I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read Dushy Ranetunge’s article published in the Sunday Island of August 24, 2008. According to Ranetunge the rationale for the Muslim call for prayer was only to call in ‘scattered goat herders’ which supposedly was what the early Muslims were, to prayer. Really? Unless the goat herders and their goats were hanging out in the mosque compound there is no way that they would have heard the muezzin’s call because early Muslim muezzins did not have the benefit of loudspeakers to call out to those goat herders who were in what Ranetunge calls ‘far-off barren lands’. Apart from the humour the article as a whole does tend to get one’s goat not just because Ranetunge wants us to take his friend’s 16-year old daughter’s misconceived opinions seriously.

The overall conclusion of the article is a call for a dialogue between the three communities and especially with the Muslims. We Muslims truly welcome such a dialogue and even invite the radical elements in the other communities to join in because we have been waiting for a long time to have a chat with them and ask them what their problem with the Muslims is.

However buried within the inaccuracies the article reveals a dangerous fascist ideology that is trying to grip the Sri Lankan polity. Let us presume for a moment that Ranetunge is right and that Muslims have grown in number. To whom should it be a problem? The size of the Muslim population big or small should not be a problem to anybody unless they make it their problem. Unfortunately human history shows that people do make it their problem when communities other than theirs grow. The Spartans had a problem with the Helots, the Nazis with the Jews and the Zionists over the non – Jewish population of Israel. The ‘problem’ that the Spartans, Nazis and the Zionists have is their ideology that they are a ‘superior’ race and that it was their land over which they should have hegemony to the exclusion of all else. Even if they had to compromise on complete possession and found others on that land it was either extermination or relegation to the status of ‘second class citizens’.

Now the LTTE has that ideology. They think that the North and the East are their exclusive homelands and that they should have exclusive control, possession, hegemony and superiority there. To such an ideology the presence of Muslims was a problem and so when ethnic cleansing was only being talked about in Sarajevo, the Muslims of the North were evicted from lands. This was also what made the LTTE commit genocidal mass murder of Muslims in Eravur and Kattankudy. All that was the result of a ‘problem’ resulting from its fascist ideology.

Of recent times another political force has started to make the Muslims a problem for themselves. That force is the JHU which Ranetunge himself classified in an article published in the Asian Tribune, as being in ranks of the KKK and the BNP who are ‘political formations of majority communities feeding on majority insecurities and warped perceptions about minorities to secure political power.’

Ranetunge may be right when he says that ‘(of) the three major ethnic communities in Sri Lanka, the Muslims are socially, culturally and religiously the most distant from the other two communities.’ Living in London, talk of ‘cohesion’ might be fashionable. What Ranetunge forgets is that calls for cohesion in his adoptive society is only the result of it being homogenous for centuries and the difficulty they have in accepting that there will be people who will call themselves British but won’t be White Anglo Saxon or Protestant.

On the other hand Sri Lanka is a society that is rich in diversity and takes pride in it. Even though we Muslims have only a little strip along the margin of the national flag we are still are part of the country and its populace. The Sri Lankan identity unlike the British needs no transformation to accommodate Muslim culture or identity.

Sri Lanka has a small population of Muslims. The only fault on their part seems to be their need to assert their identity and practice their religion steadfastly to the best of their ability. Muslims have been living in this country for centuries and have been loyal citizens of Sri Lanka. The pockets of Muslims in the Central Province are testimonies to the good relations Muslims have had with the Sinhalese kings. Even our relationship with the Tamils in the North and the East has been very healthy until of course the emergence of the LTTE.

Dialogue yes, anytime, but what we don’t need is expat sponsored fear mongering. We citizens who have made this our home and have not deserted this country for the illusive glitter of foreign lands need to take the opinions of expats with a pinch of salt. After all if we take a path of collision and there is a backlash, it is only we who will suffer. They on the other hand will condescend, lunch at a five star hotel and disappear. Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils have long histories of friendship and togetherness. Thankfully and hopefully the terrorist menace is disappearing and we Sri Lankans and more so Sri Lankan Muslims eagerly await the dawn of peace. Let’s not harbour any suspicions anymore, let’s get over the distrust and treat each other with mutual respect and make racism and fascism pathologies of the past.