His frustrated tone suggested, to my ears at least, an uneasy awareness that monks no longer play the role they once did. During the Saffron Revolution, they helped push the country toward democracy, and gained a profile that crystallized into a reassuring myth: Monks in general are peaceful and calm and “good,” and Burma’s monks in particular are noble stalwarts standing against an evil military regime. But less than five years after Saffron, Burma’s monks were already fulminating in the media about the pernicious influence of Muslims on the Buddhist nation, with special invective directed at the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State, near the border with Bangladesh.

Given the short time between these two periods of Burmese history, was the Saffron Revolution a failure? Or was it simply misunderstood? What happened to the “good” monks who were in it? Are they in cahoots with the “bad” monks—the hardline ultranationalists who frequently make headlines for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment?

The 10th anniversary of the revolution coincides with mounting international pressure for Burma’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, to address the persecution of the Rohingya minority. Just as Suu Kyi’s status as a secular saint is coming under greater scrutiny, so too should the sacred myths of the Saffron Revolution. That doesn’t mean taking away the monks’ achievements—as some have suggested doing with Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize—but it does mean deepening the understanding of Burma and Buddhism’s complex role in a complex country.

The Saffron Revolution probably did contribute to pushing the junta toward the reforms it adopted in 2011, which culminated in the 2015 election victory of the National League for Democracy and its leader, Suu Kyi. But it also contributed to a misunderstanding about the nature of Buddhism in Burma, what Buddhists here cared about, and what they wanted. The story was more complicated than one of Buddhist monks as robe-wearing dissidents who wanted nothing more than an end to iron-fisted military dictatorship. With its photos of overturned alms bowls and courageous monks facing down the mighty Burmese army, the Saffron Revolution obscured a deep-seated fear among Buddhists about the perceived fragility of their faith’s future—the feeling that even though Burma was overwhelmingly Buddhist, Islam posed a threat to it.

This feeling, in fact, had been acted upon many times before Saffron. Resentment against Muslims in the country dates back to the colonial era and the British-enabled arrival of large numbers of South Asian workers after the turn of the last century. Since the 1920s, there have been periodic outbursts of violence against the South Asian communities that developed, including the Muslims among them. After independence and the onset of military rule in 1962, General Ne Win booted out hundreds of thousands of South Asians, and the junta began to adopt policies that persecuted the Rohingya. The Rohingya were increasingly cast as immigrants from Bangladesh, despite having generational roots in Rakhine State going back hundreds of years.