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The Aftermath of Empire – Reappraisal and Reconciliation – (Part 2)

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by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe*

Continued from last week

The author is an Honorary Professor at the University of Buckingham, UK, at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, and also at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies in Sri Lanka.

He was a former Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Staff Member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and former Professor at Cardiff University. He is a pioneer of the discipline of Astrobiology and the author of over 450 scientific papers and some 35 books.

 

Several generations of British historians, archaeologists and naturalists devoted their entire lives to tirelessly exploring the multiplicity of wonders of India. Studies of the subcontinent’s natural history, archaeology and anthropology are just a few scientific disciplines that enormously benefited from the imperial encounter. The introduction of greenhouses, zoological and botanic gardens to the Western world and much else came directly as a result of the colonial venture.

One discovery of great importance is worthy of mention. A large number of stone pillars and columns bearing mysterious inscriptions in a hitherto undeciphered Brahmi script had been scattered across the length and breadth of India and, rather strangely, gone unnoticed for centuries. In the 1830’s it was an English Philologist and scholar James Prinsep (1799-1840) who successfully deciphered these inscriptions. The edicts written in the Bhrami language mentioned a King Devanampriya Piyadasi which Prinsep had initially assumed was a Sri Lankan king. He was later to discover a Pali text from Sri Lanka from which he was able to connect the title Piyadasi with Ashoka, and thus was revealed for a first time a long-hidden secret of Indian history – the life and times of Emperor Ashoka who had reigned between 268 and 232 BCE. Ashoka is famous as the Indian monarch who became a Buddhist and unified a vast part of the Indian subcontinent into a single empire ruling it according to Buddhist principles. H.G. Wells in his “Outline of World History” said of Ashoka that amid tens of thousands of names of monarchs, “Ashoka shines, shines almost alone, a star”.

In the 1920’s it was again thanks to British archaeologists that we owe the next major discovery – the unravelling of the great Indus valley civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro which represents another long-hidden chapter in the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent stretching back to the third millennium BCE. We already had knowledge from Mesopotamian records of a vigorous trade in lapis lazuli that existed between empires in the Mesopotamia and India, but now we could link this precisely with the Indus valley civilizations.

 

Unravelling a Buddhist heritage

A few British Civil Servants who were posted in Ceylon in the 19th century became assiduous students of Buddhist texts and wrote extensively and enthusiastically about Buddhism. Thomas William Rhys David (1843-1922) was one such scholar who found himself posted as Government Agent near the historic ancient city of Anuradhapura. There he became actively involved in archaeological excavations that led to the discovery of a vast number of inscriptions and manuscripts relating to Buddhism and this triggered his interest. He soon became a formidable Pali scholar, translated many Buddhist Pali texts into English and also wrote extensive commentaries on Buddhism that are still being read today.

The colonial response to Buddhism on the whole had been positive throughout the time of the Empire. H.G. Wells (1866-1946) in his “Outline of World History” writes of Buddhism thus:

“Many of our best modern ideas are in closest harmony with it. All the miseries and discontents of life are due, he (the Buddha) taught, to selfishness. Selfishness takes three forms – one, the desire to satisfy the senses; second, the craving for immortality; and the third the desire for prosperity and worldliness. Before a man can become serene he must cease to live for his senses or himself. Then he merges into a great being. Buddha in a different language called men to self-forgetfulness five hundred years before Christ. In some ways he was nearer to us and our needs. Buddha was more lucid on our individual importance in service than Christ, and less ambiguous upon the question of personal immortality.”

The amazing degree of concordance between Buddha’s view of consciousness and modern post-Jungian ideas in psychology were discussed by me and Daisaku Ikeda in our dialogue many years ago. The practice of Buddhist meditation is becoming increasingly popular in the West today because of its potential to yield mental and physical health benefits. Such practices, however, are looked upon with suspicion by many – now and in the past – as heathen primitive rituals that challenge the cannon of Christian faith. Such a narrow view cannot be interpreted as being any other than a component of racial thinking that prevailed throughout the period of British imperialism and filters down even into our post-colonial modern era.

 

Buddhist cosmology

In matters relating to cosmology and life in the Universe ideas from Buddhist as well as earlier Vedic traditions have run contrary to the canonical Western world-view. For instance, in the cosmology described in the Anguttara Nikaya (a Buddhist text dated at around the 1st century BCE) it is stated thus:

“As far as these suns and moons revolve, shedding their light in space, so far extends the thousand-fold world system. In it there are a thousand suns, a thousand moons, a thousand inhabited Earths and a thousand heavenly bodies. This is called the thousand-fold minor world system….”

It then goes on to define a hierarchy of world systems, referring to the entire universe as “this sphere of million, million world systems”. Similar views do not dominate scientific thinking in Europe until after the Copernican revolution in the 17th century of the common era. Today, with the recent discoveries of exoplanets in the past decade, the total number of exoplanetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy alone is estimated to exceed 100 billion.

As far back as the first millennium BCE a school of atomism similar to that of Democritus was founded in India, the most important proponent of this school being a philosopher named Kanada (600 BCE). The idea was that atoms are point-sized, indivisible and eternal, each possessing a distinct property and individuality. These concepts were developed further by a burgeoning Buddhist school of atomism that flourished in the 7th century CE.

Aryabhata (476-550CE) was perhaps the first Indian astronomer in the modern mould who discovered an approximation of pi to six significant figures and also correctly maintained that the planets and the Moon shine by reflected sunlight. He also correctly inferred from observations that the daily motion of the stars in the celestial sphere is due to Earth’s rotation about its axis.

From both archaeological and later historical evidence there is no doubt that high levels of advancement in science and technology had been achieved in India long before Aryabhata going back to at least the second millennium before the common era. Vedic Sanskrit texts dated at the 8th century BCE refer to Pythagorean triples (eg. (3,4,5 (5,12,13), (8,15,17)) and display a knowledge of Pythagoras theorem. One of the earliest Indian astronomical texts (Vedānga Jyotiṣa) dates from 1400–1200 BCE, with the currently extant form dating possibly from 700–600 BCE. This latter timespan also corresponds to the dating of the most ancient known “university” in the world, Takshashila in India, which was a centre first of Hindu and later Buddhist scholarship.

 

Ayurveda and plant-based pharmaceuticals

Developments in the field of ayurvedic plant-based medicine, and including reports of surgical interventions, have been recorded in a variety of sources from the earliest times. In one of the Ashokan pillars (272-231BCE), to which I have already referred, an edict reads: “Everywhere King Piyadasi (Ashoka) erected two kinds of hospitals, hospitals for people and hospitals for animals. Where there were no healing herbs for people and animals, he ordered that they be bought and planted.” There also exist many thousands of ayurvedic texts both in India and Sri Lanka with extensive lists of medicinal herbs and their alleged benefits for curing various ailments. The result of four centuries of colonial rule has unfortunately been to relegate this vast legacy to the “archive of curiosity”.

The few ayurvedic physicians who now practice in India and Sri Lanka still rely on time-hallowed anecdotal accounts of the efficacy of their plant-based medicines. The correct procedure will be for western science to fully explore these claims with chemical analysis and trials, but this has not yet been done. It should be recalled in this context that many drugs currently used in western medicine are indeed derived from plants – aspirin, quinine, digitalis, morphine, codeine – are just a few. It is hard to imagine the medical legacy that would follow from a complete investigation of the thousands of claimed herbal remedies that still remain unexamined.

 

Transition from ancient to modern science

I have already mentioned the knowledge of land surveying technologies and irrigation schemes that was evident in the Indus valley civilizations of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa; and these and other technological developments have also been found elsewhere in India and in neighbouring Sri Lanka throughout the period from the beginning of the common era until the time of the arrival of the British in 1600CE.

When the British arrived in India the difference in technological development between Britain and the subcontinent was arguably marginal. Handlooms and weaving technology that were developed and used in Bengal made India (run by the Moghuls) one of the richest countries of the world at this time. In a real sense it could be maintained that the technological advancement of the West took place at the cost of the continued impoverishment of India.

From the beginning of the 20th century many Indian scientists who were trained in British Universities and laboratories made highly significant contributions to the progress of science furthering the dominant scientific paradigms of Western science. A common feature of all these scientists is that their corpus of work supported and did not in any way challenge the major accepted paradigms of the day. Their achievements were thus thought to be a continuing tribute to the prevailing and predominant traditions of western science, and so were readily acknowledged and rewarded. However serious difficulties can arise whenever an ethnically non-European scientist hailing from an ex-colony dares to challenge a reigning paradigm of Western science.

 

Clash of Orthodoxy and Heresy

It should occasion no surprise to find that most important advances in science with regard to fundamental of issues concerning the Universe and Life have always been subject to cultural and religious constraints. Thus, in the 19th century the unfolding facts of geology that yielded an age of the Earth of some 4 billon years came into sharp conflict with Biblical chronologies of mere thousands of years, and this had initially caused great angst in some circles. Likewise, the facts of biological evolution that were unravelled after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859 continued to disturb conventional beliefs for several decades.

As already mentioned Buddhist and earlier Vedic cosmologies can be interpreted as being consistent with many aspects of modern and post-modern scientific thought. There are also fundamental differences that can cause consternation in a Western scientific context. In Vedic cosmology the universe is thought to be infinite in spatial extent and cyclic in time– strikingly reminiscent of the modern versions of oscillating universe models. In this context it is worth noting that the currently favoured Big-Bang theory of the Universe with an age of 13.8 billion years is by no means absolutely proved. The very recent discovery of a galaxy designated GN-z11 located at a distance of 13.4 billion light years (implying its formation just 420 million years after the posited Big Bang origin of the Universe) poses serious problems for the current consensus view of cosmology.

Recently Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose has come in among the select band of dissenters from the standard view of a unique Big Bang origin of the Universe 13.8 billion years ago. In a theory called the “conformal cyclic cosmology” Penrose postulates that the universe undergoes an infinite number of cycles in which the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago is the most recent cycle of which we are a part – a result strikingly in accord with ancient Vedic and Indian cosmology.

 

The inescapable fact of Panspermia

Finally, I turn to the age-old problem of our own origins – how we, humans and indeed all of life, came to be. This question has been approached in a multitude of different ways, embracing superstition, religion, philosophy and eventually science. The ideas that prevailed throughout ancient India involved the concept of life being an integral part of the structure of the universe – a view closely aligned to the ideas of panspermia discussed in the West by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxoragas of Clazomenae who lived around 500BCE. Panspermia implies that “seeds of life” are eternally present in the cosmos and take root whenever and wherever the condition permit.

This concept was vigorously rejected in the Western tradition in favour of the ideas of the more influential Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 3rd century BCE. Aristotle proposed instead that life must arise from non-living inorganic matter whenever the right conditions prevailed, and he cited many instances that were incorrectly regarded as supportive evidence, the most graphic being the statement of “fireflies emerging from a mixture of warm earth and morning dew”. Over a millennium and a half later Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1272) essentially co-opted Aristotelian philosophy into church doctrine, so that dissent from any component of it thereafter was effectively construed as heresy. The Aristotlean doctrine of “Spontaneous Generation” was transformed into “Abiogenesis” in modern terms and continues to dominate Western science almost to the present day.

Attempts to re-examine panspermia in the West began in earnest with the French biologist Louis Pasteur in the early 1860’s. Pasteur showed in the laboratory what was already known for larger visible life forms – that life is always derived from pre-existing life of a similar kind. This casual chain of events – life-from-life – is true not only for lifeforms existing today but it is also true throughout the entire record of fossilised life on the Earth. The question that next arises is: when and where this connection cease to operate. The answer could be never – so this then naturally leads to panspermia.

Following the experiments of Pasteur, panspermia came at last to be championed by many contemporary physicists in the late 19th century.

Lord Kelvin declared: “Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive. This seems to me to be as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation….”

And the German physicist Herman von Helmholtz wrote in 1874:

“It appears to me a fully correct scientific procedure, if all our attempts fail to cause the production of organisms from non-living matter, to raise the question whether life has ever arisen, whether seeds have not been carried from one planet to another…”.

A similar position was also championed a few years later by the Nobel prize-winning Chemist Svante Arrhenius in his 1908 book Worlds in the Making. But all this enthusiasm was transient. On the basis of poorly designed experiments concerning limits to the viability of microbes in space, the situation soon reverted, and spontaneous generation and abiogenesis came back into vogue.

In the past five decades abiogenesis was confronted with a formidable array of new facts from astronomy, geology, space science and molecular biology, all of which challenged its validity. On the other hand, an ever-increasing number of predictions of panspermia has come to be verified to an astounding degree of precision. Wrong theories do not perform in this way, so it soon became amply clear that panspermia’s star was on the ascendant! The sociology of science now took over: the triumphs of panspermia over rival models began to irritate an ever-increasing body of scientists. This was aggravated by the fact that all attempts to demonstrate the validity of abiogenesis in the most advanced laboratories in the world consistently led to dismal failure.

The trajectory of panspermia from its early roots in the Vedas through to Anaxoragas in the 5th century BCE and into modern times is sketched in Fig.4. The last phase following on from Pasteur led up to the work of the present writer, Fred Hoyle and many collaborators. This unfolding scientific drama is well-documented in a very large number of scientific papers and recent books.

What I would like to reiterate by way of conclusion is that the body of objective scientific evidence in favour of cometary panspermia and against abiogenesis is now compelling and overwhelming. The main reason that this new world view has yet to enter mainstream thinking, and even become more widely known, may be simply because its principal proponent (the present writer) is seen as a heathen and a former colonial subject. In what could be seen as the most egregious travesty of justice serious attempts are being made to “steal” our well-documented priority on these ideas in recent publication of similar ideas but with a deliberate omission of any reference to pioneering work over the past 40 years. In my view overt racism including antagonism for what is seen to be an alien concept is the only conceivable explanation for this conduct. This explanation also provides the only reason for why a long-overdue paradigm shift from planet-centred life to cosmic-centred life – a paradigm shift which is potentially of the most profound importance across the whole of science – is being delayed.

The long colonial encounter between “West” and “East” that began in the 15th and 16th centuries ending barely seven decades ago has in every sense shaped the modern world. Many scars have been left, however, and a priority of the ongoing decolonisation process must not only be to expand on the legacy of this long experience but also to heal its wounds.



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Features

Timely theatrical exploration of Middle East conflict

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A dramatization of the warring sides in the Mid-East. (Pictures by courtesy Stages Theatre Group)

In what amounted to a refreshing change for the politically-conscious of Sri Lanka and the world, the Longsuffering of the peoples of the Middle East was made to come alive on stage recently through two short plays. The venue for the engaging pieces of drama, staged on November 8th, was the ‘Kolombo Kamatha’ theatre at the BMICH and the organizer of the notable experience was the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS), Colombo.

The BCIS is in the process of celebrating the 50th anniversary of its establishment in 1974 through a series of events and projects of an educational and artistic nature throughout November and the plays were part of this wider commemorative enterprise. The relevant programs are being conducted by the BCIS staff under the guidance of the institution’s Executive Director Ms. Priyanthi Fernando.

Directed by Ruwanthi de Chikera and staged in association with the Stages Theatre Group, the plays of one hour’s duration each were titled, ‘Patterns of our Genocides’ and ‘Children of the Little Olive Park’.

The casts consisted of entirely young persons and this was an exceptional feature of the dramatizations. The latter play, which was staged first, cogently highlighted the inhumanity and brutality characteristic of the Middle East conflict. Although the victimization of the Palestinian people came to be highlighted in the main, this columnist believes that the point was driven home as well that political violence brutalizes both the victim and the aggressor in conflicts featuring contested land, nationhood and self- identity. Accordingly, the play’s thematic content is applicable to the majority of conflicts of the global South, including of course Sri Lanka.

A parable like quality which was notable in the ‘Children of the Little Olive Park’ enhanced its appeal. Although the presumed encroacher on land, in this case Israel, emerges dominant, the play stresses that the latter’s might would not be possible if not for the biased support lent to it throughout the decades by the major imperial powers, headed by the US.

The audience is left with the sense that it is the powerful and their wards who finally win and prevail in conflicts of the kind that are playing out in the Middle East.

If one were to paraphrase summarily the content of the ‘Children of the Little Olive Park’, it would go thus: ‘Once upon a time there was a little garden with an Olive tree that bore a lot of fruit. The garden was a playground for children in the village where the tree grew and they also freely tasted of its fruit.

‘But one day, two important persons from the big world outside brought a child from a nearby village and asked him to eat the Olives and play in the garden as well. But as time went by the boy from outside bullied the original children of the park, ate the fruit all by himself and brought his playmates from his villages to settle in the land as well. This resulted in quarrels and fights between the groups. However, the children who were bullied did not give in; they too armed themselves and fought back. In this way the stage was set for a long, unending fight.’

Thus, the play’s import and relevance is plain to see. However, the mode in which the play was presented made it memorable as well. It was stylized drama of a very fluid kind which was most economical in its use of the usual theatrical resources, such as props and stage sets. Thus, the audience was invited to intuitively and imaginatively connect with the play’s content. Besides, the actors engaged in spectacular movements which realistic drama would not have made possible.

‘Patterns of our Genocides’ continued with the same thematic concerns. However, the focus here shifts to the situation of the Rohingyas of Bangladesh. It is the now quite familiar story of how the Rohingyas came to be brutally victimized and driven out of their land by Bangladesh’s military rulers. Their only ‘flaw’, from the viewpoint of their oppressors, is their ethnic and religious identity. It is a case of the powerful of the land siding with the majority community and pandering to the latter’s power aspirations.

Unlike in the case of the former play, ‘Patterns of our Genocides’ unfolds in the form of mainly a narration by an actor who represents the Rohingya community. He narrates the suffering and persecution of the community, which to a degree, is dramatized and rendered engrossing. Many Sri Lankans would not find it difficult to engage deeply with the unfolding narration, since the issues strike one as familiar and are common to some local communities.

During the Q&A which followed the staging of the plays a member of the audience referred to the need for the first play to incorporate the Israeli viewpoint as well. Ideally, this should have been the case but since the play was a short one it would have been impracticable to meet this need. May be the creators of the play could consider dramatizing a play of this scope in the future running into two hours or thereabouts.

However, the plays performed a vital role by raising awareness on the gut issues in the relevant conflicts in a most exhilarating and engrossing fashion. The choice of the artistic medium ought to be commended because it concretized, as few other art forms could, the issues at the heart of the conflicts, which are only read about by most Sri Lankans.

The Middle East conflict, along with scores of others raging in the South, are not likely to abate any time soon and the intractable nature of the issues involved account in good measure for this. Moreover, there needs to be also a total coming together of all local and international stakeholders in these conflicts, with peacemaking as their main aim, for the purpose of establishing even a degree of peace in these contemporary killing fields.

However, hopes cannot be entertained on the latter score as well. This is mainly on account of the fact that the major powers are usually at cross-purposes and unity of aim among these players is essential for the effective functioning of the UN system. Such effectiveness continues to determine to a great extent whether the world would have a measure of peace or otherwise.

Unfortunately, US President-elect Donald Trump is showing all signs already of being a negative factor on the international peacemaking front. For example, his choice of US Permanent Representative to the UN is said to be a ‘fierce critic’ of the system. It is plain to see that Trump is not acting in good faith on the question of making the world a less dangerous place to live in.

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New coffee-table book unveils rich, little-known heritage of Sri Lanka’s Moor Community

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Some illustrated pages of the book

Author Asiff Hussein , known for his extensive research on the culture and traditions of Sri Lanka’s Muslim communities, discusses his latest work.

The author of ‘A Ceylon Moor Pictorial with a Glimpse into the Moorish Life of Old,’ has set out to showcase the often-overlooked culture of Sri Lanka’s largest Muslim community, the Moors.

Speaking to The Island, Hussein explained the inspiration and scope behind his coffee table book, which offers a visual journey into the unique customs, attire, and culinary heritage of this long-established community.

By Ifham Nizam

“Moors have a very rich culture, but it remains largely unknown outside the community,” Hussein said. “Beyond the familiar dishes like biriyani, wattalappam, and falooda, the Moorish culinary heritage includes diverse foods from India, Persia, and the Arab world. These foods reflect the centuries of cultural exchange that have shaped our community.” His new book aims to broaden public awareness, capturing the community’s traditions and customs in 360 images that span family portraits, wedding ceremonies, traditional dress, and heirloom artifacts.

Excerpts of the interview:

Q: What inspired you to create a pictorial book about the Moor community of Sri Lanka?

A: That’s a good question. Little is it known that the Moors, who are the largest Muslim community of our island, have a very rich culture. However, it is not much known outside of the community, that is except in respect of food, which is shared with others, but even here only part of it is known, like biriyani, wattalappam and falooda, which need no introduction. There are, actually, many more rich rice dishes, desserts and beverages the Moors are heir to, and have originated from lands as far as India, Persia and the Arab World, showing the diverse cultural influences the community has been subject to over the course of a thousand years or so.

When I published my book Sarandib, an Ethnological study of the Muslims of Sri Lanka, now in its third edition, I included some photographs, but these were not many. Over time, during my excursions and sojourns in various parts of the island, where the Moors had established settlements long ago, I would at every given opportunity take photographs of various items, artefacts, dishes of various kinds of food and even old houses and flora and fauna believed to have been introduced here by the Arabian ancestors of the Moors long ago. Old Moor families shared their albums and heirlooms to take pictures of, and museum collections such as those housed in the Southeastern University were another important repository of our traditional culture which I took photographs of during my visits to the provinces. By the middle part of this year I had gathered a considerable collection.

Although I had initially planned to publish some of these in subsequent editions of my book Sarandib, over time, I conceived the idea of producing a coffee table book with a lot of visual content including old and rare monochrome photographs, colour photographs of more recent times, vintage maps, paintings and sketches that captured the life and culture of those times, supplemented by extracts from journals and travelogues, and my own field work and research findings that went into both the main text and captions.

Q: Can you elaborate on the significance of the 360 images included in the book?

A: Well, I must say it’s quite a collection and includes old photographs that capture the traditional life of the community such as weddings and circumcision ceremonies and individual and group photos from family albums that clearly depict how the Moor gentlemen and ladies of old were attired, more recent colour photographs of various cultural items, including food items prepared by the traditional families, articles of dress and jewellery from museum and heirloom collections, some interesting artefacts from heritage mosques, including an old hatchet buried under the old mihrab of the Maradana Mosque which must have had some ritual significance, and a very old tile, that goes back to Kandyan times, I discovered at the Bakinigahawela Mosque in Uva Province, not to mention extracts of Old Dutch registers, known as Tombos, which show what Moor names were like more than three hundred years ago and vintage maps showing old Moor settlements, such as a very old Dutch map I came across in the Old Town Hall of Colombo.

Besides these, the book contains old sketches including Moormen in Surattu Toppi which was the traditional headgear of the Moor gentleman before the Fez cap took its place, and old paintings such as of the Maradana Mosque which is shown standing besides a graveyard with the gravestones clearly seen, proving that it served as a burial ground for the faithful of old.

Q: What cultural traditions and unique practices of the Moor community do you hope readers will appreciate the most?

A: There are many such traditions and practices covered, including some which have gone out of usage and others which are little understood outside of the community. An interesting item I came across in the Maradana Grand Mosque was an iron hatchet that had been under the older Mosque and which I feel had some ritual significance, such as to ward off the Jinn who Islamic lore holds are beings created out of smokeless fire. Even Satan, known in Arabic as Shaitan, is one such being. Such jinns are said to be afraid of iron and one finds a similar belief in Sinhala culture where the Yakku or demons are likewise supposed to be scared of iron. Such practices are, however, no longer followed when erecting mosques.

Others are little understood, but need to be told so that we have greater understanding between our communities. One such is female circumcision, which has been falsely compared to the African practice of FGM by interested NGOS whereas what we practice here is a harmless procedure which may actually be beneficial if performed in the religiously prescribed manner of removing the redundant skin surrounding the clitoris, both for hygiene’s sake and a better sex life later in life. We never had any problem with it in the past and there’s no reason why it should be an issue now. So there’s a lot others need to understand about us and this book brings that out vividly.

Q: Why do you believe this book is important for Moor households and the wider public in Sri Lanka?

A: The Moors, as I said earlier, have a very rich culture. Sadly it is not much known outside the community. Unlike in other communities, there have been very few writers who have written about it in languages other than in Tamil. This is despite the fact that a good number of Muslims, in the Sinhala-majority areas, are literate and conversant in both Sinhala and English. In fact many Moors today speak these languages as their ‘home language’ like my family, but sadly these have not as yet been fully established as full-fledged literary languages of the community.

Another reason is, of course, the fact that many Moors have been traditionally business people and since their interaction with others was limited, they may have not thought it necessary to share those features of their culture other than food, which was, of course, much appreciated by others. That said, the situation has changed somewhat over the years and even prominent business families now feel a need to share and showcase their culture. In fact the sponsors of this book are one such family, the Hashim family of Malship fame.

So I think it’s quite important that Moorish culture be publicised in its full scope and range from the seemingly trivial to the more salient aspects so that others know, understand and appreciate us better as a cultured community. Here’s what one Tour Guide said after seeing a post about the book “I was immediately captivated by the intriguing history and culture of the Ceylon Moors. After receiving my own copy, my admiration for the community deepened, sparking an even greater sense of pride in the country I call home. As a tour guide constantly learning and discovering new facets of Sri Lanka’s diverse heritage, this book is a valuable addition to my collection. I believe this work belongs in every Moorish household and in the homes of anyone who appreciates the rich cultural tapestry that defines Sri Lanka”.

The members of the community also look upon it as a valuable contribution to preserving our traditional way of life and have told me so. In fact at a MyBiz event after I had made a presentation about the book, there was this lady who had been gifted a copy by a friend and had gone through it cover to cover and got up to tell the audience how important it was to have the book in their households, not the least because their children would come to know what their culture was really like in the good old days.

So yes, we have come a long way, and ours is a story worth telling in pictures that speak a thousand words.

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Features

Big scene…here as well

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Glam Scene

Last week’s Presidential Election, in America, generated worldwide attention.

It was also the talk-of-the-town, in the scene here, and these are the views some of the known local personalities, based here and abroad, decided to share with readers of The Island:

*  Manilal Perera (Singer/Entertainer):

I have been a huge Trump supporter. Trump was the only American President to tame the North Korean dictator. He openly called him the “Rocket man” and said that America can wipe him and North Korea off this earth. Grande Trump. Bravo!

* Maneka Liyanage

(The Island Beauty Tips/Model):

Imagine a world where the threat of global conflict no longer looms over us. What if, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, we could see an end to the escalating tensions and conflicts that have plagued us for so long? Could this be the moment when diplomacy prevails over division, when dialogue replaces destruction, and when nations work together, not against each other? With a clear commitment to preventing World War III, Trump promises to bring stability, peace, and cooperation back to the world stage. Is it possible to secure a future where war is no longer an option? Let’s believe it’s possible—and take the steps together to make peace our priority.

* Sohan Weerasinghe (Singer/Entertainer):

Trump victory means oil prices will become stable as America will start drilling for oil and that means energy Independance. However, although he will be better at handling the economy and immigration, Kamala Harris would have been a more humane President and looked after the interest of the poor people. Whether America will become great again…we will have to wait and see!

* Rozanne Diasz (Catwalk Coach and Choreographer):

I am a Donald Trump fan…even when he lost, I rooted for him. I like his straight forwardness and strategy. I am also a big fan of Vivek Ramaswamy who backed him. They make a good team.

* Andrea Marr (Singer/Entertainer):

This is a time for people to come together, put aside political differences, and be kind to each other. There is a lot of pain and suffering in the world and that’s where our focus should be.

* Kay Jay (Singer/Entertainer/Beautician):

Hopefully, Donald Trump will do what’s right. It’s a bit hard to trust Politicians nowadays. So let’s Hope for the best. Fingers crossed.

* Angela Seneviratne

(Film/TV Stage Artiste/Former Model):

We, Sri Lankans, pulsating with the excitement of the recent Presidential elections, flowing into the General Elections, could learn a lesson that people’s power, no matter how large or small the country is, is the one strength we have to accept, and importantly, support for the betterment of the nation.

Raffealla Fernando (Photographer/Fashion Designer/Stylist):

My thoughts are quite turbulent about the American presidential election and Donald Trump’s victory. In 2020 he lost because it was disastrous management, the predatory instincts and compulsion to dominate, I don’t know if this behaviour, or way of ruling the nation, would continue. Let’s see if he will bring a different approach this time. A lot will change in America…greatest country in the world might not have the greatest leader for some time, I guess.

*  Shareefa Thahir

(TV Presenter/News Anchor/English Radio Announcer/News Reader/Emcee):

Given that the previous Trump administration maintained minimal interference in the affairs of other nations I feel his re-election may bring a continued focus on global stability, similar to his previous term.

*  Lankika Perera

(Singer)

“Let me congratulate America’s 47th President Donald Trump for his historic and magnificent victory. His victory speech was truly extraordinary and I was so impressed when he said, “We don’t worship Government, we worship God,” and his ambition is to spread Christian values. May God bless the USA and President Donald Trump, and protect him and give him strength, wisdom and good health, always.

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