The editor in chief of the paper, Maung Thway Chun, told me in a recent interview at his Yangon home that he harbors no hatred toward Muslims and has Muslim friends—but the threat of “Islamization” is a problem. “We’re not oppressing Muslims, and we recognize their existence. But we don’t want Muslims to swallow our country. … They will not finish with attacking just Rakhine. They will also invade Chin State or Irrawaddy region,” he said, referring to two states located to the immediate south and northeast of Rakhine. “Then this country will be a Muslim country. It is such a shame for us that the land we inherited from our former generations will be lost in our time.”

Founded in 2013, Ma Ba Tha successfully backed the 2015 passage of four race and religion laws—widely perceived as discriminatory toward Muslims—that attempted to implement population control methods, forbid polygamy, and put restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith marriage. The government has attempted to crack down on the group, for example by ordering Aung Zay Yatu to stop publishing, but the weekly will simply relaunch under a different name, its editor said.

In March, Buddhist religious authorities slapped Ma Ba Tha’s Wirathu with a one-year preaching ban after he thanked the men who killed a high-profile Muslim legal adviser in Yangon and after he told Buddhist women it would be better to marry dogs than Muslims. The state-backed Buddhist Sangha Council said Ma Ba Tha was not a legal organization and ordered it to take down its signs. Ma Ba Tha chapters either ignored the order or rebranded.

Wirathu also ignored it. On the Sunday after the August attacks in Rakhine, he appeared at a rally in front of City Hall in Yangon. “We’ve been to some high schools in Maungdaw and we didn’t see any of our ethnic people in these schools,” he said, referring to one of three main towns in northern Rakhine State impacted by the fighting. “All of them are Bengali students. Will the world know who is the majority or who is the minority when it sees that?"

Buddhist nationalism and religious tensions in Burma have existed at least as far back as the British colonial era and into the rocky period following independence in 1948. Rohingya groups have for decades fought under different banners for more autonomy in Rakhine. But these tensions reached a new phase after 2011, when the country started to open up to the outside world after decades of military rule, and the feeling of uncertainty over the future of Buddhist life in a changing country was more acutely felt.

Muslims make up only about 4 percent of the country’s 53 million people, and the Rohingya make up part of that minority. But Rakhine State fuels nationwide existential angst as the Rohingya are concentrated in that territory, with more than 1.1 million living there. The state is seen as the “Western Door” beyond which Muslim South Asia, and Global Islam, waits.