MUSLIMS ARE US

President Mahinda Rajapaksa making a speech at the donation of a new school building for Muslim Ladies College by Minister A. H. M. Fowzie, stressed on the importance of a good education for girls of Muslim parentage.

This was timely. At the rate things are going, those working overtime on the fiction that Sri Lanka is an anarchic dystopia, will no doubt be saying that the 'government is not allowing Muslim girls to be properly educated'!

It may appear as if this is being said in jest, but the rate of fabrication against Sri Lanka's governance record is expanding so exponentially that things are becoming almost surreal. The other day Gordon Weiss of ex-UN notoriety inferred that gays are being subject to persecution in Sri Lanka and could be a potential category of refugees from this country! So it wouldn't be long before they say that the Rajapaksa regime is not mimicking the Taliban, as Mangala Samaraweera said recently, but is the real Taliban -- preventing Muslim girls from going to school! This would be convenient indeed when the Jehan Pereras and sundry others along with the Salma Yusufs, the new opportunists of the NGO persuasion, have already created the diabolical canard that there is some kind of state sponsored Muslim baiting that is going on, because there have been a few incidents at the fringes of society involving some out on limb and overactive fringe groups.

They would be able to cap that canard with some quantity of icing if they say Muslim girls are kept away from school by the regime as well, and Salma Yusuf may be writing that tract already because she recently was caught out saying violence against Muslims went unreported when she was unable to point to a single - JUST ONE - such incident that may have escaped the national newspaper radar.

It is clear then that if anybody is adding fuel to what some people see as a volatile situation, it is not the government but the very 'liberals' that shout from every rooftop they can climb onto, saying that they are the conscientious objectors that are sounding the alarm to guard society from impending anarchy. How shall we expose this contradiction except to use the effective time worn cliche - O, Tempora, O, Mores.

It will take quite a bit more than a hyper-active hysterical and overambitious (not to mention callow young) liberal lady, to disturb the trust and harmony built over the years between Sri Lankan Muslims and the Sinhala Buddhists (and the Sinhala Christians) keeping in mind that the Muslims are the flesh and blood of the Sinhalese in any event, as the Muslim traders that originally settled in this country took Sinhalese women as wives, as historians, particularly of the calibre of Lorna Devarajah for instance, would be able to affirm.

It will certainly not be objectionable to anybody to say that Sri Lankan Muslims are Sri Lankan Muslims, as distinct from Muslims in say Afghanistan, Egypt, Malaysia -- or even India, for instance.

This is an ethnic group that has, curiously, both integrated and assimilated. That is having granted that the debate about 'integrating' (being multi-cultural) as opposed to 'assimilating' is rather tired and overworked.

First mooted in Britain, the idea was that immigrants should assimilate and not merely integrate, meaning that they should blend into the dominant culture and not remain pockets of cultural isolation in the broader mosaic of pluralistic societies.

What hogwash, to think that people are going to leave their cultural affiliations behind, and forget their roots entirely because some Oxford or Cambridge educated bright boy said it might be a great idea to 'assimilate'?

There always was an amalgam between assimilation and integration, if the way Muslims live in this country is considered from an objective perspective. Muslims while being part of the Sri Lankan whole, because of so many reasons such as their support in the war effort for instance, and many other cultural reasons such as the adaptation of their food habits to suitability and local conditions, are also known to maintain their identity fiercely, which is of course expected due to the nature of Islamism as a way of life.

Those who are trying to teach us Sri Lankans about living in harmony a la Obama and the American example, in the context of all this history can only simply be described as 'nut cases.'! They might want a date seed or two to suck on while they ruminate on that thought.