I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. The author is a scholar of Burma, and his focus is on analogies between the rise of mainland Southeast Asian nation-states and other zones of Eurasia (or, lack thereof). The first volume, which I read last year, is more narrowly focused on Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and their antecedents. One aspect that stands out to me is that the Indic Southeast Asian states are some of the best analogs that I can see to the development of church-state relations to what we in the West have known. Specifically, the role of the Theravada Buddhist hierarchy in the creation of a common delineated national identity resembles the coevolution of Anglicanism and Spanish Catholicism with England and Spain (not to mention the national Lutheran Churches or French Catholicism after the expulsion of the Protestant minority).
Though religion and state have obviously had a relationship in the Islamic world, it has not been so clearly proto-national. Turkish nationalism after all arose as a reaction to and rejection of Ottoman Muslim identity, which was not ethnic. Similarly with Arab nationalism, which was to a great though not exclusive extent the product of Melkite Levantine intellectuals. The main exception I can see is the connection between Shia Islam and an Iranian national identity with a Persian ethnic core, despite the full integration and leading role of Turks in the state apparatus (the Turks under the Safavids were the founders of this new order in the 16th century). The analogy here can be made to Burma, which is far more rooted in its Theravada identity than the majority Burman ethnos (Burmans are probably around the same proportion of Burma’s population that Persians are of Iran’s; modern Myanmar’s statistics are not always reliable).
Not only was the state and national identity associated with religion, but the Theravada religious identity was assimilative, and expansive. The proto-Burmese state engaged in warfare against the rulers of Manipur in part on religious grounds, to bring the Hindu kingdom to Therevada Buddhism. Similarly, as the kingdom of Siam expanded south into peninsular Malaysia Muslim warlords who were aligned with the Thai state converted to Buddhism to signal their commitment to integration into its elite culture. In Cambodia the connection between Therevada Buddhism and national identity was strong enough that in the mid-17th century a Khmer Muslim ruler was overthrown in part due to the intrigues entailed by his religious distinction from the populace (the analogy to James II is obvious). Finally, there were many foreigners who arrived in these kingdoms, often as mercenaries. They were encouraged to convert to Buddhism. To my knowledge none of the modern Christian communities date back to the period when European mercenaries were relatively common in the 16th and 17th centuries (they brought their knowledge of firearms). All of the descendants of these men were assimilated into the population. Not so with Muslims, as ethnic Burmans and Thais who are Muslim, whether in fact or nominally, are so often because they descend from foreign males who intermarried with local women. But many of these relationships produced lineages which melted back into the general population. Aung San Su Suu Kyi is from just such a family, whose prominent Muslim origins are known, but who are now no different in religion from other ethnic Burmans.
All this back story is to highlight a thought which popped up in my head: perhaps the dichotomy that we establish between “Dharmic” religious and “Abrahamic” religions in terms of their practice and aesthetic is a coincidence of the fact that Hinduism was for all practical purposes “stateless” for the whole late medieval and early modern period. I am aware that of course there have been Hindu states over the past 1,000 years, from Vijayanagara to modern Nepal (at least until 2006, when the Hindu monarchy was abolished). But these states were to a great measure “Islamicate,” in that the style and affect of the Muslim rulers of South Asia served as objects of emulation and the measure for the Hindu potentates, great and small, and Hindu civilization more broadly was interpenetrated and constrained by the parameters of Islam. This connection persists down to the modern era, as Hindu nationalists attempt to reframe their own tradition in response, and arguably in emulation of, the formal vigor that they perceive in the Abrahamic cults. And yet I wonder if the contrasts we observe, in particular the tolerance and broadness of Hinduism vis-a-vis Islam, may not in part just be a function of the fact that to a great extent the elite state Hinduism of ~1000 went into hibernation, never to truly reemerge (the anointing of Shivaji for example clearly exhibited the hallmarks of anachronism and reconstruction, not a continuation of a genuine organic tradition).
An analogy may be made to Judaism, which was stateless after the fall of the Khazars one thousand years ago. Many of the hallmarks of Judaism, its involution and quietism, can only be understood in its proper historical light. With the reestablishment of Judaism as the national religion of the state of Israel many of those perceptions melted away, as a martial and aggressive religious-national spirit quickly grew up under the umbrella of the Zionist polity. Some of the most fearsome and pitiless soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces are “religious-nationalists,” who are in many ways equivalent to our American “modern orthodox.” There is nothing in their Judaism which is quietist today.
The connection between state and church in Southeast Asia, and the ethno-religious violence of Burman monks directed at Rohingya Muslims in Arakan, illustrates perhaps the the possibilities of what the past might have been. On the one hand the great Hindu architecture of northern India would have a much greater time depth. But other aspects of Hinduism which we perceive today to be the essence of the faith may not have been so prominent. In some ways I wonder if the enslaved and sublimated Hinduism of the 1000 years of Islam may be more ready for the global modern world than their Dharmic cousins in Southeast Asia. Hinduism knows hows to operate “offstage.” There’s no evidence that Islam does. Yet.