We are deeply conscious of the lacunae in this volume caused by the absence of [...] a paper on Arabic-Tamil, a dialect which was mainly Tamil with a profusion of Arabic conceptual terms, which were indispensable to convey Islamic thoughts and feelings. And it was written in Arabic script. It was a dialectical synthesis of Semitic Arabic and Dravidian Tamil – an ingenuity of the Moors, which remained the tool of Moorish intellectual writing and discourse from the end of the thirteenth century right up to the end of the nineteenth century. And Arabic-Tamil had its parallel in the Swahili group of languages along the East African coast. A deeper research of Arabic-Tamil and the immense corpus of literature that came out of it is bound to reveal much about the origin and history of the Moors of this country, at least, such was the contentions of one of our foremost eudcationists and scholars – the late Mr. A. M. A. Azeez.
[...]
Some of the source material, I should say, a greater part of them – namely, the immense body of literature of the early Arab settlers in Arabic and the much later productions in Arabic-Tamil are irretrievably lost. The Moorish leaders in the past had expressed a desire that the younger generations of this community should delve into their past and continue the initial effort made by I. L. M. Abdul Azeez. It should be borne in mind that Mr Azeez’s contribution to this field is of a polemical nature as it arose in the course of a controversy to refute Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s thesis* on the origin of Moors.

The term ‘Muslim’ denotes a religious denomination and not an ethnic, and not necessarily an ethno-cultural one, but an ethico-religious one. This should be clearly grasped by the readers to avoid confusion. Conceptual clarity is vital to understand the problem we are dealing with, namely, Muslim Minorities. For instance, while all Moors are Muslim, all Muslims in this country are not Moors. Cultural varia[tion] within even a local or regional community such as the Sri Lankan Muslims is a fact, but it is glossed over even by serious-minded scholars. “Moor” is not a synonym for “Muslim,” at least as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. There is a sizeable number of Malays, Bhoras, and Memons; and in the recent past there were substantial numbers of Coast Moors, Khojas, Afghans, etc.

* Ethnology of the Moors of Ceylon. Vide Article on the Moors of Ceylon by Sir ir Ponnambalam Ramanathan. Proceedings f the R. A. S. (C. B.) Vol X No 36 of 1888.

– Skukri, M. A. M. “Preface.” Muslims of Sri Lanka. Avenues to Antiquity. Jamiah Naleemia Institute: 1986, Sri Lanka. iii-v.

Notes.

  • What are “Islamic feelings”? I think he meant Islamic concepts or terms (masjid, mosque, palli; sawm, fasting, nombu). However, the rest of his writing indicates that he is in fact invested in the construction of a unifying Muslim spirituality, which is what finds expression here as “Islamic thoughts and feelings.”

  • My mother’s maternal grandmother – who I think was from Gampola, and therefore not a coastal Muslim, i.e. without direct contact with Arab traders, who anyway stopped coming to the island some centuries ago, so can we please stop with the ridiculous “Sri Lankan Muslims have Arab connections” myths, unless you want to talk to me about how the Sri Lankan government benefits from its labour ties with Arab nations, in which case go ahead, because it’s not Al Qaeda I give a fuck about, it’s modern-day slave conditions in Middle-Eastern households, and this applies as much to Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese housemaids and labourers as it does Muslim ones – could speak and read Arabic-Tamil (aka Arwi, aka Arabu-Thamizh). I don’t know if any of her offspring could. I should find out. In any case, my mother, who knows both Arabic and Tamil (and can read the first, but not the second), doesn’t know Arabic-Tamil.

  • I first heard of Arwi about the same time that I learned about Moriscos. These were sixteenth-century Portuguese and Spanish Muslims, who basically created a secret language during the Reconquista: an amalgamation of Spanish and Arabic in which Arabic was transliterated into Spanish. This allowed them to disseminate Islamic texts without attracting the attention of the Spanish crown, who’d forbidden practises of Islam (and Judaism).

  • With regards to the desire for “younger generations of this community [to] delve into their past,” I’m wondering how these research projects (if they were begun) were affected by the war. Keep in mind that this conference was held in 1984 and this anthology published in 1986 – i.e., in the very early years of the war. In that way, it’s dated, because while there already had been moments of violence on the island, it wasn’t at the level of sustained violence that the war would usher in.

    The contemporary local research (as opposed to the research done by, for instance, North American academics) that I’m encountering now is mostly about the war and the way it has impacted minority communities. So I’m looking at reports on refugee movements, rehabilitation projects, and very occasionally, records of actual deaths. In the middle of all this, what space is there to talk about apolitical (insofar as there are spaces devoid of a politics that has only to do with the war) culture and dead languages? This isn’t a concern unique to Sri Lankan Muslim history. It’s one that informs how young people in Toronto conceptualise their identities as Tamil and Sinhalese. The emphasis on the war is overwhelming to the point that it sometimes feels exclusionary: our identities are bound up – definitively and wholly – in the violence. It therefore feels frivolous and selfish to argue for a different construction of Sri Lankan cultures, one that doesn’t centralise the war. And while I by no means want to trivialise the impact of the war on how we understand our cultural locations, often I think that a movement for peace and justice that is self-aware must have room for those kinds of discussions.

    Nor is this to say that the war is all we ever think about, when we think about our cultures. In fact, many of us, when we seek out knowledge about the war, do this against the force of community silences around the nature and the extent of the violence (these are silences that are enforced for a number of reasons). Still, silences and incomplete histories notwithstanding, anxieties around the war are integral to how many young diasporic Sri Lankans position themselves culturally and politically.

  • The afternoon before we flew out of Gampola I was filling out my grandmother’s form for her. I’d read out the question and write down her answers. When we got to the question about citizenship, she said “Ceylon Moor.”
    I choked and came close to swearing. “I’m not going to write that,” I said, sharply. “Sri Lankan’s good enough. I’m not putting down that you’re a goddamn Moor.”

    She was abashed; it was the term she’d used in her childhood and is the term given under “Race” on her birth certificate.
    I am bothered by the word “Moor,” and dislike being called it. My only other engagement with the word is from Othello, where it’s loosely and problematically synonymous with Black/African. So I want to learn about the history of the word – who decided it was appropriate and why? Is this an example of British colonial categorisation, one that has since been assumed by its subject community? And what exactly is a Sri Lankan Moor, anyway? What differentiates them (us?) from other Muslims?

  • I haven’t read either Ramanathan or ILM Azeez’s works. I’d like to, not so much because I want to hear their specific theories, but because I want to know about the nature of their disagreements. If the conversations I’ve had over the last two months are any indication, I suspect I’d tend towards Azeez’s ‘polemicism.’

    I am frustrated by the ways Muslim history on the island is flattened out or romanticised away for political ends that serve distant geopolitical machinations, as opposed to lived social justice projects. On the one hand, I’ve had conversations with pro-government Sri Lankan Muslims in which Sri Lankan Muslim political interests are presented as entirely in line with that of the ruling Sinhala party. On the other hand, I’ve also had conversations with pro-Eelam Sri Lankan Tamils in which Muslim identities become absorbed into Tamil ones, because the assertion of an autonomous Sri Lankan Muslim identity (however internally fractured, or externally fluid) is seen as being at odds with or dangerous to the project of Tamil emancipation in Sri Lanka. In both cases, the complicated history of Muslim existences on the island is glossed over in favour of broad political projects that are - even without the issue of engagement with Sri Lankan Muslims - contingent on the suppression of internal community differences. Thus, the fact that one side will point to the other’s abuses of Sri Lankan Muslims as proof of their own moral superiority is symptomatic not of any given political group’s genuine investment in the viable protection of minority rights in Sri Lanka, but of the wilful disingenuousness of their political positions.

    The other thing that I find supremely frustrating about these conversations is that they put me in a position where I am protesting the autonomy of a community that in all other instances I’m always interested in dissolving. Later on in the preface, Shukri writes,

    While it is imperative for a clear perception of the Muslims in Sri Lanka to distinguish the many segments within this community, this analytic approach should not be permitted to obscure the fact that as followers of one religion which is universal in its belief and ritual, all these segments in turn constitute a single Ummah in this country.

    I disagree with this, profoundly. I do not believe in the existence of a cohesive and unified Muslim community, neither across the globe nor within any given nation. Moreover, I have no interest in helping create that identity, as those are always projects driven by political motivations that invariably alienate members of the community who do not fit the internally-imposed and policed definition of that community. And yet, in my conversations with nationalist Tamil and Sinhalese Sri Lankans, I find myself arguing for the verifiable existence of a Sri Lankan Muslim community, one whose contemporary (as opposed to precolonial) political history on the island demands that we acknowledge an experience of and relation to the conflict that is distinct from that of Sinhala and Tamil communities.

    It’s not that I think Sri Lankan Muslims can or should make a claim for their own piece of the homeland, or their own political governance structure, or anything of that kind. Rather, I am troubled by narratives of the war that dismiss Muslim victims as collateral, because they don’t fit the Sinhala/Tamil binary.