Buddhists view on Muslim socio-culture in post-war context of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lanka is a multi religious multi ethnic and multi linguistic country and Buddhists are the predominant religious group, constituting 70.19% of total population and the Muslims are the second largest minority next to the Tamils in this country. There are sufficient records available in the history to prove well of the cordial relationship prevailing for longer than 12 centuries, between the Buddhists and the Muslims. However, in recent past years, particularly, soon after the governmental victory of civil war in 2009 an unrest trend has come to prevail among Buddhists and Muslims in Sri Lanka could be observable. This is because of campaigns recently undertaken by a few Buddhist nationalist groups (BNGs), which have caused the rage of disfavor among them. So the groups have been carrying on protests against a number of aspects on Muslims’ socio-cultural practices such as issuing Halal certification, slaughtering of cattle, worship places and prayer services, woman’s Hijab and Niqab, Muslim trade and commercial stores and questioning the origin of Muslims to mother country. Also, they have disseminated among the general public that the number of Muslim socio-religious practices are threats to the Buddhists and their religion-Buddhism within Sri Lanka a predominant Buddhist country. Based on the above backdrop, this paper attempts to explore the Buddhists’ view on the number of Muslim socio-cultural aspects, which were recently disseminated by the BNGs as threats. And also it tries to find out to what extent the above aspects have been observed by the Buddhists as obstacles to maintain a better interaction with Muslims in the current context of Sri Lanka. According to the result, the Buddhists did not concern about the aspects of socio-cultural role of Muslims as the threats to them or to their religion and they did not see those as interruptive of maintaining a better interactions and obstacles to their daily activities. However, almost all of the Buddhists have stressed out here that the slaughtering of cattle is a mere problematic socio-cultural factor due to the prohibition according to Buddhism and its philosophy.