Category Archives: Muslims in Lanka

An “Indian Ocean World Museum” in Sri Lanka?

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, presenting a proposal with this fuller title “Concept Note for an Indian Ocean World Museum, Researc and Resource Center”

 Sri Lanka is ideally located for an Indian Ocean World Museum in what has been termed the “Asian 21st Century.”  People of diverse cultures, religions, histories, and linguistic communities have mixed and mingled for centuries along the ancient spice and silk trade routes of the Indian Ocean where Lanka is centrally placed.

Map from Arundathie abeysinghe’s article referred to below

 

 

 

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Filed under Africans in Asia, ancient civilisations, China and Chinese influences, cultural transmission, economic processes, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, island economy, landscape wondrous, modernity & modernization, Muslims in Lanka, pilgrimages, Portuguese in Indian Ocean, power politics, sea warfare, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, transport and communications, world events & processes

Jehan Perera on Channel Four’s Slant on the Easter Sunday Attacks of 2019

Jehan Perera in The Island, 19 September 2019

The Channel 4 documentary that claims to give the story behind the Easter bombing has restarted the debate, within the country, about who was behind the foul deed, and why. The answer is not proving to be simple. It has become the subject of anger, threat and controversy. The identities of the suicide bombers and their victims are known. Eight suicide bombers died. 269 innocent people also died. All of the bombers were Muslim. Some of them were highly educated and came from prosperous families. They would not have wished to sacrifice their lives except for a cause they believed in as being of the utmost importance.

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Articles on the Easter Sunday Attacks in 2019 presented within TPS in May 2019

Michael Roberts

I have recently presented the list of items placed in this site during April 2019 immediately after the shocking events and now commence  to  present the itmes that appeared in May 2019. I can hardly claim to have provided a comprehensive coverage, but readers will find a wide variety of  personnel from different ethnic groups within this list.  That it should evoke such wide interest is not surprising: it was a kind of 9/11 in Sri Lankan and Indian Ocean history.

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The Expulsion of Muslims from the North by the LTTE in October 1990: Raison Détre

DBS Jeyaraj, whose chosen title is “How and Why the LTTE Evicted Muslims from the Northern Province in “Black October 1990,” when placed in DBSJeyaraj.com on 22 October 2020, …… This article was written in 2015 to mark the Twenty–Fifth Anniversary of Muslim Mass Expulsion From North by the LTTE. It is being re-posted without any changes to denote the 32nd annivrsary of the tragic event.

The Investigation launched by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has in accordance with its terms of reference probed the period of time from the 2002 February ceasefire until the end of the war in May 2009 to ascertain whether war crimes, crimes against humanity and human rights violations occurred in Sri Lanka during the final phase of the war as alleged. The focus on these particular years has naturally led to the overlooking of many other terrible incidents which happened in the years preceding 2002. Notable among these horrors is the mass expulsion of Muslims from the North by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE).

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The Galle Fort: Skyrocketing Property Today

DG Sugathapala, in Daily Mirror, 9 June 2023 “Value of a perch in Galle Fort increased to Rs. 22mn”

More than one hundred buildings, located within the Galle Fort, have been purchased by foreigners, increasing the value of one perch to Rs 22 million, the Galle Heritage Foundation said. With this development, the population within the fort, which used to be around three thousand, has decreased to around 1000.

 

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Cricket & Galle in Rothman’s ‘Potted’ History of Sri Lanka

VIEW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNJyW-rdZPQ …. entitled The Modern Origins of Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict”

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Meditations: Jihadist Assailants, Flaming Suicidal Protest & Gandhi Within the Same Frame

Michael Roberts

Early in the month of February 2023, I was invited by a young friend, Dr Geethika Dharmasinghe, to deliver a Zoom Video Lecture to a small class of her students at Colgate University in New York. These students were following her course on “Religion and Violence in Asia.”

Gandhi speaking and Zahran Hashim in pact with fellow Lankan jihadists …. Zahran was one of the two suicide bombers at the Shangri La Hotel in Colombo on Easter Sunday 2019 where where 36 people died

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Muslims in the East of Sri Lanka: Ashfaque Mohamed’s Insightful Film

Laleen Jayamanne, whose title is Notes towards a Politics and Aesthetics of Film” in a review essay presented in The Island, 1 & 2 February 2023: the focus being Ashfaque Mohamed’s ‘Face Cover’ **

 

 ‘Face Cover’ by Ashfaque Mohamed

Asfaque  Mohamed

“Black cat, at the tip of my fingers pulsates poetry,

Desiring hands, yours, nudgingly pluck those roses of mine

In the soft light of the moon

The dreams we picked from the foaming edges of waves of the sea.”

                                                                          Jusla/Salani (in Face Cover)

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Confronting Two Calamities in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2005

Dennis B. McGilvray, in India Review 5(2-3) November 2006, special issue on public anthropology, …. where the title reads  Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka: An Anthropologist Confronts the Real World”  …. with highlighting in different colours imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi

Recent calls for a new “public anthropology” to promote greater visibility for ethnographic research in the eyes of the press and the general public, and to bolster the courage of anthropologists to address urgent issues of the day, are laudable although probably too hopeful as well.  Yet, while public anthropology could certainly be more salient in American life, it already exists in parts of the world such as Sri Lanka where social change, ethnic conflict, and natural catastrophe have unavoidably altered the local context of ethnographic fieldwork.  Much of the anthropology of Sri Lanka in the last three decades would have to count as “public” scholarship, because it has been forced to address the contemporary realities of labor migration, religious politics, the global economy, and the rise of violent ethno-nationalist movements.  As a long-term observer of the Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities in Sri Lanka’s eastern coastal region, I have always been attracted to the classic anthropological issues of caste, popular religion, and matrilineal kinship.  However, in the wake of the civil wars for Tamil Eelam and the 2004 tsunami disaster, I have been forced to confront (somewhat uneasily) a fundamentally altered fieldwork situation. This gives my current work a stronger flavor of public anthropology, while providing an opportunity for me to trace older matrilocal family patterns and Hindu-Muslim religious traditions under radically changed conditions.

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Deeply Wounded. Also Divided? Sri Lanka Today

Neloufer De Mel, in History Today, Vol 72/8, September 2022, where the title reads “Sri Lanka’s Deep Wounds” **

On 31 March 2022 a public protest occurred in the vicinity of the home of the Sri Lankan president Gotabhaya Rajapakse. The protest marked frustration at the shortages of essential commodities (gas, medicines, fuel) and the gruelling ten-to-13-hour power cuts imposed by a cash-strapped government with insufficient dollars to pay for imported fuel. The protestors also sought answers as to why certain neighbourhoods (such as Mirihana, where the president lived) continued to enjoy uninterrupted power.

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