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.

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