M.MAS 7/22/15 This excerpt from the woman at the Ma Ba Tha office in Lashio illustrates the way many people understand their concerns as contemporary. It also illustrates the work that people must do to reconcile the contradiction between this narrative of threat and past experiences that do not match this narrative. In this excerpt from Lashio, the narrator accomplishes this by saying that she had only become aware of the threat from Islam following the riot in Lashio and subsequent ‘study’ with Ma Ba Tha. Variants on this were common, in which people described being newly informed or awoken; if the two religious communities had co-existed peacefully before, this telling says, it was because they did not know of the danger within their midst. That many dated this awakening to 2012 or later is relevant for additional reasons explored in the next section, though other origin points have also been noted, including the popularisation of a book about the dangers of Islam in the late 1990s59 or the perception that in approximately the early 2000s Muslims began emphasizing their difference through dress and religious practice. Not everyone, however, reconciled memories of harmony with recent tension and violence in this way. I have doubts. That religious conflict [riots in July 2014] was created by the government. But I don’t think they can make it happen again, because people have noticed it... Not long ago conflict happened, but I understood what was going on [that it had been manufactured] because Muslims and Buddhists got along in the past. It [July riots] happened out of nowhere.60 Rather than accept recent violence as an example of Muslim aggression and evidence of Muslim threat, some explicitly sought to reject such a narrative. We heard versions of this in each of the six cities, statements positioned to both reject the idea that violence in a given local area spoke to the ‘truth’ of relations between religious groups and to reject the idea that religion is driving conflict across Myanmar. Most commonly, this operated in the form of explaining violence as the product of outside machinations rather than as the local manifestation of religious antagonism. Some narrators explicitly named the government, the military, or individuals within the government or military as behind conflict, though many others did not put a name to their suspicion. A: Concerning this recent incident [riots in May 2013], we tried to figure it out and later we came to know that it was not created by people from Lashio… It was a relief for us to learn that. We pondered more about this problem with local people from Lashio and discussed it so that things like this won’t happen in the future… Q: Where do you learn this? A: Not from any one place, the whole town knows about it. We heard that they have plans, and they implement their plans… It is a good thing that no one from Lashio was involved. We just take care so that such things won’t happen in the future.61 Listening across six Myanmar cities helped us to identify a set of arguments that persistently feature in the construction of Islam as a threat for the country and for Buddhism in general. But this research also clarifies that this sense of threat and related antagonism towards Muslims is not pre-defined nor does it exist within a static set of relations. It is being produced through the mutually reinforcing interaction of everyday discourse and a narrative framework that draws on global discourses related to Islam but is also 59 Published under the name Disappearance of the Race is a Thing to Fear (A-myo: pyauk hma so: kyauk saya), this booklet (sometimes broken into a series of smaller volumes) consisted of arguments about the risk that Buddhism faces from Islam, including apocryphal stories of Muslims committing crimes against Buddhists and the loss of Buddhism in other places across the world. 60 Man, 19, Buddhist, Myanmar, Mandalay, April 2015 MSPT 6. 61 Man, 38, Christian, Kachin, Lashio, March 2015 MSPT 10. 16