Some Notes On Moors Religious Exlusivism
By Imtiyaz Razak -August 23, 2013 |
Dr.Imtiyaz Razak
I would like to sketch some points about Moors to help readers to understand the trend. Note that I am neither hired by external forces, as some alledged, to criticize Moors nor do I hate my own community so I criticize it.
As I pointed on my facebook wall “We need to be critical of our own choices and paths. I know well about my own community, when we think that we are the perfect and others are always bad, we actually contribute to tensions. it is the time for Muslims to revisit their actions for better,… what we all need is space for self-critical. It is hard to get that done, but it should be done to promote peace at popular level. Failure from our parts helps political actors both at home and abroad. I love my country-Sri Lanka. This is the only space I can call confidently as MY country despite my deep respect and love for both China and the US.
Moors of Sri Lanka have been winning significant socio-cultural concessions from the successive governments since the organized rise of ethnic tensions between the Tamils and Sinhalese. These concessions from state were made possible due to Moor political elites’ explicit cooperation with Sinhala ruling elites. Introduction of the market economy by former President JR. Jayewardene opened the way for poor Muslims to seek jobs and other opportunities in the Middle Eastern countries. There was increase flow among Muslims of Sri Lanka, especially economically weaker sections of Moors to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries from the North and East and other parts of Sri Lanka. On the other hand, Sri Lanka also experienced growth of tensions and conflict beyond the Tamil-Sinhala. Actually, the conflict begun to transfer from the Tamil-Sinhala to Tamil-Sinhala-Moor conflict. Tamil–Muslim riots broke out in April 1985, apparently over an incident in the town of Mannar in the north where three Muslim worshippers were said to have been gunned down by Tamil militants inside a mosque, which ruined the Tamil–Muslim cordiality. During this period, there were religious increase activities by certain groups of Sri Lanka Moors. There were new Islamic organizations and groups. Some of them won generous support from the Middle Eastern Wahabists and their organizations. My interviews for my research on Eastern Muslims suggest that there were explicit helps and communications between certain Islamist groups based in the Eastern Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka’s neighbor country. The sources outside of Sri Lanka wanted to advance their religious and political agendas among Moors.Read More
Fleadom Of Explession
Arjuna Seneviratne
Everyone knows the story of little Johnny and the flea.
Regardless of what sort of essay the teacher tells the class to write, this formidable brat always finds a way to very quickly tie the assigned topic through some marginal link to the flea and then proceeds to blast out his spiel on that redoubtable species and its critical importance to every single reason behind every single reason that underscores every single reason why Johnny, his peers, his educators and his examiners, his family, his community, his town, his country and his planet should or shouldn’t live. The local equivalent of Little Johnny of course, as everyone knows, is Amden and the story is “makkage kathaava”. In fact, when someone constantly harps on a single idea regardless of the idea he/she is responding to or its direction or its worth or its relevance, we, in Sri Lanka say “mekata one uge mekkage ellena” (He just wants to spin his flea) or PMS (“Predetermined Mekka Spinning” – yeah, it was not what you were thinking but it is similarly annoying).
I was recently reading an article on Colombo Telegraph by Vangisha Gunasekera on the global problem of climate instability (to which, by the way, Sri Lanka contributed almost nothing) and found, both to my astonishment and day-long amusement that one of the responses was on Weliweriya (you see, the pollution of water bodies in Weliweriya are just as important to planetary climate stability as Amden’s mekka is to a fish right?). Another was just classic “what we are doing to mother earth at Weliweriya and other places is slow murder and therefore Sri Lankan women are fleeing to the middle east”! What the….?!
