Colombo (AsiaNews) – In a message of best wishes to Sri Lanka’s Muslim community issued on the occasion of the end of Ramadan, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa called on the country’s Muslims to help “forge a new Sri Lankan nation” based on “unity, tolerance and harmony” by making their “own contribution to the further progress of peace in the country”.
Muslims are about 1.75 million people and represent about 9 per cent of the island nation’s population. Today is Eid al-Fiter, a three-day celebration involving prayer, charity and visits to family and friends that marks the end of the month-long period of fasting.
In his message Rajapaksa said that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers freed “the Eastern Province, with its large population of Muslims, from the grip of terrorism” so that “Muslims expelled from their homes in the northern parts of the country” can now “return to live and carry out their traditions and religious activities in freedom.”
On the occasion of the end of Ramadan, the president stressed the Muslim community’s long “presence in Sri Lanka,” living “in harmony with Sinhalese, Tamils, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and all other communities,” and contributing “much to its progress.”
For some observers, the president’s focus on harmony and peaceful coexistence among the country’s different religious communities reflects concerns over problems within the Muslim community itself.
The end of the civil war brought back to the fore divisions among Muslims, which just before Ramadan, broke out into open clashes that ended in the death of two people and the wounding of 40 more in the mosque of Beruwala, a coastal town, some 40 kilometres south of Colombo.
Inter-communal frictions are due to opposition between Thaweed, a Wahhabi-inspired Islamic group that emerged in the seventies, and Muslims who adhere to indigenous traditions.
The split is centred on Kattandkudy, a mostly Muslim city of some 50,000 on the island’s est coast.
A number of Sri Lankan Islamic groups accuse Thaweed of being funded by Saudi Arabia, something the group denies. Instead, they claim that all they are doing is trying to ensure that Muslims correctly adhere to true Islam.
However, the possibility that a new separatist movement might emerge has started to worry local Muslims and the authorities—the former fear losing the freedom they regained with the end of the civil war, whilst the latter are worried about new violence, following almost 30 years of war against the Tamil Tigers.
