Horizons by Lakshman Gunasekara
Who would have thought that the people of Madatugama, a sleepy village on the A9 between Dambulla and Anuradhapura, would make history in our continuing, agonising struggle for ethnic co-existence? Madatugama does have a post office and other important public institutions but, more importantly, the village has a mosque – until last week, two mosques.
But last week, the Muslims of the village got together and demolished one of the mosques with their own hands. As a local Muslim community leader told news media, the community decided that the second mosque, a new, little-used but ornately-built, traditional-style structure was a blot on their landscape and should be demolished. News media photos showed the local Muslim faithful breaking down the walls of the mosque.
Why? Why should the faithful of a religious community opt to destroy one of their sacred buildings? As local community leaders explained to the media – no doubt invited to record the demolition for public record –the new mosque had been built with foreign funds believed to have originated from Wahhabi fundamentalist donors in Saudi Arabia. It had been built by a local Thowheed group which had used the building exclusively for its activities.
Following the Easter Sunday bombings and the subsequent exposé of the role of Wahhabi-Thowheed splinter factions in that carnage, the Muslims of Madatugama decided that they could not tolerate such groups on their home ground. While they already had their own, traditional, mosque, they decided (as they told news media) that not only was there no need for a second mosque for their small community, but, more importantly, they felt that the Thowheed strain of Islamic fundamentalism had become more damaging than beneficial to their community.
A mosque frequented by Thowheed fundamentalist Muslims does not showcase that fundamentalism through any distinctive architecture. If at all, only a name board describing the particular religious school that functioned there would indicate to an outsider the precise doctrinal identity of a Muslim place of worship. The local faith community will know, however, who worships there and what doctrines they espouse.
Thus, the demolition of the Thowheed mosque in Madatugama was not simply a choreographed public demonstration of the local Muslims’ rejection of Islamist fundamentalist violence. It was not a mere public posturing to demonstrate their goodwill towards other communities. After all, their non-Muslim (essentially Sinhalese) neighbours would not, at first sight, discern the objectionable doctrinal identity of the mosque and its association with the Easter carnage.
Rather, the full meaning and implications of the demolition of that particular “masjid” is known mainly – if not solely – to the local Muslim community. The Muslims of the area were taking steps not simply to reassure their non-Muslim neighbours but also to reassure themselves that this kind of pseudo-Islamic doctrinal aberration would not, any more, seep into their community life.
The act of demolition of a supposed place of worship was, therefore, an act of internal renewal of faith just as much as it was a demonstration of public goodwill and an overture for better communal co-existence. It was a first step by the local Muslim community to sustain a civilised religiosity that cultivated both inter-religious, spiritual dialogue, as well as more harmonious social relations between religious communities.
Self-iconoclasm
Have Sri Lankans ever heard of such a tearing down of a functioning religious edifice by members of that same faith community before this? Actually, our island history has been punctuated – disagreeably – by many instances of iconoclasm, but not self-iconoclasm (if I am allowed poetic licence). These instances have been mainly the destruction of one faith community’s edifices and symbols by another community. And this has happened more in our historic past rather than in the present.
We have seen the ancient Maha Vihara ecclesiastical establishment encourage the Anuradhapura monarchy of the time to destroy establishments of the Vaithulyavadins – the revisionist school of Buddhism that had begun to thrive in our classical historic period. Likewise, the Vaithulyavadin hierarchy won over King Mahasena (and others) to their establishment and encouraged the destruction or abandonment of the Maha Vihara establishments.
Likewise, the Brahmins of invading Chola kings encouraged the destruction of Buddhist shrines and temples that maintained an ideological hold over the local populace. The colonising Portuguese were far more devastating in their destruction of indigenous religious edifices and institutions.
But today, it is the Muslims themselves who are doing this – in their attempts at community self-renewal.
The elimination of one’s own resources is usually a step taken in recognition of the redundancy of those particular resources. In the case of the Muslims, it is an active rejection of certain discourses and practices no longer regarded as viable, useful, or meaningful to the community concerned. Such a “cleansing” of thought and practice is, therefore, reflective of an inner spiritual renaissance, in this case, at the level of the whole community.
This heroic act by the Muslims of Madatugama is not an isolated one. In fact, its social significance was preceded just a week earlier by the collective action of the Muslim religious leadership of Galle District.
On Monday, the previous week, the Galle District Muslim Mosques’ trustees and their committee members met with Speaker Karu Jayasuriya in Parliament and submitted a memorandum detailing steps to be taken to eradicate “extremism”, as news media reported.
In their memorandum to the Speaker, Galle’s combined Muslim religious leadership collectively called for a complete rejection of Wahhabi preaching and inculcation in the country. Media reports seem to quote them as calling for a “ban” on Wahhabism.
Again, the Muslims of Galle were not merely publicly demonstrating their rejection of the Easter Sunday carnage. Rather, they were indicating the beginnings of their inner struggle to retrieve the spiritual essences of their faith from amid the obfuscating and harmfully misguiding accretions of generations of social tradition and situational interpretations. After all, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) certainly did not preach the genocide of non-Muslims, leave aside the crude use of violence for the propagation of the faith.
If the action by Madatugama Muslims demonstrated a social, grassroots initiative by a faith community for internal spiritual renewal, the action by the Galle Muslim leadership demonstrated the initiative at the level of larger faith community leadership that aimed at systematic doctrinal renewal.
Interestingly, the banning of facial covering through an emergency regulation was preceded just days earlier by a call by the national Muslim religious leadership for Muslim women to voluntarily stop covering their faces in order to help ensure public security. This indicates that, while the State saw the importance of addressing such socio-cultural practices endangering public security, the community most linked with such practices had already thought ahead in the interests of national security over and above its own customs.
Living theology
“Systematic theology” is a term familiar to Christian scholars, both clerical and lay. It encompasses the gamut of “doing theology” in a systematic way. This denotes the meticulous study and interpretation of Christian texts, the analysis and discussion of doctrine, the study of social contexts of the origins of doctrine, and the distilling of doctrine and meaning after the processing of source materials to ensure authenticity.
“Doing theology” implies the living, creative re-interpretation of texts and doctrine in the spirit of the original motivation of divinity or spiritual/philosophical inspiration in a manner that takes into account the exigencies of the real life of the faithful today (as against life in past eras).
Such systematic doctrinal interpretation and debate has characterised virtually all major religions with such doctrinal activity continuing throughout the history of the respective religions right up to this day. However, different religions have experienced upturns and downturns in such spiritual creativity and innovation at different times in their histories.
Fundamentalisms in all schools of religion (and philosophy) tend to restrict or even reverse such exploratory living and spirituality. Theologically speaking, one can argue that such fundamentalism opposes divinity.
The refusal to acknowledge history is a crucially destructive element in fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. By “history”, I do not mean the simplistic elements of fixed historical explanations on which fundamentalism depends. Fundamentalism needs the destruction of the past – except for its selected elements of a fixed history – in order to prevent living theology, that is, the ongoing interpretation of the faith in the light of the present.
Genuine history means the continued improvising of our understanding of our history on the basis of sustained historical research, including systematic archaeology.
If the faith renewal initiatives begun by the Muslim community are to succeed, such systematic theology must be done. And so must historical research.
However, the Muslims’ endeavours at internal spiritual renewal are done in the context of living in a larger society of many religious communities. Peaceful co-existence between these communities depends on parallel progress in a similar internal spiritual renewal within these other communities as well.
The religio-ethnic community most decisive in the politics of co-existence in Sri Lanka is the Sinhala Buddhist community.
Despite its control over state resources in the 70 years of post-colonial freedom, the Sinhala Buddhist community has singularly failed in its own “renaissance” although many voices within this community have signalled the need for such renewal. Ideally, given the resources at hand, it is the Sinhala Buddhist community that should have taken the lead in post-colonial spiritual and civilisational revival.
Rather, we have seen the Sinhala Buddhist community leadership (both political and ecclesiastical) use its new-found electoral power over the State (thanks to its majority vote) to merely emulate the politics of state dominance exercised earlier by our colonial masters. The inspiration of the social republicanism upheld by the Buddha himself in his discourses has been ignored in the heady delight of present-day social dominance.
The second largest religio-ethnic community, the Tamils, seemingly trapped by this vortex of inter-ethnic rivalry, has also resorted to the politics of rivalry with little regard to the possible options for multi-dimensional interaction between communities and classes offered by an approach to social co-existence that explores both politics and culture.
Of course, the politics of ethnic rivalry, supremacism, and political opportunism will persist in spite of these initiatives by the Muslim community. It is to be hoped that the Muslims will persevere. They will do so if they learn from their own rich history and be inspired by the sheer brilliance of Muslim civilisation across the world and across eras.
The Muslim community is showing the other Sri Lankan communities the way forward in genuine civilisation building. We need more self-iconoclasm in the other communities if we are to move towards the genuine co-existence so essential for collective prosperity.
Who would have thought that the people of Madatugama, a sleepy village on the A9 between Dambulla and Anuradhapura, would make history in our continuing, agonising struggle for ethnic co-existence? Madatugama does have a post office and other important public institutions but, more importantly, the village has a mosque – until last week, two mosques.
But last week, the Muslims of the village got together and demolished one of the mosques with their own hands. As a local Muslim community leader told news media, the community decided that the second mosque, a new, little-used but ornately-built, traditional-style structure was a blot on their landscape and should be demolished. News media photos showed the local Muslim faithful breaking down the walls of the mosque.
Why? Why should the faithful of a religious community opt to destroy one of their sacred buildings? As local community leaders explained to the media – no doubt invited to record the demolition for public record –the new mosque had been built with foreign funds believed to have originated from Wahhabi fundamentalist donors in Saudi Arabia. It had been built by a local Thowheed group which had used the building exclusively for its activities.
Following the Easter Sunday bombings and the subsequent exposé of the role of Wahhabi-Thowheed splinter factions in that carnage, the Muslims of Madatugama decided that they could not tolerate such groups on their home ground. While they already had their own, traditional, mosque, they decided (as they told news media) that not only was there no need for a second mosque for their small community, but, more importantly, they felt that the Thowheed strain of Islamic fundamentalism had become more damaging than beneficial to their community.
A mosque frequented by Thowheed fundamentalist Muslims does not showcase that fundamentalism through any distinctive architecture. If at all, only a name board describing the particular religious school that functioned there would indicate to an outsider the precise doctrinal identity of a Muslim place of worship. The local faith community will know, however, who worships there and what doctrines they espouse.
Thus, the demolition of the Thowheed mosque in Madatugama was not simply a choreographed public demonstration of the local Muslims’ rejection of Islamist fundamentalist violence. It was not a mere public posturing to demonstrate their goodwill towards other communities. After all, their non-Muslim (essentially Sinhalese) neighbours would not, at first sight, discern the objectionable doctrinal identity of the mosque and its association with the Easter carnage.
Rather, the full meaning and implications of the demolition of that particular “masjid” is known mainly – if not solely – to the local Muslim community. The Muslims of the area were taking steps not simply to reassure their non-Muslim neighbours but also to reassure themselves that this kind of pseudo-Islamic doctrinal aberration would not, any more, seep into their community life.
The act of demolition of a supposed place of worship was, therefore, an act of internal renewal of faith just as much as it was a demonstration of public goodwill and an overture for better communal co-existence. It was a first step by the local Muslim community to sustain a civilised religiosity that cultivated both inter-religious, spiritual dialogue, as well as more harmonious social relations between religious communities.
Self-iconoclasm
Have Sri Lankans ever heard of such a tearing down of a functioning religious edifice by members of that same faith community before this? Actually, our island history has been punctuated – disagreeably – by many instances of iconoclasm, but not self-iconoclasm (if I am allowed poetic licence). These instances have been mainly the destruction of one faith community’s edifices and symbols by another community. And this has happened more in our historic past rather than in the present.
We have seen the ancient Maha Vihara ecclesiastical establishment encourage the Anuradhapura monarchy of the time to destroy establishments of the Vaithulyavadins – the revisionist school of Buddhism that had begun to thrive in our classical historic period. Likewise, the Vaithulyavadin hierarchy won over King Mahasena (and others) to their establishment and encouraged the destruction or abandonment of the Maha Vihara establishments.
Likewise, the Brahmins of invading Chola kings encouraged the destruction of Buddhist shrines and temples that maintained an ideological hold over the local populace. The colonising Portuguese were far more devastating in their destruction of indigenous religious edifices and institutions.
But today, it is the Muslims themselves who are doing this – in their attempts at community self-renewal.
The elimination of one’s own resources is usually a step taken in recognition of the redundancy of those particular resources. In the case of the Muslims, it is an active rejection of certain discourses and practices no longer regarded as viable, useful, or meaningful to the community concerned. Such a “cleansing” of thought and practice is, therefore, reflective of an inner spiritual renaissance, in this case, at the level of the whole community.
This heroic act by the Muslims of Madatugama is not an isolated one. In fact, its social significance was preceded just a week earlier by the collective action of the Muslim religious leadership of Galle District.
On Monday, the previous week, the Galle District Muslim Mosques’ trustees and their committee members met with Speaker Karu Jayasuriya in Parliament and submitted a memorandum detailing steps to be taken to eradicate “extremism”, as news media reported.
In their memorandum to the Speaker, Galle’s combined Muslim religious leadership collectively called for a complete rejection of Wahhabi preaching and inculcation in the country. Media reports seem to quote them as calling for a “ban” on Wahhabism.
Again, the Muslims of Galle were not merely publicly demonstrating their rejection of the Easter Sunday carnage. Rather, they were indicating the beginnings of their inner struggle to retrieve the spiritual essences of their faith from amid the obfuscating and harmfully misguiding accretions of generations of social tradition and situational interpretations. After all, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) certainly did not preach the genocide of non-Muslims, leave aside the crude use of violence for the propagation of the faith.
If the action by Madatugama Muslims demonstrated a social, grassroots initiative by a faith community for internal spiritual renewal, the action by the Galle Muslim leadership demonstrated the initiative at the level of larger faith community leadership that aimed at systematic doctrinal renewal.
Interestingly, the banning of facial covering through an emergency regulation was preceded just days earlier by a call by the national Muslim religious leadership for Muslim women to voluntarily stop covering their faces in order to help ensure public security. This indicates that, while the State saw the importance of addressing such socio-cultural practices endangering public security, the community most linked with such practices had already thought ahead in the interests of national security over and above its own customs.
Living theology
“Systematic theology” is a term familiar to Christian scholars, both clerical and lay. It encompasses the gamut of “doing theology” in a systematic way. This denotes the meticulous study and interpretation of Christian texts, the analysis and discussion of doctrine, the study of social contexts of the origins of doctrine, and the distilling of doctrine and meaning after the processing of source materials to ensure authenticity.
“Doing theology” implies the living, creative re-interpretation of texts and doctrine in the spirit of the original motivation of divinity or spiritual/philosophical inspiration in a manner that takes into account the exigencies of the real life of the faithful today (as against life in past eras).
Such systematic doctrinal interpretation and debate has characterised virtually all major religions with such doctrinal activity continuing throughout the history of the respective religions right up to this day. However, different religions have experienced upturns and downturns in such spiritual creativity and innovation at different times in their histories.
Fundamentalisms in all schools of religion (and philosophy) tend to restrict or even reverse such exploratory living and spirituality. Theologically speaking, one can argue that such fundamentalism opposes divinity.
The refusal to acknowledge history is a crucially destructive element in fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. By “history”, I do not mean the simplistic elements of fixed historical explanations on which fundamentalism depends. Fundamentalism needs the destruction of the past – except for its selected elements of a fixed history – in order to prevent living theology, that is, the ongoing interpretation of the faith in the light of the present.
Genuine history means the continued improvising of our understanding of our history on the basis of sustained historical research, including systematic archaeology.
If the faith renewal initiatives begun by the Muslim community are to succeed, such systematic theology must be done. And so must historical research.
However, the Muslims’ endeavours at internal spiritual renewal are done in the context of living in a larger society of many religious communities. Peaceful co-existence between these communities depends on parallel progress in a similar internal spiritual renewal within these other communities as well.
The religio-ethnic community most decisive in the politics of co-existence in Sri Lanka is the Sinhala Buddhist community.
Despite its control over state resources in the 70 years of post-colonial freedom, the Sinhala Buddhist community has singularly failed in its own “renaissance” although many voices within this community have signalled the need for such renewal. Ideally, given the resources at hand, it is the Sinhala Buddhist community that should have taken the lead in post-colonial spiritual and civilisational revival.
Rather, we have seen the Sinhala Buddhist community leadership (both political and ecclesiastical) use its new-found electoral power over the State (thanks to its majority vote) to merely emulate the politics of state dominance exercised earlier by our colonial masters. The inspiration of the social republicanism upheld by the Buddha himself in his discourses has been ignored in the heady delight of present-day social dominance.
The second largest religio-ethnic community, the Tamils, seemingly trapped by this vortex of inter-ethnic rivalry, has also resorted to the politics of rivalry with little regard to the possible options for multi-dimensional interaction between communities and classes offered by an approach to social co-existence that explores both politics and culture.
Of course, the politics of ethnic rivalry, supremacism, and political opportunism will persist in spite of these initiatives by the Muslim community. It is to be hoped that the Muslims will persevere. They will do so if they learn from their own rich history and be inspired by the sheer brilliance of Muslim civilisation across the world and across eras.
The Muslim community is showing the other Sri Lankan communities the way forward in genuine civilisation building. We need more self-iconoclasm in the other communities if we are to move towards the genuine co-existence so essential for collective prosperity.