The Muslim Threat as Territorial

Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) supporters often draw parallels between the Tamil separatist movement and the territorial incursions which Muslims have supposedly been making since the war’s conclusion. Muslims are described by BBS supporters as making efforts to establish exclusive ethnoreligious enclaves; attempting to capture land is almost seen as a primordial Muslim trait.

Palitha, a BBS supporter from Colombo, claimed that Muslim students in Kattankudy (a Muslim-majority city on the east coast) made a resolution to work for a separate state, much like the Vaddukoddai Resolution made by Tamils. Moreover, he suggested that Muslims intended to establish one “stan” on Sri Lanka’s east coast and another on the west (the two areas with the largest concentrations of Muslims). He drew a parallel with Pakistan and Bangladesh on either side of India. Dayan, a new recruit to the BBS in his early 20s, also described Kattankudy as being “like a separate state.”

Romesh, a very young and ardent BBS supporter from Kotte, claimed that Muslims had “captured” the Colombo Harbour and were implementing their own Sharia-based laws there. In the view of the BBS and its supporters, Muslims are attempting to take over areas and impose their rule.

Further, economy and geography are interlinked in the discourse of the BBS, which abounds with imagery of rich Muslims buying up land. Anuruddha, a BBS supporter from Gampola (a town near Kandy with a substantial Muslim population), used the analogy of Tamil separatism to describe Muslim economic activities related to land:

They buy up areas and separate them as Muslim areas. It’s separatism. […] The Tamils were doing it in a specific area — the north and east. The Muslims are doing it everywhere in Sri Lanka. The LTTE did it with guns. Muslims use their black money. They are doing through the deed what Prabhakaran tried to do with the gun.

Rev. Akmeemana Dayarathana Thero, the leader of Sinhala Ravaya (one of a number of groups with similar ideologies to the BBS), explained, “These lands here in Colombo, [Muslims] buy. Some land they take by force. When they’re buying on one side, taking by force on the other, we will not have enough land for us.”

Though most Sri Lankan Muslims live in poverty, stereotypes of wealthy Muslims persist, due in part to Sri Lanka’s economic interactions with rich Gulf states, where many Sri Lankans go as temporary workers. These macro-level flows between Sri Lanka and the Gulf have affected micro-level relationships between Buddhists and Muslims in Sri Lanka, such that connections are drawn in the Sinhalese popular imaginary between rich Saudis and local Muslims. For Sinhala nationalists, perceived geographical encroachments by minorities seem all the more important due to global interactions in which the Sinhalese seem powerless or isolated.

Buddhist Sacred Space

While BBS supporters accuse Muslims of forming exclusive Islamic zones, it is often quite difficult for minorities to live and practice their religion in areas of particular historical and religious importance to Buddhists. Several of the most high-profile attacks on mosques have occurred in areas where there is a Buddhist claim to sacred land, such as Dambulla and Anuradhapura.

A report from the Centre for Policy Alternatives explains that some Buddhist groups “have opposed religious structures of other faiths in the vicinity of Buddhist temples, in some public spaces considered sacred to Buddhists, as well as on private lands in areas perceived by them to be in areas that are predominantly Buddhist.” The report notes that “there are efforts to declare [Dambulla and Anuradhapura] as ‘sacred areas’.” Moreover, “Muslim religious places and even residents have faced both legal and extra-legal processes to evict them from these areas.”

When speaking to BBS supporters about mosques attacked by Buddhist groups, it is often suggested that the land on which these mosques were built originally belonged to Buddhist temples, as it was given to them by the ancient Sinhalese kings. “They can’t ask for a mosque close to Dambulla Temple,” explained Chaminda. “Most land in Sri Lanka was given to the temples by kings as a gift.” Nimal, a less zealous supporter of the BBS, gave a similar explanation: “They built the mosque in the land of the temple. In Sri Lanka, ancient kings gave large areas of land and villages to the maintenance of the temple. So in Dambulla, the area where they built the mosque belongs to the Dambulla Raja Maha Viharaya. The high priest of this temple didn’t like to have the mosque on temple land.”

In the case of Anuradhapura, Nimal claimed that “they built a mosque on holy land. Anuradhapura is a main city of Buddhists. We have Sri Maha Bodhi and many important temples in Anuradhapura city. The government has named it a holy city area for that Buddhist temple. Muslims have built a mosque in that holy city area.”

Muslims are also viewed as failing to respect the sacredness of Buddhist heritage sites. Making reference to Kuragala/Jailani, the site of an ancient Sufi shrine and allegedly also a Buddhist monastery, Rev. Akmeemana Dayarathana Thero claimed that “places where Buddhists used to meditate, caves where they would sit inside, are being used to slaughter cows now.”

Moreover, mosques that exist in these “sacred areas” are described by BBS supporters as illegal or makeshift buildings rather than legitimate places of religious worship. When I questioned Udaya Gammanpila, the former leader of the Sinhala nationalist Jathika Hela Urumaya political party, about attacks on Muslim places of worship, he claimed, “At all these places, there is an unauthorized Muslim mosque, an illegal mosque. People kept complaining to the authorities, and when the authorities didn’t listen, people came out and protested against these mosques.”

Echoing the same views, Palitha claimed, “Dambulla and Anuradhapura, they were not properly built mosques. They were kept secret. Then they say it was there for 100 years.” “They buy a building and make a mosque out of it,” explained Romesh. “In Grandpass, they have done that. It was just a building and they converted it into a mosque.” In Dambulla, “they started with a small hut, put a green colour flag up and made it a mosque. It is not legal.” In Mahiyangana, “the trick they have done is to buy a shop for business purposes and convert it to a mosque.” With regards to the Grandpass Mosque, Mr. Gammanpila explained, “They built a big building claiming it was a store for 3 years […] All of a sudden, they started praying inside that building.”

The use of shops as mosques was a recurring motif in my conversations with BBS supporters. Ironically, it is possible that this results from the Muslim community’s pragmatic use of nonconventional spaces for religious worship in Buddhist-dominated areas, where it would be politically impossible to build a new mosque because of pressure from groups like the BBS.

Alternatively, the shop-as-mosque image may be part of the BBS’ portrayal of Islam as an invisible force permeating the nation’s boundaries through economic means. The narrative of “creeping sharia”, which configures Islam as invisible and below the surface, reflects the invisibility and incomprehensibility of global markets. In the context of Sinhalese guest work in Gulf states and nationalist allegations of Muslim economic takeover, concerns about shops turning into mosques may reflect deep-seated fears about global economic forces affecting idealized religiously homogenous polities.

Further, for the BBS, the spatial politics of Sri Lanka are conceived of in zero-sum terms, such that land where religious minorities have autonomy or ownership is seen as the loss of the Sinhalese. In the BBS publication “Encountering the Demise of a Race: An Enquiry Into the Population Trends in Sri Lanka,” it is stated that ethnoreligious conflicts begin when Muslims “pose a threat to encroach the heartland of the Sinhalese. When they try to grab the land from others in areas where they are proliferating. When they try to push out the Sinhalese and others in areas where they expand.” Here, Muslims are portrayed as aggressively widening their sphere of influence to larger and larger geographical areas.

Next, the document describes the Sinhalese population as “getting restricted to a limited stretch of land” and “concentrated (kotuweema) in limited physical space and economic terrain.” After Tamil separatists’ attempts to “flush out the Sinhalese from the districts of Putalam, Mannar, Jaffna, Mulativu, Kilinochchi, Vavuniya, Trincomale, Batticoloa and Ampara and herd them to the South” — i.e. to “limit the Sinhalese to a 66.6% of the total of 65610 Sq. kms in Sri Lanka” — today the Sinhalese go to most of these districts “merely as tourists,” claims the document. “There is a trend towards increased concentration of Sinhalese, other than military, to limited land areas in many of the districts.”

This document reflects a deep-seated fear of a reversal in ethnic power relations; in which the Sinhalese will be pushed out of Tamil and Muslim-majority areas and find themselves constrained to smaller and smaller tracts of land within their only country.

Ironically, at the same time as the BBS has raised fears about the Sinhalese being pushed out of certain districts, the Sri Lankan government is accused of deliberately settling Sinhala members of the armed forces and their families in the Northeast and building Buddhist statues and shrines in the areas previously claimed by the LTTE. What is the relationship between the reality of Sinhalese expansionism and the BBS’ suggestion that the very opposite is occurring? “Demise of a Race” directly addresses the claims of Sinhalese internal colonialism towards Tamils and claims that Muslims are actually the ones responsible:

The separatist cohorts who claim that Sinhalese are involved in an ethnic genocide against Tamils must understand that the real threat for them comes from the Tamil speaking Musalmanus [pejorative term for Muslims] who initially joined them in their separatist campaign.

The Northern Provincial Council [a major political unit representing the Tamil-majority Northern province], which is passing many anti-Sinhalese legislations on a routine basis, is living in a fantasy world. When a Sinhala army soldier erects a small Buddha statue at the foot of a Bodhi tree to offer flowers to Lord Buddha, these anti-Sinhala separatist politicians loudly claim that this is a Sinhala expansionism. But they do not realize that the real threat to them comes from Islamic quarters.

Perhaps this is merely a form of projection, in which transgressions perpetrated by the self are displaced onto the dehumanized Muslim other. Alternatively, the perceived Muslim threat in the South may serve to justify Sinhalese expansion in the North, as a supposedly defensive reaction to geographical transgressions by the minorities.