Features

An untold history of Sri Lanka’s Independence

Published

4 years ago

2022/02/5

By Uditha Devapriya

In Sri Lank, as in every other colonial outpost, resistance to foreign domination predated Western intervention by well more than two centuries. Surviving numerous onslaughts of South Indian conquest, the Anuradhapura kingdom gave way to the Polonnaruwa kingdom in the 11th century AD. The latter’s demise 200 years later led to a shift from the country’s north to the north-west, and from there to the south-west. It was in the south-west that the Sinhalese first confronted European colonialism, a confrontation that pushed the Kotte and the Sitava kingdoms to the last bastion of Sinhalese rule, Kandy.

The shift to Kandy coincided with the commencement of Portuguese rule in the island. Both Portuguese and Dutch officials emphasised, and sharpened, the line between the Maritime Provinces and the kanda uda rata. The Sitavaka rulers, in particular Rajasinghe I, had fought both Portuguese suzerainty and Kotte domination. These encounters more or less breathed new life into the country’s long history of resistance to foreign rule.

The Kandyan kings inherited this legacy and imbibed this streak. But under them resistance to colonial subjugation acquired a new logic and a fresh vigour. That was to define the island’s struggle against imperialism for well more than three centuries.

Sri Lanka’s confrontations with European colonialism took place in the early part of what historians call the modern period. The social, political, and economic transformations inherent in this period had a considerable impact on the trajectory of European imperialism and anti-imperialism. For that reason, any examination of Sri Lanka’s fight against colonial rule and its eventual independence must evaluate a broad array of historical trends. While the island’s lunge into statehood in 1948 followed a long period of peasant, elite, and radical struggles against foreign domination, the analysis would be incomplete without reference to how European colonialism itself influenced the course of such struggles.

The period between the British annexation of the island and the declaration of independence (1815-1948) unfolded in four successive but interrelated stages. In the first stage between 1815 and 1848, British colonialism was compelled to reckon with the reality of an unending series of peasant uprisings, beginning in Uva-Wellassa in 1817 and culiminating in Matale three decades later. In keeping with similar insurrections in other colonial societies, these were essentially Janus-faced: on the one hand, they sought liberation for a repressed group, the Kandyan peasantry, while on the other they envisaged a return to a pre-colonial polity. Yet, whatever their motives, they wanted to free the country of foreign rule.

The British government realised too late, the folly of assuming that its political-military grip over the island would weaken, and prevail over, peasant resistance. Since the annexation of 1815, the colonial government had drawn and redrawn the country’s borders, breaking up the former Kandyan kingdom into Central and North-Western provinces and separating the Kandyan kingdom from its Sabaragamuwa and Wayamba peripheries. With these measures, officials hoped for the breakup of Kandyan unity. The aim of these processes, notes K. M. de Silva, was “to weaken the national feeling of the Kandyans”.

However, for obvious reasons, none of these reforms could quieten or dispel the spirit of resistance among the peasantry. The Kandyan peasantry never accepted the notion of Sri Lanka as a unitary and united administration overseen by the colonial government. Indeed, when the subject of constitutional reform came up in the 1920s, the Kandyan delegation demanded federal autonomy, predating Tamil nationalist claims for a separate homeland by three decades. This showed very clearly that the British policy of amalgamating the Kandyan provinces with the rest of the country had not really worked out.

To complicate matters further, while dealing with peasant rebellions colonial officials had to put up with the growth of an assertive, and often radical, middle-class. To give one example, the Matala Uprising was never limited to Matale and Kurunegala: it erupted in Colombo as well, where Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher middle-classes protested the government’s tax policies. K. M. de Silva observes that attempts by these middle-classes to influence Kandyan agitation “achieved little impact.” Yet that such an attempt was made at all showed that the colonial government had to reckon with two distinct dissenting groups.

The middle-classes may not have been revolutionaries, but as their interventions during the Matale Uprising showed, they could combine their dissatisfaction with the way things were with popular hatred of the government, to make their own demands. As a way of resolving this issue, between 1848 and 1870 – the second of the four periods pertinent to this essay – the colonial government began hiring and empowering a subservient elite, drawn from “the second echelon of the Kandyan nobility” as well as a low country bourgeoisie.

Newton Gunasinghe has noted the paradox underlying these reforms. While putting an end to the monopoly of the Kandyan aristocracy, the British government reactivated the very social relations that had undergirded traditional Kandyan society. By reviving rajakariya in modified form, feudal production relations in temple lands, and a network of gamsabhas, colonial authorities grafted archaic social customs and practices on what was, essentially, a capitalist mode of production. This had the effect of building up a class of subservient elites and reducing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.

For a while, the strategy worked. However, while it kept the Kandyan peasantry in check and in control, it backfired when the same intermediate elite the government had employed to their ranks began demanding further reforms.

Here it’s important to clarify exactly what these elites wanted. In rebelling against the government, neither the newly co-opted aristocracy nor the middle-classes promoted the overthrow of the British government. They did not want a radical transformation of colonial society, largely because by then they had grown too dependent on that society to envisage, or desire, a Ceylon falling outside the British orbit. This is why, while clamouring for greater representation for themselves, they very carefully, and consistently, opposed the extension of the franchise. As Regi Siriwardena has noted, none of those celebrated as national heroes today – with the important exception of A. E. Goonesinha – wanted universal suffrage vis-à-vis the Donoughmore Commission. Such reforms had to be imposed on them.

Despite this, though, the British government’s policy of engaging with local elites worked fairly well. Colonial officials now had local emissaries through whom they could mediate potential peasant uprisings. Yet the policy necessitated the retention of archaic and quasi-feudal social relations, which in the long term stunted capitalist development. On the other hand, the new strategy paved the way for the revival of various art forms, most prominently the Dalada perahera. As scholars like Senake Bandaranayake have noted, the government defined the perimeters and the contours of cultural artefacts and objets d’art, ensuring that they were in line with the broader aim of legitimising colonial rule.

These reforms led, in the third period (1870-1915), to a Buddhist revival whose exponents alternated between championing opposing to and cooperation with colonial officials. These two lines were promoted, respectively, by the two Buddhist institutions of higher learning established in the late 19th century, Vidyalankara and Vidyodaya. While it’s rather difficult to draw a line between these two universities and their representatives, it is true, as H. L. Seneviratne suggests in The Work of Kings, that significant disagreements prevailed within the Buddhist clergy over the issue of British domination.

From their side, colonial authorities, especially governors like Henry Ward, William Gregory, and Arthur Gordon, sought closer cooperation with a conservative Buddhist bourgeoisie, legitimising British rule while implementing cultural and political reforms. Very often these reforms antagonised groups like Evangelical missionaries. Yet colonial officials ignored their concerns; endearing themselves to revivalists, orientalists, and moderate nationalist opinion to maintain the colonial administrative structure became the bigger priority.

The effect of these developments was to turn the Buddhist elite to the forefront of the reforms being supported by the British government. Towards the end of this period, the bourgeoisie, who were too entrenched economically in colonial rule to advocate radical change, yet too underrepresented politically to be content with the way things were, began to take the lead in these reforms through the Temperance Movement.

The Temperance Movement provided an impetus for a number of other organisations. K. M. de Silva has argued that none of them – not even the ambitious Ceylon National Association – fulfilled the aims for which they had been set up. Ranging from communal outfits like the Dutch Burgher Union to commercial groups like the Plumbago Merchants Union, these organisations, for the most, preferred gradual to radical change, dispensing with the sort of agitation politics that would come to define the Indian National Congress.

Moreover, Hector Abhayavardhana has noted that the bulk of the Sinhalese elite leadership consisted of “small men with narrow vision” who wanted to bring religion into politics. Any hopes for a multicultural alliance faded away with the establishment of Mahajana Sabhas, which campaigned for Buddhist candidates. However highly one may have thought of outfits like the Jaffna Youth Congress, the lack of enthusiasm for such alliances, among the colonial bourgeoisie, paved the way for their inevitable and tragic demise.

Meanwhile, the colonial bourgeoisie faced a more formidable foe, or competitor, in the form of nationalist firebrands like Anagarika Dharmapala. In a bid to blunt the fervour of such firebrands, who they viewed with much distaste, the Sinhalese bourgeoisie toed the Vidyodaya line, promoting change within the framework of a plantation economy while seeking more representation for themselves. This was necessitated by expedience: by the early 20th century a working class movement had begun to emerge in the country, as the Carters’ Strike of 1906 showed, and though it lacked proper leadership, it nevertheless concerned the bourgeoisie. Their rather ambivalent response to these developments had the unfortunate effect of stunting the rise of a mass struggle in the country.

The comprador bourgeoisie shot to fame, so to speak, with the 1915 riots. A point often forgotten in contemporary reconstructions of the riots is that none of the elites arrested by the British government posed a direct threat to colonial rule. As Kumari Jayawardena has pointed out, it was a case of official overreaction to the faintest threat of an anti-colonial uprising. Much like the J. R. Jayewardene government proscribing the Left after the 1983 riots, there was no link between the riots and the causes attributed to it, be it the supposed agitation of Buddhist elites or the politics of the Temperance Movement.

Kumari Jayawardena and K. M. de Silva point out that the period after the 1915 riots – the fourth period relevant to our discussion – witnessed the dulling down and fading away of the Buddhist revival. This is indeed what happened. In the person of Anagarika Dharmapala, the revival had brought together both reformist and radical streams. The Sinhalese elites, obviously cooperating with British authorities, marginalised him to the extent of excluding him from political activity. Yet Dharmapala’s departure from the island gave rise to newer parties and forms of struggle, many of them inspired by his vision. Among these, the most prominent was the Labour Party, founded in 1928 by A. E. Goonesinha.

Naturally enough, working class unrest dominated much of the post-1915 period, leading to the formation of a broad, radical Left. The newly formed Left identified the limitations of Goonesinha’s politics and sought to transcend them. To this end the establishment of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), in 1935, marked a pivotal turning point in the country’s lunge towards independent statehood. Envisioning a complete, radical transformation of society, its representatives and ideologues broke with the dominant political outfit of the day, the Ceylon National Congress, charting their own course.

The LSSP’s original objectives, as radical in their time as in ours, included the socialisation of the means of production, the attainment of complete independence, and the abolition of all forms of inequality, including caste. Given the state of the economy at the time – it was a plantation enclave heavily dependent on a few sectors – no other programme would have sufficed for an organisation calling for a mass struggle against colonial rule. It goes without saying that it was the stalwarts of the Marxist Left – specifically Philip Gunawardena – who first advocated complete independence for Ceylon.

In the meantime, the colonial bourgeoisie managed, rather dismally, to turn the Ceylon National Congress into a pale echo of what it had once aspired to. With the departure of Ponnambalam Arunachalam in 1921, there came an end to an era where, as K. M. de Silva and Hector Abhayavardhana have observed, Sinhala and Tamil communities constituted in unison the majority of the country. In the hands of a predominantly Sinhalese bourgeoisie the Congress became a little more than a communal organisation, a point reinforced by the decision of its leaders to disenfranchise estate Tamils. In this they were occupied more than anything else with the preservation of their economic interests.

All these developments led to a situation where the Left could claim, very validly, that the ruling elite had not won independence, but had secured it on a platter from Whitehall. The elite themselves were not unaware of the inadequacy of their campaign for freedom: when the masses reacted vociferously against the cosmetic reforms they had obtained from the British government, the Congress bourgeoisie quickly went back and pressed for what was being demanded. Yet tied to three agreements which made the defence, foreign policy, and civil service blanks of the government subservient to British interests, Ceylon could become free only through a radical transformation of its political structures.

In breaking off all remaining ties with the colonial government, the 1972 Constitution sought to give effect to such a transformation. By then even the Sinhalese bourgeoisie had come to realise the folly of maintaining the status quo and the inevitability of change: whereas John Kotelawala could support Ceylon remaining a Dominion, Dudley Senanayake could a decade later support the idea of it becoming a Republic within the Commonwealth.

I believe we need a new account of our country’s emergence as an independent state. The accounts we have at present, barring very few, glorify one set of leaders over all others, marginalising and excluding everyone else. Conventional narratives depict the colonial elite as national heroes. This was not always so, though important differences did exist within the bourgeoisie. What we have learnt about our own independence is hardly adequate to the task of helping us understand our past. We badly need a new history.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

All News Advertisement

Features

Rethinking post-disaster urban planning: Lessons from Peradeniya

Published

2 days ago

2025/12/26

Thilina Walpola

University of Peradeniya

A recent discussion by former Environment Minister, Eng. Patali Champika Ranawaka on the Derana 360 programme has reignited an important national conversation on how Sri Lanka plans, builds and rebuilds in the face of recurring disasters.

His observations, delivered with characteristic clarity and logic, went beyond the immediate causes of recent calamities and focused sharply on long-term solutions—particularly the urgent need for smarter land use and vertical housing development.

Ranawaka’s proposal to introduce multistoried housing schemes in the Gannoruwa area, as a way of reducing pressure on environmentally sensitive and disaster-prone zones, resonated strongly with urban planners and environmentalists alike.

It also echoed ideas that have been quietly discussed within academic and conservation circles for years but rarely translated into policy.

One such voice is that of Professor Siril Wijesundara, Research Professor at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS) and former Director General of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya, who believes that disasters are often “less acts of nature and more outcomes of poor planning.”

Professor Siril Wijesundara

“What we repeatedly see in Sri Lanka is not merely natural disasters, but planning failures,” Professor Wijesundara told The Island.

“Floods, landslides and environmental degradation are intensified because we continue to build horizontally, encroaching on wetlands, forest margins and river reservations, instead of thinking vertically and strategically.”

The former Director General notes that the University of Peradeniya itself offers a compelling case study of both the problem and the solution. The main campus, already densely built and ecologically sensitive, continues to absorb new faculties, hostels and administrative buildings, placing immense pressure on green spaces and drainage systems.

“The Peradeniya campus was designed with landscape harmony in mind,” he said. “But over time, ad-hoc construction has compromised that vision. If development continues in the same manner, the campus will lose not only its aesthetic value but also its ecological resilience.”

Professor Wijesundara supports the idea of reorganising the Rajawatte area—located away from the congested core of the university—as a future development zone. Rather than expanding inward and fragmenting remaining open spaces, he argues that Rajawatte can be planned as a well-designed extension, integrating academic, residential and service infrastructure in a controlled manner.

Crucially, he stresses that such reorganisation must go hand in hand with social responsibility, particularly towards minor staff currently living in the Rajawatte area.

“These workers are the backbone of the university. Any development plan must ensure their dignity and wellbeing,” he said. “Providing them with modern, safe and affordable multistoried housing—especially near the railway line close to the old USO premises—would be both humane and practical.”

According to Professor Wijesundara, housing complexes built near existing transport corridors would reduce daily commuting stress, minimise traffic within the campus, and free up valuable land for planned academic use.

More importantly, vertical housing would significantly reduce the university’s physical footprint.

Drawing parallels with Ranawaka’s Gannoruwa proposal, he emphasised that vertical development is no longer optional for Sri Lanka.

“We are a small island with a growing population and shrinking safe land,” he warned.

“If we continue to spread out instead of building up, disasters will become more frequent and more deadly. Vertical housing, when done properly, is environmentally sound, economically efficient and socially just.”

Peradeniya University flooded

The veteran botanist also highlighted the often-ignored link between disaster vulnerability and the destruction of green buffers.

“Every time we clear a lowland, a wetland or a forest patch for construction, we remove nature’s shock absorbers,” he said.

“The Royal Botanic Gardens has survived floods for over a century precisely because surrounding landscapes once absorbed excess water. Urban planning must learn from such ecological wisdom.”

Professor Wijesundara believes that universities, as centres of knowledge, should lead by example.

“If an institution like Peradeniya cannot demonstrate sustainable planning, how can we expect cities to do so?” he asked. “This is an opportunity to show that development and conservation are not enemies, but partners.”

As climate-induced disasters intensify across the country, voices like his—and proposals such as those articulated by Patali Champika Ranawaka—underscore a simple but urgent truth: Sri Lanka’s future safety depends not only on disaster response, but on how and where we build today.

The challenge now lies with policymakers and planners to move beyond television studio discussions and academic warnings, and translate these ideas into concrete, people-centred action.

By Ifham Nizam ✍️

Features

Superstition – Major barrier to learning and social advancement

Published

2 days ago

2025/12/26

Thilina Walpola

At the initial stage of my six-year involvement in uplifting society through skill-based initiatives, particularly by promoting handicraft work and teaching students to think creatively and independently, my efforts were partially jeopardized by deep-rooted superstition and resistance to rational learning.

Superstitions exerted a deeply adverse impact by encouraging unquestioned belief, fear, and blind conformity instead of reasoning and evidence-based understanding. In society, superstition often sustains harmful practices, social discrimination, exploitation by self-styled godmen, and resistance to scientific or social reforms, thereby weakening rational decision-making and slowing progress. When such beliefs penetrate the educational environment, students gradually lose the habit of asking “why” and “how,” accepting explanations based on fate, omens, or divine intervention rather than observation and logic.

Initially, learners became hesitant to challenge me despite my wrong interpretation of any law, less capable of evaluating information critically, and more vulnerable to misinformation and pseudoscience. As a result, genuine efforts towards social upliftment were obstructed, and the transformative power of education, which could empower individuals economically and intellectually, was weakened by fear-driven beliefs that stood in direct opposition to progress and rational thought. In many communities, illnesses are still attributed to evil spirits or curses rather than treated as medical conditions. I have witnessed educated people postponing important decisions, marriages, journeys, even hospital admissions, because an astrologer predicted an “inauspicious” time, showing how fear governs rational minds.

While teaching students science and mathematics, I have clearly observed how superstition acts as a hidden barrier to learning, critical thinking, and intellectual confidence. Many students come to the classroom already conditioned to believe that success or failure depends on luck, planetary positions, or divine favour rather than effort, practice, and understanding, which directly contradicts the scientific spirit. I have seen students hesitate to perform experiments or solve numerical problems on certain “inauspicious” days.

In mathematics, some students label themselves as “weak by birth”, which creates fear and anxiety even before attempting a problem, turning a subject of logic into a source of emotional stress. In science classes, explanations based on natural laws sometimes clash with supernatural beliefs, and students struggle to accept evidence because it challenges what they were taught at home or in society. This conflict confuses young minds and prevents them from fully trusting experimentation, data, and proof.

Worse still, superstition nurtures dependency; students wait for miracles instead of practising problem-solving, revision, and conceptual clarity. Over time, this mindset damages curiosity, reduces confidence, and limits innovation, making science and mathematics appear difficult, frightening, or irrelevant. Many science teachers themselves do not sufficiently emphasise the need to question or ignore such irrational beliefs and often remain limited to textbook facts and exam-oriented learning, leaving little space to challenge superstition directly. When teachers avoid discussing superstition, they unintentionally reinforce the idea that scientific reasoning and superstitious beliefs can coexist.

To overcome superstition and effectively impose critical thinking among students, I have inculcated the process to create a classroom culture where questioning was encouraged and fear of being “wrong” was removed. Students were taught how to think, not what to think, by consistently using the scientific method—observation, hypothesis, experimentation, evidence, and conclusion—in both science and mathematics lessons. I have deliberately challenged superstitious beliefs through simple demonstrations and hands-on experiments that allow students to see cause-and-effect relationships for themselves, helping them replace belief with proof.

Many so-called “tantrik shows” that appear supernatural can be clearly explained and exposed through basic scientific principles, making them powerful tools to fight superstition among students. For example, acts where a tantrik places a hand or tongue briefly in fire without injury rely on short contact time, moisture on the skin, or low heat transfer from alcohol-based flames rather than divine power.

“Miracles” like ash or oil repeatedly appearing from hands or idols involve concealment or simple physical and chemical tricks. When these tricks are demonstrated openly in classrooms or science programmes and followed by clear scientific explanations, students quickly realise how easily perception can be deceived and why evidence, experimentation, and critical questioning are far more reliable than blind belief.

Linking concepts to daily life, such as explaining probability to counter ideas of luck, or biology to explain illness instead of supernatural causes, makes rational explanations relatable and convincing.

Another unique example that I faced in my life is presented here. About 10 years ago, when I entered my new house but did not organise traditional rituals that many consider essential for peace and prosperity as my relatives believed that without them prosperity would be blocked. Later on, I could not utilise the entire space of my newly purchased house for earning money, largely because I chose not to perform certain rituals.

While this decision may have limited my financial gains to some extent, I do not consider it a failure in the true sense. I feel deeply satisfied that my son and daughter have received proper education and are now well settled in their employment, which, to me, is a far greater achievement than any ritual-driven expectation of wealth. My belief has always been that a house should not merely be a source of income or superstition-bound anxiety, but a space with social purpose.

Instead of rituals, I strongly feel that the unused portion of my house should be devoted to running tutorials for poor and underprivileged students, where knowledge, critical thinking, and self-reliance can be nurtured. This conviction gives me inner peace and reinforces my faith that education and service to society are more meaningful measures of success than material profit alone.

Though I have succeeded to some extent, this success has not been complete due to the persistent influence of superstition.

by Dr Debapriya Mukherjee
Former Senior Scientist
Central Pollution Control Board, India ✍️

Features

Race hate and the need to re-visit the ‘Clash of Civilizations’

Published

3 days ago

2025/12/25

Sahan Weerasooriya

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: ‘No to race hate’

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has done very well to speak-up against and outlaw race hate in the immediate aftermath of the recent cold-blooded gunning down of several civilians on Australia’s Bondi Beach. The perpetrators of the violence are believed to be ardent practitioners of religious and race hate and it is commendable that the Australian authorities have lost no time in clearly and unambiguously stating their opposition to the dastardly crimes in question.

The Australian Prime Minister is on record as stating in this connection: ‘ New laws will target those who spread hate, division and radicalization. The Home Affairs Minister will also be given new powers to cancel or refuse visas for those who spread hate and a new taskforce will be set up to ensure the education system prevents, tackles and properly responds to antisemitism.’

It is this promptness and single-mindedness to defeat race hate and other forms of identity-based animosities that are expected of democratic governments in particular world wide. For example, is Sri Lanka’s NPP government willing to follow the Australian example? To put the record straight, no past governments of Sri Lanka initiated concrete measures to stamp out the evil of race hate as well but the present Sri Lankan government which has pledged to end ethnic animosities needs to think and act vastly differently. Democratic and progressive opinion in Sri Lanka is waiting expectantly for the NPP government’ s positive response; ideally based on the Australian precedent to end race hate.

Meanwhile, it is apt to remember that inasmuch as those forces of terrorism that target white communities world wide need to be put down their counterpart forces among extremist whites need to be defeated as well. There could be no double standards on this divisive question of quashing race and religious hate, among democratic governments.

The question is invariably bound up with the matter of expeditiously and swiftly advancing democratic development in divided societies. To the extent to which a body politic is genuinely democratized, to the same degree would identity based animosities be effectively managed and even resolved once and for all. To the extent to which a society is deprived of democratic governance, correctly understood, to the same extent would it experience unmanageable identity-bred violence.

This has been Sri Lanka’s situation and generally it could be stated that it is to the degree to which Sri Lankan citizens are genuinely constitutionally empowered that the issue of race hate in their midst would prove manageable. Accordingly, democratic development is the pressing need.

While the dramatic blood-letting on Bondi Beach ought to have driven home to observers and commentators of world politics that the international community is yet to make any concrete progress in the direction of laying the basis for an end to identity-based extremism, the event should also impress on all concerned quarters that continued failure to address the matters at hand could prove fatal. The fact of the matter is that identity-based extremism is very much alive and well and that it could strike devastatingly at a time and place of its choosing.

It is yet premature for the commentator to agree with US political scientist Samuel P. Huntingdon that a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is upon the world but events such as the Bondi Beach terror and the continuing abduction of scores of school girls by IS-related outfits, for instance, in Northern Africa are concrete evidence of the continuing pervasive presence of identity-based extremism in the global South.

As a matter of great interest it needs mentioning that the crumbling of the Cold War in the West in the early nineties of the last century and the explosive emergence of identity-based violence world wide around that time essentially impelled Huntingdon to propound the hypothesis that the world was seeing the emergence of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Basically, the latter phrase implied that the Cold War was replaced by a West versus militant religious fundamentalism division or polarity world wide. Instead of the USSR and its satellites, the West, led by the US, had to now do battle with religion and race-based militant extremism, particularly ‘Islamic fundamentalist violence’ .

Things, of course, came to a head in this regard when the 9/11 calamity centred in New York occurred. The event seemed to be startling proof that the world was indeed faced with a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ that was not easily resolvable. It was a case of ‘Islamic militant fundamentalism’ facing the great bulwark, so to speak, of ‘ Western Civilization’ epitomized by the US and leaving it almost helpless.

However, it was too early to write off the US’ capability to respond, although it did not do so by the best means. Instead, it replied with military interventions, for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which moves have only earned for the religious fundamentalists more and more recruits.

Yet, it is too early to speak in terms of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Such a phenomenon could be spoken of if only the entirety of the Islamic world took up arms against the West. Clearly, this is not so because the majority of the adherents of Islam are peaceably inclined and want to coexist harmoniously with the rest of the world.

However, it is not too late for the US to stop religious fundamentalism in its tracks. It, for instance, could implement concrete measures to end the blood-letting in the Middle East. Of the first importance is to end the suffering of the Palestinians by keeping a tight leash on the Israeli Right and by making good its boast of rebuilding the Gaza swiftly.

Besides, the US needs to make it a priority aim to foster democratic development worldwide in collaboration with the rest of the West. Military expenditure and the arms race should be considered of secondary importance and the process of distributing development assistance in the South brought to the forefront of its global development agenda, if there is one.

If the fire-breathing religious demagogue’s influence is to be blunted worldwide, then, it is development, understood to mean equitable growth, that needs to be fostered and consolidated by the democratic world. In other words, the priority ought to be the empowerment of individuals and communities. Nothing short of the latter measures would help in ushering a more peaceful world.