Arakan

Arakan is the most westerly division of Lower Burma, lying between the Arakan Yoma range and the Bay of Bengal. It was an independent kingdom until 1199/1784 and then formed part of Burma, under British administration from 1241/1826. ¹

Arakan had been Buddhist from about the third/tenth century. In 809/1406 King Narameikhla, defeated by the Burmese, took refuge with the Muslim ruler of Bengal. In 833/1430 troops of the Bengal sultan restored him to his throne, and he became a tributary of that sultan. From the ninth/fourteenth to the thirteenth/eighteenth century Arakan's history was closely linked with that of Muslim Bengal. ¹

His nephew Basawpyu, a conqueror, took the important port of Chittagong. It was lost about 918/1512 to the rajas of Tippera, recaptured by King Minyaza, and then held by the Husayn Shahis, until in 946/1539, in the time of King Minbin, it was absorbed into the Arakan kingdom. The Arakanese navy based at Chittagong, working with Portuguese adventurers settled at the head of the Bay, dominated the riverine tracts of Bengal, and the Noakhali and Backergunge districts were raided for plunder and slaves. ¹

In 1070/1660 Shah Shuja', defeated in Bengal by the forces of his brother Awrangzib, sailed with an Arakanese flotilla that had operated in his support. He sought asylum with Sandathudamma at Mrohaung, but the Mughals demanded his extradition, and in 1071/1661 Arakanese troops surrounded him, and he was probably killed in the struggle that followed. Awrangzib's viceroy Shayista Khan avenged his death, destroyed two Arakanese fleets and took Chittagong in 1076/1666. This ended Arakanese ascendancy in eastern Bengal, although slave raiding continued into the twelfth/eighteenth century. ¹

In 1103/1692 Muslim soldiers of fortune, joined by many captive Bengalis, rose in the capital and for about twenty years held power in Arakan. The Bengali Muslim poets Dawlat Kazi and Sayyid al-Awwal, who wrote at the courts of Thirithudamma and Sandathudamma, were under the patronage of such officers. Their descendants, called Kaman (from the Persian kaman, "bow"), still live in the Ramri and Akyab areas. Muslims left their mark in the Sandikhan mosque at Mrohaung, and at Akyab and Sandoway, where the Buddermokan shrines honour Badr al-Din Awliya, whose most famous shrine is at Chittagong and who is the guardian saint of the sailors of Arakan and Bengal. ¹