A kingdom born of an alliance
After being driven from Arakan by the Burmese Ava kingdom in the early 15th century, the exiled Arakanese king Narameikhla spent 24 years at the court of the Bengal Sultanate in Gaur. In 1430, restored to his throne with the help of Sultan Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah's soldiers, he founded a new capital: Mrauk-U. Many of those Bengali troops settled in the region permanently. In gratitude — and to signal his standing in the wider Muslim world — Narameikhla adopted the Muslim title Suleiman Shah and began issuing coins bearing the Islamic kalima alongside Buddhist symbols. Every subsequent Arakanese king used a similar Muslim title into the 17th century.
The wealth of a cosmopolitan capital
At its height under Min Bin (r. 1531–1553), Mrauk-U ruled a coast that stretched from Chittagong (in today's Bangladesh) down to Cape Negrais at the mouth of the Irrawaddy. Portuguese Jesuit Sebastião Manrique, who lived there in the 1630s, described it as one of the richest cities of the East, its harbours crowded with ships from Aceh, Malacca, Coromandel, Persia, and the Netherlands. Dutch VOC records estimate its population at over 160,000 — larger than contemporary London.
The court was multilingual: Arakanese, Pali, Bengali, Persian and Portuguese were all used for different purposes. Bengali poets such as Alaol and Daulat Qazi produced some of the greatest works of medieval Bengali literature at the Mrauk-U court, under the patronage of Buddhist kings and their Muslim ministers.
The role of Muslim ministers and soldiers
Muslims served at every level of the Arakanese state. The king's bodyguard, the "Kaman" archers, were Muslims descended from Mughal soldiers. Muslim viziers oversaw taxation, trade and diplomacy with Bengal and the Deccan sultanates. Chittagong, then Arakan's chief port, was administered by Muslim governors on behalf of the Buddhist crown. Mosques, shrines and madrasas were built and endowed by the state; the Santikan mosque in Mrauk-U, raised in the 1430s, still stands.
Shah Shuja and the beginning of the decline
In 1660 the Mughal prince Shah Shuja, defeated by his brother Aurangzeb in the war of succession, fled with his family and retinue to Arakan seeking sanctuary. Within months a dispute over his treasure led to his and his family's death, and to a diplomatic crisis with the Mughals. In 1666 Aurangzeb's forces retook Chittagong. Arakan's naval power was broken. Portuguese pirate allies, factional intrigue and a series of weak kings pushed the kingdom into a long decline.
1784: the destruction of Mrauk-U
In 1784 the Burmese Konbaung king Bodawpaya invaded Arakan, sacked Mrauk-U, deported tens of thousands of captives into Burma, and carried off the great Mahamuni Buddha image to his new capital at Amarapura, where it still resides today. Contemporary British sources estimate that a third of Arakan's population — Buddhists and Muslims alike — fled across the Naf river into British-controlled Chittagong to escape Konbaung rule. This is the earliest large modern refugee movement of Arakanese people, and one of many that would follow.
Why Mrauk-U still matters
The Mrauk-U period matters because it is the clearest historical rebuttal to the modern claim that Muslims are strangers to Arakan. For three and a half centuries, Muslims in Arakan were not a fringe migrant community but part of the state's political, military, cultural and economic core — under a dynasty that itself owed its throne to Muslim allies. Any honest account of Rakhine State's history has to begin with that fact.