Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka

Abstract

This article bridges Sri Lankan studies and the academic debate on the relation between contemporary Islam and politics. It constitutes a case study of the Muslim community in Akkaraipattu on Sri Lanka's war-ridden east coast. Over two decades of ethnically colored conflict have made Muslim identity of paramount importance, but the meanings attached to that identity vary substantively. Politicians, mosque leaders, Sufis and Tablighis define the ethnic, religious and political dimensions of "Muslimness" differently and this leads to intra-Muslim contradictions. The case study thus helps resolve the puzzle of Sri Lankan Muslims: they are surrounded by hostility, but they continue to be internally divided. Akkaraipattu's Muslims jockey between principled politics, pragmatic politics and anti-politics, because they have to navigate different trajectories. This article thus corroborates recent studies on Islam elsewhere that argue for contextualized and nuanced approaches to the variegated interface between Islam and politics.

Performing democracy and violence, agonism and community, politics and not politics in Sri Lanka

“…3 In Sri Lanka, Muslims are the ''other' minority, Tamil-speakers but not considered ''ethnically'' Tamil, caught up in the conflict but as likely to be attacked by Tamil separatists as by anyone else. For good critical introductions to what is obviously a long story see Ismail (1995), McGilvray (2008), and Klem (2011). For a stronger sense of the immediate political context see Spencer (2010 within the town itself 2 years earlier.…”

“…The SLMC in its earliest days was primarily a youth organization, organized as he put it, for both security and social reasons. In 1983, after the government-backed attacks on Tamils in Colombo and 7 For useful recent overviews of the Muslim political situation see Lewer and Ismail (2010) and McGilvray and Raheem (2007), and specifically Klem (2011) and Hasbullah and Korf (forthcoming). Although the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress was founded as a Muslim political party, in practice it has not functioned as an obviously Islamist party: its main concerns have been Muslim identity politics rather than Islamic social issues.…”

On sacred ground: the political performance of religious responsibility

“…Instead, the paper sits between and builds upon two different canons in the anthropology of Sri Lanka: that of political-Buddhism (Gombrich & Obeysekere 1988, Kemper 1991, Tambiah 1992, Scott 1994Seneviratne 1999, and Abeysekera 2002 and the anthropology of politics and nationalism (Tennekoon 1988(Tennekoon , 1990Spencer 1990Spencer , 2007Brow 1996;Gunawardana 1990;Woost 1990Woost , 1993De Alwis 1996, 1998Jaganethan & Ismail 2009;Amarasuriya 2010). 2 Recent contributions to understanding further the relationship between politics and religion in Sri Lanka have been made from the field of Political Geography (Goodhand, Klem, Korf 2009, Klem 2011, Johnson 2012. These explore the capacity of religious institutions and figures to operate in political arenas and will also be discussed within.…”

Taking liberties and making liberty: religious bounding and political violence in Sri Lanka

“…This is a fluid and ambiguous moment, predicated on discursive boundaries and vulnerable to misjudgment and manipulation. Other interventions have looked more specifically at the boundary engagements of religion (Hasbullah and Korf 2009, Klem 2011, Heslop 2014. These consider the politics of post--tsunami aid and religious networks; identity and boundaries in a religious field structured by violence; patrimony; political contestation and ethnic identity; and the idiomatic use of the 'sacred' to express political claims.…”