, Muslim missionaries were also at work. From what texts have survived, we know that quite a number of Muslim religious works were translated from Urdu into Burmese in the years directly either side of the publication of Sayr-e Barhma in 1893. Cementing by direct connection the processual parallels with Bombay, one such work — a book on the regulations of Muslim worship containing Arabic prayers and Burmese rubrics — was printed in that city in 1890.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A series of others appeared from the new vernacular Burmese presses of Moulmein and Rangoon, including a hagiography of the Prophet Muhammad translated from Urdu; a celebration of Muslim generosity attributed to the Prophet's son-in-law Imam ‘Ali; two books on the correct observance of Muslim prayers, fasts and festivals in Arabic and Burmese script; and a critical comparison of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in which the latter emerged as superior.Footnote ¹¹¹ In the years after ‘Abd al-Khaliq published his book, other translations from Urdu began to be published in Mandalay, possibly by recent converts, including a life of the Prophet and his wife Khadija and a translation of a catechism of Muslim beliefs that contained a defence of Islam.Footnote ¹¹² By 1910, this drive towards propagation through print reached a milestone with the publication of a Burmese version of the Quran translated by an Indian Muslim born in Burma, Hajji U Ba O.Footnote ¹¹³ As the Indian presence in Mandalay rapidly increased after its conquest in 1885, it was amid this widening religious competition that ‘Abd al-Khaliq positioned himself by travelling there for his public disputation with the Thathanabaing. We can now finally turn to that debate, which formed the centrepiece of his book.

Debating the Thathanabaing

As ‘Abd al-Khaliq made clear in his foreword, unlike many Indian immigrants who resided only in Rangoon, he had lived in several Burmese cities, including Minbu and Mandalay. Given that he gave the date of the completion of his book as 16 Muharram 1310 (10 August 1892) — that is, less than seven years after the conquest of Mandalay in late November 1885 and of Minbu in March 1886 — it is important to situate the events he recounts taking place in Upper Burma (and especially Mandalay) in relation to the consequences of its fall.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As he himself recounted, the city's defeat saw the collapse of the last Burmese state and the exile of its final king.Footnote ¹¹⁵ What he didn't describe — but did nonetheless take part in — was the ensuing collapse of the pre-colonial religious economy that had supported the institutions and authorities of Theravada Buddhism.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Not only did this come through such hazards of warfare as the devastating loss of manuscripts in the looting and burning of Mandalay palace, it also came through more systematic disinvestment in Buddhist institutions as colonial rule divorced the state from the established religion of its predecessor.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The halt of court patronage of the monasteries deprived many thousands of their livelihoods and, moreover, between 1885 and 1892 a series of fires destroyed many of the former capital's monasteries.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As Mark R. Woodward has noted, ‘The British occupation of Mandalay and subsequent abolition of kingship sparked a religious crisis of major proportions.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ Whether through missionaries such as ‘Abd al-Khaliq or the many soldiers who occupied the fallen city, Indians were inseparable from this crisis.

During the 1890s Indians played a key part in installing the new colonial order as some 4,000 Indian troops and over 10,000 mostly Indian military police were stationed in the defeated provinces of Upper Burma that centred on Mandalay.Footnote ¹²⁰ Since Mandalay Hill and all of the Buddhist shrines near the old city were included in the new military cantonment, ‘many of them were used to house Indian troops, most of whom were Muslim or Sikh’.Footnote ¹²¹ And as in Rangoon beforehand, immigration followed annexation: after a decade in which Mandalay's Buddhist population had dropped by 8,000, by 1901 Indians predominated among its 21,000 foreign-born residents.Footnote ¹²² As in other regions around the Indian Ocean, such immigration was enabled by the introduction of industrialised transport, in this case the linking of Mandalay to the port of Rangoon via rail in 1889. Given that ‘Abd al-Khaliq gave the date of his debate with the Thathanabaing in Mandalay as taking place in 1307 Hijri (that is, 1889–90), there is every reason to suppose that he was one of the thousands of Indians who used the new train service during its first year.Footnote ¹²³ But what is in any case clear is that in occurring just four years after the conquest of the city, the debate took place at the peak of the Buddhist crisis in colonial Burma.

The arrival of the missionary ‘Abd al-Khaliq in Mandalay does not mean that the city was not previously home to Muslims of various kinds, for there were earlier Indian, Chinese and ‘Zirbadi’ Burmese Muslims there.Footnote ¹²⁴ Nor does his agenda suggest that these local Muslims' relations with their Buddhist neighbours was not harmonious and amicable. There was also a Christian presence in the city before 1885, though their insecure position in the state Buddhist-dominated religious economy can be gleaned from the expulsion of missionaries shortly after the accession of Thibaw in 1878.Footnote ¹²⁵ This is significant because our focus here is rather on specific religious actors — missionary entrepreneurs — rather than on communities at large. For the change in the underlying structures of religious interaction in Upper Burma that were concomitant with the region's integration into the religious economy of British Burma and the Indian Empire at large created conditions that favoured the arrival of missionary entrepreneurs to compete with representatives of the weakened former Buddhist establishment.

Muslims such as ‘Abd al-Khaliq and the translators of propagatory texts into Burmese that we have seen earlier were by no means the only immigrant impresarios to enter the new marketplace. Through the legacy of Adoniram Judson, the Baptists were the missionary pioneers of the new market and another early entrant was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which arrived under royal protection 15 years before the conquest, consolidating its position thereafter. Moreover, Methodist missionaries began to arrive almost immediately after Mandalay's fall. In 1887 the colonial authorities provided the missionary and military chaplain Joseph Bateson with one of the many abandoned monasteries in which to establish his mission; he was soon followed by other Methodists who used Mandalay as the headquarters for their wider propagation throughout Upper Burma.Footnote ¹²⁶ By the 1890s, it was not only Christians that were coming to Mandalay, but also emissaries of such new religious firms as Baha'ism and the conversionist Hindu Arya Samaj, which arrived in 1897.Footnote ¹²⁷ It was amid this wider pattern of competition that ‘Abd al-Khaliq began his debate with the Thathanabaing.

An office given shape by King Bodawpaya in 1788, the Thathanabaing (‘Controller of the Religion’) was the royally-installed primate of the Thudhamma monastic lineage of Burmese Buddhism. His task was to ensure the orthodoxy of monks and, together with the mahadan-wun (‘minister of great donations’, in fact a council), to manage the king's donations and the generations of inherited monastic and pagoda properties (wutmye wun).Footnote ¹²⁸ This Thathanabaing was not recognised by all monastic lineages and the Shwegyin, for example, had their own Thathanabaing. Although the Thathanabaing was therefore not the sole head of all Burman Buddhists in the way that ‘Abd al-Khaliq understood him to be, he was still a highly prominent selection as an opponent in a public debate over the relative merits of Buddhism and Islam. As ‘Abd al-Khaliq explained,

While this was certainly a simplification of the more divisive and complex reality of religious authority among Burma's Buddhists, the Thathanabaing was still an axial figure in Burma's pre-colonial religious economy. Whether in printed tale or public deed, to try to defeat and, moreover, convert him was a bold stratagem indeed.

Although the available evidence affords no certainty as to whether the debate ever actually took place, even as a fiction of ‘Abd al-Khaliq's invention its appearance in his printed book rendered it a public disputation. Yet, given what we have seen of the context in Mandalay and what we know of the centrality of the public debate (munazara) to the propagatory techniques of Indian Muslim missionaries at this time, there is no reason to doubt that some form of such a debate did take place. If it indeed did, the Thathanabaing in question would have been the Taungdaw Sayadaw, who had been appointed by King Thibaw in 1883 and died some six years after the purported debate in 1895. We certainly know that the Taungdaw Sayadaw became embroiled in colonial attempts to reframe the place of Buddhism in Burma, blocking British attempts in the early 1890s to use the monasteries as bridgeheads for the new educational curriculum.Footnote ¹³⁰ In accordance with their laissez-faire policies towards religion, after his death the colonial state refused to recognise his successor, U Visuddha Silacaraha (1844–1938). As they saw matters, in the months and years directly after the fall of Mandalay, various senior monks had led a whole sequence of rebellions against the British takeover.Footnote ¹³¹ Though the office of Thathanabaing was partially reinstated in 1903, it was stripped of its former influence and functions. Buddhism had indeed become one religion among many in a religious economy that it had formerly dominated.

Following the strategy of earlier Muslim and before them Christian missionaries in colonial India, ‘Abd al-Khaliq had chosen his debating opponent on the basis of a trickle-down model of conversion that focused on persuading religious leaders to convert or at least admit the inconsistencies of their doctrines. Indeed, in the run-up to the debate section, he explained that the influential monk who had taught him Burmese had eventually become a Muslim and taken a wife, leading some fourteen of his disciples to also break their vows of celibacy and convert to Islam.Footnote ¹³² As he explained to readers, ‘all of the ordinary Burmese monks respect [the Thathanabaing] so much that they ask him to adjudicate any disagreements or agreements in the scriptures. They completely follow his command and do not interpret or investigate religious matters for themselves.’Footnote ¹³³ The strategy was clear. Setting the scene for the debate in his text, he added that Christian missionaries had already tried to convert the Burmans and had been quite successful.Footnote ¹³⁴ On the day of the debate, in which he claimed the Thathanabaing had been keen to participate, ‘Abd al-Khaliq was accompanied by a Hindu, who in the text at least had the function of posing the dramatic question: ‘Let us see whether the Thathanabaing will convert to your religion (mazhab) or not.’Footnote ¹³⁵

In his book, ‘Abd al-Khaliq presented the debate in the form of a dialogue which focused on his own exposition of the logical inconsistencies of Buddhist doctrine.Footnote ¹³⁶ The debate focused on the doctrine of reincarnation (tanasukh) and its relationship to sin and punishment. As they argued back and forth, ‘Abd al-Khaliq sought to demonstrate the illogical character of reincarnation since, for example, if a person was born again in a new body and was then punished for a sin they had committed in a previous life, they would not understand what it was they were being punished for.Footnote ¹³⁷ Better the Islamic doctrine that the same body that committed the sin would be punished for it.Footnote ¹³⁸ As the Indian pushed this point through several iterations, the Thathanabaing was forced to admit that reincarnation was contrary to reason and that there could indeed be no such thing as rebirth. As ‘Abd al-Khaliq explained, ‘Aye, our Islam is, as you say, logical and natural. One needs nothing more than reason (‘aql) to understand this pure religion.’Footnote ¹³⁹ Warming to his theme, ‘Abd al-Khaliq moved on to what he saw as the morally repugnant implications of Buddhist doctrine, teasing responses from the Thathanabaing that demonstrated his point for him. Thus, if a soul was reincarnated, it was logically possible that in its next life the same person could unknowingly marry his mother or sister. Claiming to cite the Buddhist scriptures, the Indian stated that ‘according to this belief, there are thousands of people alive of forbidden (i.e. incestuous) birth and who innocently commit incest by marrying their mother or daughter or sister, or even their father, son or grandfather!’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ For ‘Abd al-Khaliq, this all served to prove that Buddhism offered a perverse theology in which humans were cosmically compelled to commit what, in Muslim terms, were the most heinous of all sins. Moreover, it logically implied a ‘blameworthy’ God, for ‘why would God not explain to someone in their second birth that “Such-and-such is your mother or daughter, so don't marry her!”?’Footnote ¹⁴¹

By not only using logic but also by resorting to what he had learned through his study of the Buddhist scriptures to cite proofs of his argument in the Pali canon itself, according to his own account ‘Abd al-Khaliq eventually forced the Thathanabaing to concede the superiority of Islam: ‘Your explanations have proved to me that your religion Islam is a true religion (apka mazhab islam ek sacha mazhab ha'i) that pleases every rational person and myself alike.’Footnote ¹⁴² Closing the debate section by this account of convincing the head of Burma's Buddhists of the superiority of Islam, ‘Abd al-Khaliq added that he had met many other monks who knew in their hearts that Islam was true.Footnote ¹⁴³

Clearly, even if the debate itself took place we must surely doubt the verbatim version that ‘Abd al-Khaliq presented: his dramatic rendering of the debate was a rhetorical exercise in which it was both necessary and inevitable that Islam would triumph. But even if we must doubt the dramatised version of the dialogue, a contextualised reading allows us to recognise it as part of the larger transformations we have seen earlier. For what we can detect in ‘Abd al-Khaliq's public display — whether in text or debate — of the logical inconsistencies in Buddhist doctrine were techniques appropriate to a new kind of religious economy in which individuals were expected to choose for themselves the most superior religious system on offer. As SherAli Tereen has written of these Muslim missionary debates in India, their polemical comparisons of different religions’ doctrines responded to ‘the emergence of a new kind of [human] subject whose job it was to decide on the truth and untruth of competing religious claims’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Whether or not we can detect such subjectivity, what we have seen clearly is the emergence of a new religious marketplace, in Rangoon and then Mandalay, in which entrepreneurs such as ‘Abd al-Khaliq sought followers amid the ruins of the old order.

The model of religious economy holds that the attacks made by ‘Abd al-Khaliq, the Muslim translators of the printed Burmese polemics, and the sundry Christian and Hindu missionaries, should have provoked the emergence of Buddhist religious entrepreneurs, just as the earlier attacks of Christian missionaries had triggered religious innovation in India. This does indeed seem to have been the case, not least with such new Buddhist religious firms as the Sasana Nuggaha Athin (Mission Association) founded in Mandalay 1897, seven years after ‘Abd al-Khaliq's activities in that city during 1889–90.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ New Buddhist religious entrepreneurs also emerged, such as Ledi Sayadaw (1846–1923), the innovative reviver of meditation (vipassana) who through printing simple works in Burmese brought to the masses techniques and teachings that were previously the preserve of ordained monks.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Among the many vernacular works that Ledi Sayadaw added to the competitive new marketplace of printed religious books was a polemical study of the ‘four great religions’ (Batha-kyi le-ba) in 1919 in which he compared his own version of Burmese Buddhism with Hinduism, Christianity and Islam.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Naturally, all three fell well short of Buddhism, and Islam was the target of especial hostility. Muslims were said to worship a powerful god who demanded from his followers sacrifices of human and animal blood (Musa/Moses was given as an example) and whose legion of evil spirits spread epidemics and disorder. Tellingly, the name that Ledi Sayadaw gave for the Muslim God in Burmese was not the Arabic word Allah but the Urdu word Khuda. Here he pointed to the Indian sources of the Islam to whose spread he was responding with the same proselytising techniques.