Muslim Perspectives on the Sri Lankan Conflict

by Dennis B. McGilvray

The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict is often regarded as a two-way contest between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority, ignoring the interests and concerns of the island’s 8 percent Muslim (or “Moorish”) minority. One-third of Sri Lanka’s Muslims are concentrated in towns and districts located within the Tamil-speaking agricultural northeast, a region envisioned as independent “Tamil Eelam” by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In the postindependence period, the Muslim leadership at the national level abandoned their colonial identity as Arabs (“Moors”) and adopted a religious identity as Muslims, clearly defining their ethnicity as neither Sinhala nor Tamil. Muslim politicians emphasized coalition politics with mainstream Sinhala parties until the outbreak of the armed Tamil secessionist campaign in the 1980s. Since then, Muslim communities in the northeast have suffered violence and dispossession at the hands of the LTTE, and they have been harmed by indiscriminate mili