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. |