"As most countries in continental Southeast Asia, Burma/Myanmar is home since many centuries to Muslim communities whose ethnic and geographic origins are traced to either China, India, Malaysia and more recently Persia. Since the 1950s, leaders of the Muslim community in Arakan (Rakhine; Western Burma/Myanmar) have raised the claim of being a separate ethnic group within Burma?s already highly complex patchwork of ethnicities. By that way the Arakan Muslims set themselves consciously apart from other Indian immigrants who took root in Burma/Myanmar mostly during the British colonial period. This claim has been contested for various reasons. It is clear that the country of origin of most Muslims from Arakan is Bengal. Both the old Muslim community that lived in Arakan before the fall of the kingdom in 1785 and the more recent and much more numerous one that developed during the British colonial period (after 1825) trace their origins overwhelmingly to Bengal. This is not surprising as Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh is the neighbouring country and historical relations have existed for centuries between East Bengal and Arakan. Chittagong, today the second biggest city of Bangladesh, was controlled by the Arakanese kings for over eighty years. The language of the Muslims is derived from Chittagonian Bengali. North-south migrations (and earlier deportations) of the population are the rule rather than the exception, as well for Tibeto-Burman as for Aryan populations ..."