A Sri Lankan Muslim pointing to Mecca from the train. Photo by Biel Calderon
Sri Lanka is frequently broken down into Sinhala and Tamil (or Sinhala vs. Tamil), but the country is actually a lot more diverse. There is a huge and largely multilingual Muslim population, but even that doesn’t do people justice. There are also Malays, mostly Muslim but diverse in their own way. Here are two posts on the subject.
In one, Halik Azeez gives a rundown of Muslim history in Sri Lanka
The Muslims of Sri Lanka hark back to early Arab traders, everyone knows that, but the story is actually much more complex and interesting. Like any historical narrative, tradition or well known fact, this idea that Sri Lankan Moors are somehow descendant from Arab traders becomes multifaceted and many layered when you start zooming in on it with a keen historian’s eye*.
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As Arab power waned with the diminishing power of the Caliphate come the 14th and 15th centuries, trade along the East coast of Sri Lanka was increasingly monopolized by Tamil Muslims who sailed down from South India.
With the reduction of Arab ties and the influx of Indians, Muslims in Sri Lanka increasingly began looking to South India for religious guidance and hence soon adopted the Tamil language as their official mother tongue (as all education, books and scholars coming from India used Tamil). The Muslims themselves remained an anthropological mish mash of ethnicities overshadowed by a common religious identity that ignored racial and caste based boundaries.
In another post, Meg gives a brief history of the Malays, originally from Indonesia/Malaysia abouts. Malays were traders and Malay kings seem to have successfully captured Jaffna before. Also:
Having invaded Java, the Dutch found the Javanese royalty (Indonesian and Malaysian kings and chiefs) to be a threat to the ‘Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie’ (translating into- Dutch East India Company) and banished them to Sri Lanka and South Africa; two of the Dutch strongholds at the time.
Worth a read, both.
There are more muslims in this country than sri lankan tamils. I think there is a census around the corner that will reveal this.
Agree.
But I think the government really needs to stop using the term “Muslim” as an ethnic term. It just makes no sense whatsoever. The ethnic terms should be “moors” and “malays.”
There are other sub groups as well.
The Borah’s, the Mehmons (both of Indian origin) and one other group that I forget now.
A lot of the colonial age books mention afghans – are there any left in SL?
None as far as I know. I think they were all swept out with the Citizenship Act of 1948.
Too bad. They would’ve been the only good-looking Sri Lankan people.
Alavi Moulana’s family is of Afghan origin.
Yeah. It’s such a simple thing, someone should start a lobby to get them to do this.
How about burghers? aren’t they a distinct ethnic group? And of course, the veddhas, they were here before anyone else.