Farzana Haniffa

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University of Colombo

This chapter deals with Sri Lanka’s Muslim council of theologians - the All Ceylon Jamiathul Ulema (ACJU) - and their response to Sri Lanka’s anti- Muslim movement. The anti-Muslim movement emerged after the end of Sri Lanka’s ethnic war and flourished when Sri Lanka was exploring post-war reconciliation measures. The ACJU responded to the anti-Mus...

The rate at which Muslims were procreating as well as Muslim women’s dress were important issues for Sri Lanka’s post-war anti-Muslim movement. Muslim interlocutors defended women’s dress practices as protecting women from sexual violence, and urged that the solution to perceived Muslim population increase was to ensure increase of the Sinhalese po...

Ideas about women have ��gured since at least the late nineteenth century in Sri Lankan Muslim identity politics, both in how Sri Lankan Muslims have viewed themselves and in how other communities have seen Muslims. Sri Lanka is home to four major ethno-religious communities. Most of the population is Sinhala-Buddhist, with substantial Hindu, Musli...

The ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka have many root causes and consequences that are closely interconnected. Given the nature and the complexity of root causes and consequences of these highly contested concepts, it should not be treated as a part of linear historical processes where one event led to another. Sri Lanka presents case of how inter...

This paper looks at the anti Muslim movement at its moment of ascendency in 2013. It also describes a particular post war sensibility that supported the assertion of anti Muslim sentiment in this manner. It argues that, additionally the power wielded by monks was utilised to its fullest in taking forward the movement.

On the evening of 15 June 2014, violence erupted in southern Sri Lanka. During two days of violence, Sinhala mobs systematically attacked Muslim shops and homes in the towns of Aluthgama, Dharga town, Welipanna and Beruwela, causing three deaths and massive damage to property. Anti-Muslim sentiment had been simmering in postwar Sri Lanka for some t...

Gender and sexuality in the Muslim world is decided both on interpretations of the Qur'an and on the respective social and political contexts in which people live. Edward Said argued that the Middle East and the Muslim world were imagined in particular ways by the Orientalists that had little to do with the Middle East itself. The manner in which I...

The northern Muslims together with all protracted IDPs displaced prior to 2008 became a low priority caseload for return and resettlement assistance in the aftermath of the ‘end’ of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009. Framed in terms of an ethics of ‘greatest need’ connected only to funding availability, all old IDPs lost out in the resettlement process....

The articles in this volume build up ethnographic analysis complementary to the historiography of South Asian Islam, which has explored the emergence of reformism in the context of specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century British India. Taking up diverse popular and scholarly debates as well as everyday religious practic...

This paper examines three instances of attempted rapprochement between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government in 1987, 2002 and 2005, and the inadequate response to the security and economic concerns of the Muslim minority community. The state's indifference to Muslim concerns has been due to the fact that minorit...

South Asia and Southeast Asia boast a large number of diverse ethnic groups, each with their own languages and cultural practices. Here dress traditions may be rooted in ancient, mystical beliefs. Textiles, many spectacularly embellished, very often have symbolic significance as visual markers of cultural and religious identity. South Asia and Sout...

In this paper I argue that the manner in which piety is perceived and propagated among Muslims in Sri Lanka must be understood as located within the context of ethnic conflict and the polarization between ethnic groups that occurred in its wake. I explore the work of one Muslim women's da'wa (preaching) group—Al Muslimaat—that pioneered the process...