The diverse Muslim population of Myanmar has attracted relatively little serious academic study in recent years despite their occasional importance. Clashes, often described as Muslim-Buddhist riots, but often related to underlying economic, political or property issues, have punctuated Myanmar's domestic politics during the last century and this one. Internationally, the treatment of Muslims who are often described as ‘Rohingya from Myanmar’ has created one of the numerous issues for which the military government has been criticised for not dealing with them adequately or humanely. Dr Berlie's volume supplements other studies done earlier, particularly those by Dr Moshe Yegar over a 40-year period. One of the strengths of the Berlie book is the author's intimate personal knowledge of many of the leading figures and institutions in the contemporary Myanmar Muslim world. In that regard, his slim volume is unique.

However, The Burmanization of Myanmar's Muslims contains many errors and misleading statements. For example, the author writes on page 3 that ‘the number of followers of Islam is not reported nowadays and after 1948 does not appear in censuses, such as that of 1983’. In fact, the Burma 1983 Population Census, published in June 1986 by the Immigration and Manpower Department, Ministry of Home and Religious Affairs, Government of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma, states on pages 1–22, in Table A-7, and passim, that 3.8 per cent of the total population identify themselves as Sunni Muslims and 0.1 per cent as Shiite. Table 11, Population by Race, Sex and Religion, pages 2–55–6 of the same volume, reveals that the majority of the 1,308,524 Muslims in Burma – 743,623 – were of South Asian ethnic origin, but that followers of Islam were to be found amongst all of the major indigenous ethnic groups in the country. About a quarter of a million persons who considered themselves to be Burmese also described themselves as Muslims, and in addition, another 22,000 described themselves as Rahkine and Muslim. According to the Rakhine State 1983 Census volume, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in that western state are the descendents of relatively recent immigrants from Bangladesh.

Advocates of the rights of almost all minority groups in Myanmar claim that the official figures deliberately under-report the size of their group, Muslims included. Dr Berlie believes, but provides no evidence to support this contention, that the Muslim population is proportionately at least twice as large today as was reported in 1983, around 8 per cent on page 1 and between 7 and 10 per cent on page 107. The perception that the Muslim minority is much larger than officially reported is shared by many Burmese Buddhists as well, and is at the heart of much of the Buddhist–Muslim religious tension in Myanmar today and in the past. There is a widespread belief that if the majority does not remain alert, Buddhism will be vanquished.

That perception, which denies the longevity of a minority of the Muslim community in Myanmar, is part of the complex mixture of myth and reality which lies behind the oft-mentioned question of the Rohingya. Dr Berlie points out – and I believe correctly, based on observations made on a trip in 2009 to the Buthidaung and Maungdaw areas of northern Rahkine state where Myanmar abuts Bangladesh – that the term ‘Arakan’ or ‘Rahkine’ Muslim is better accepted by many, if not most, of the Muslims who live in that area than the term heard recently in the international media, ‘Rohingya’. ‘Rohingya’, to most of the 28.3 per cent of the population who followed Islam in 1983 in Rahkine State, was a word unheard-of until the late 1950s, when it was developed in a claim to establish a separate ethnicity with political rights, initially by university students in Yangon, and in the 1970s and subsequently by several armed factions which, with international assistance from North Africa and perhaps the Middle East, sought to break away from Myanmar and form a separate state known as Arakanistan. In that, they were lineal descendants of the Mujahadeen who fought the British in the Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung regions in 1947 in an effort to be included in East Pakistan.

The large outflows of persons from northern Rakhine State into Bangladesh, in 1978 and again in the early 1990s, underscore the fluidity and tenuous nature of the majority of the Muslim population of Myanmar. However, as Dr Berlie discusses, many Muslims have been integrated into Burmese society for centuries. His appendices provide lengthy lists of the prayer halls and mosques found in many major cities. A full list would be much longer if it were to take in places of Islamic worship in smaller towns and cities from the north to the south of the country. The volume also discusses the presence of Muslims of Burmese or Han descent in both northern Myanmar and neighbouring Yunnan. Dr Berlie's volume touches on many important subjects and demonstrates how much is not known as well as what is known, if only imperfectly. The study of Islam in Myanmar, in all its varieties and complexities, has hardly begun. The Burmanization of Myanmar's Muslims is evidence that there is much to do. A census that all could accept might be a good place to start.