FACILITATORS Myanmar is one of the world’s most deeply religious societies.149 Approximately 90 percent of the population is Theravada Buddhist,150 and monks exert a deep spiritual and moral influence over Burmese society. However, unlike monks in other Buddhist nations, such as in Sri Lanka, Burmese monks are banned from “secular affairs.” They are prohibited from voting in parliamentary elections and cannot participate in politics.151 Nevertheless, monks have been at the forefront of many of Myanmar’s pivotal historical turning points, including during the struggle for independence against British colonialists and during the 2007 “Saffron Revolution” against the military junta.152 However, the role of religion in Burmese politics extends beyond just specific events. A monastery is at the center of cultural and social life, especially in rural areas. As Matthew Walton, one of the foremost scholars on religion and politics in Myanmar, has stated, Buddhism provides a “repertoire of ‘raw materials’ that people have used to make sense of their political environment.” As a result, “Burmese political thinkers have constructed Buddhist arguments to both [legitimize] and criticize various forms of political authority and political ideologies.”153 As one of the country’s largest religious organizations, the Ma Ba Tha lends significant legitimacy to the anti-Muslim narratives that are poisoning Myanmar’s socio-political discourse. The Ma Ba Tha claims to have over 250 offices and 10 million followers across the nation, 154 and while this figure is uncorroborated, the size of its recent rallies do indicate very significant support from within both the monkhood and the laypeople.155 However, these tens of thousands of affiliated Ma Ba Tha monks are spread out in local chapters across the country; as a result, they have significant autonomy in their local operations. Thus, rather than a hierarchical organization, the Ma Ba Tha is perhaps better understood as a network of similarly inclined individuals, each with their own respective patronage systems and activities. This network has a central organizational core that provides an ideological direction for chapters, but is unlikely to exert much direct operational control over all chapter activities. Organization Image 21: Ma Ba Tha Central Committee Hierarchy Chart 23