Since the bombings, Facebook groups have organised boycotts of Muslim-owned shops; fake pictures of huge weapons caches “found in mosques” have circulated
s sound silly but the consequences are not. One Muslim lady’s crime was to wear a shirt printed with a ship’s helm. Her accusers said it looked like the wheel of dharma, so she must be mocking Buddhism, the religion of the majority. A young Muslim man was nabbed for having threecards in his pocket, and a broken memory card. True, he worked in a phone shop, but police insisted he must have snapped the memory card to hide nefarious contents.
Just over a month ago, on Easter morning, jihadist terrorists killed more than 250 people around Sri Lanka in a series of suicide-bombings. It is not surprising that since the attacks, jittery police have arrested more than 2,000 people, nearly all of them Muslim. But with suspicion among the public running high, calls for extra vigilance soon morphed into harsher demands.
After decades of civil war , one might expect Sri Lankans to be wary of demonising minorities. Alas, many are doing just that. Since the bombings in April, police have not just randomly arrested Muslims, who are about 10% of the population, but responded lackadaisically to repeated mob attacks against Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses. Facebook groups have organised boycotts of Muslim-owned shops; fake pictures of huge weapons caches “found in mosques” have circulated.
Muslim leaders point out that they had for years warned authorities about the emergence of cult-like radical groups. After the bombings, it was local Muslims who led police to what was believed to be the jihadists’ lair. Co-religionists also took it upon themselves to demolish one of the radicals’ mosques with sledgehammers.
Some Muslims have called for introspection. The prosperous Muslim elite, they say, has for too long turned a blind eye to creeping extremism. This is partly a product of widespread migration to the Gulf, and partly a reflection of a global trend among Muslims to abandon “diluted” local forms of Islam in favour of a “purer” Arabian kind. At the same time Buddhist groups with similarly narrow-minded inclinations have also gained ground.
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