M.MAS 7/22/15 threat. A focus on the falsity of some individual ‘little stories’ reinforces a questionable image of Myanmar people as naïve consumers and evaluators of information. This is an assumption that would, for example, look at those arguments justifying a sense of Muslim threat and highlight as problematic only those that are found to be untrue. Application of such an organizing principle to those arguments interpreted in this research would result in excising a large number of justifications that we heard to be important. Many of the ‘little stories’ narrators raised were not rumours, per se, but references to killings by ISIS or other incidents of violence committed by Muslims. In other cases, narrators referenced events in Myanmar that did indeed occur, elsewhere in the country, in their local area, or in their own lives. Misinformation about Islam and rumours of local and international events are in wide circulation, and are particularly visible on social media. These should be seen as important, but to focus on them exclusively is both insufficient and potentially harmful, for three reasons: First, in the encounter in which a given little story is being discussed, to make the truth or falsity of the story the central issue is to implicitly concede the premise that if the facts of the little story are true, then so too is the larger narrative about threat from Islam – and the potential legitimacy of violence. While this is not a result required by any sense of formal logic, it is the result that follows from the interpersonal interaction.64 Second, the sources referenced for such little stories are often religious leaders, family members, or neighbours. To call such a story untrue is to accuse such speakers of lying. This is untenable, particularly when the speaker is a religious leader speaking on a matter related to Buddhism. In such a context, counter-claims may inadvertently worsen conflict. Contestation by non-Buddhists against monastic pronouncements could be interpreted as attacks on Buddhism itself.65 It may also be perceived as denying the experiences of those who have faced violence or who feel that they are part of a victimized collective. Especially as the perceived denial of Buddhist suffering in Myanmar is a persistent complaint regarding outside analysis of the conflict, it is particularly important to make sure that individual experiences of violence are acknowledged and addressed. This does not imply a need to accept, for example, U Zaw Aye Maung’s claim that the Rakhine people have been victims of genocide. Simply that attention to the unequal burdens of violence or discrimination suffered by different religious and ethnic communities in Myanmar ought to be balanced by sufficient recognition of personal experiences of suffering. The central question then is not whether or not a given little story is true but how it is interpreted, and the way it is used to bolster the larger narrative of Muslims as a threat or to produce a discrete moment in 64 Exploring this dynamic as it relates to the contestation of anti-Muslim narratives in Myanmar, see Schissler, “New Technologies, Established Practices: Developing Narratives of Muslim Threat in Myanmar.” 65 Responding to claims made by religious leaders is an important instance in which attempting to respond to a given claim is complicated by the authority of speaker. One frequently-cited example is the claim (briefly described above and mentioned by several of our interviewees) that certain countries in the world, such as Afghanistan or Indonesia, ‘used to be’ Buddhist but are now Muslim, which supports the sense that Buddhism is in existential danger. Scholarly consensus on this issue would dispute whether any of those countries could have ever been labelled as ‘Buddhist’ (not to mention the fact that they were not bounded or categorized as ‘countries’ until relatively recently), rather than simply containing Buddhist communities of practice or at most Buddhist-influenced polities (On the religious history of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, for example, see F.M. Schnitger, Forgotten Kingdoms in Sumatra (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1939)). While disputing the historical veracity of these claims would be an important part of any response seeking to change the narratives associated with Islam in Myanmar, it needs to be done carefully and ideally by those who have sufficient authority in relevant spheres, such as other monks. Otherwise it could risk reinforcing a feeling that Buddhists are being particularly targeted by international criticism, a feeling that feeds into the narrative of existential threat and virtuous defence. Disputing these inaccurate historical accounts also needs to take into consideration the factual elements within them. So, for example, although Afghanistan was not formerly a ‘Buddhist country,’ the presence of large Buddhist monuments and the historical existence of Buddhist communities in that region does contribute to an intuitive sense that the region used to be ‘Buddhist.’ 18