Muslims as Poetic Tropes

The earliest epigraphic evidence for Muslim settlements in Sri Lanka consists of Arabic tombstones found near the coast that date to the ninth century, the same time that the island began to be mentioned in Arabic literature across the ocean. It was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, that Sinhala literature began to regularly take note of Muslims, mainly in the form of sandēśa, or “messenger,” poetry. These poems describe coastal communities while detailing the route of a messenger, usually a type of bird. Two fourteenth-century sandēśa poems, Tisara Sandēśaya (Swan's message) and Mayura Sandēśaya (Peacock's message), describe the southwestern port town of Beruwala and its wealthy merchant inhabitants:

Although these verses do not directly mention Muslims, Beruwala was home to such communities by this time. Local histories date the arrival of Arab Muslims there to the early centuries of Islam, with subsequent settlements by Maraikkar Muslims from South India (Effendi Reference Effendi1965; van Sanden Reference van Sanden1925, 117–18). When papal emissary Giovanni dei Marignolli was blown ashore in Beruwala in the mid-fourteenth century, he noted that the port was controlled by “an accursed Saracen” (Abeydeera Reference Abeydeera1993, 4). Presuming that the foregoing verses refer to Muslims, they reveal early impressions of the stereotype of wealthy traders and their lovely women. The latter poet in particular found the beauties of Beruwala positively disorienting, drawn to them like a greedy bee. There was even an implication of adultery, as the merchants who colored the market also remained there constantly, the verb raňdanavā carrying both meanings, leaving wives alone in home gardens. These sentiments show subtle antecedents of twentieth-century Sinhala folktales, where lusting after Muslim women and cuckolding their impotently trade-obsessed husbands was explicit (Sūrasēna Reference Sūrasēna2000, 30–31).

It is possible that Berbers from North Africa were also among Beruwala's Muslim settlers, considering that there was a thirteenth-century embassy to the Mamluk sultans of Egypt sent by a Buddhist king (Codrington Reference Codrington1919), and that colonial European sources refer to Beruwala as “Berberim,” “Barbareen,” or some such variation. Sinhala sandēśa poets also seemingly made this homophonous Berber connection by referring to the inhabitants of Beruwala as baburu in fifteenth-century sandēśa verses, where they are portrayed as fearsome and wild, as in Parevi Sandēśaya (Dove's message):

Such frightful rowdiness was born of guzzling rā—a frothy, tart toddy fermented from coconuts. Baburu were similarly shown with different intoxicants in Girā Sandēśaya (Parrot's message), blending opium and ganja with local methods of ecstasy making like the hallucinogenic attana flowers adorning their ears, exaggerated descriptions that presage modern rumors that Muslims are to blame for foreign drugs on the island (Sarjoon, Yusoff, and Hussin Reference Sarjoon, Yusoff and Hussin2016, 7). Alongside these rowdies, however, Girā Sandēśaya also included the usual beauties:

The beautiful women in these sandēśa poems are called yon, from the Sanskrit yavana, often designating “Westerners.” Perhaps originally referring to Central Asia, the term was later equated with Muslims. It was rendered cōṉakaṉ in Tamil (pronounced “Sonahar”), becoming a form of Muslim self-identification (van Sanden Reference van Sanden1925). Yet it is possible these “Muslim women” (yon liya) arose from the convention of referring to “young women” (yōnan liya) in sandēśa poems, as in Tisara Sandēśaya and Parevi Sandēśaya (Suravīra and Vijayasūriya Reference Suravīra and Vijayasūriya1991, v. 101; Dharmavardhana Reference Dharmavardhana1967, v. 59). Muslim women may thus have appeared simply by syllabic modulation from yōnan to yon for poetic purposes. Yet tracing a sign back to its arbitrary origins cannot undo accumulated significances. All commentaries I have seen gloss yon as “Muslim” without pausing to consider a possible link to yōnan.

Who the Baburu were, however, was more debatable. Two giants of the Sri Lankan academy—Leslie Gunawardana and Gananath Obeyesekere—represented opposite poles of interpretation. Obeyesekere, dissenting from “every edition of these sandēśa poems I have seen” that interpreted the term “to mean Berber,” rejected this possibility of North Africans. His alternative, however, ignored the “Muslim” (yon) mention in the previous verse, read baburan as bamburan, and connected it to a Vädda dance of the same name. Yet the territory of Vädda tribes was generally the northern and central jungles, and Obeyesekere (Reference Obeyesekere1984, 303–5) admitted that placing them in Beruwala was imagined. A more reasonable interpretation that maintains the Baburu-Vädda connection may be that foreigners were “branded” as Baburu-Väddas on account of their unruliness, a Vädda allusion figuratively blended with exotic Berbers (Säbiheḷaya Reference Säbiheḷaya1962, 160). Gunawardana (Reference Gunawardana and Chandra1987, 82–83), on the other hand, turned his imagination outward to the ocean, interpreting the dancing Berbers as whirling dervishes who came to Sri Lanka after the thirteenth-century embassy to the Mamluk sultans. Taking seriously Gunawaradana's optimism about the extent of Lankan geographic knowledge, the use of both baburu and yon in Girā Sandēśaya may anticipate spatial imaginations in the seventeenth-century Rājāvaliya, where the land of Baburu was distinguished from Yonaka (most likely Arabia), listed before Pratikal (Portugal) and Spañña (Spain) in a section on “countries where the preachings of those other than the Buddha exist” (Suraweera Reference Suraweera2014, II:4). The poet of Girā Sandēśaya may have thus distinguished two types of Muslims, Arabs and Berbers, inhabiting Beruwala.

Yet contested Baburus continue. Girā Sandēśaya is now one of the most printed poems in Sri Lanka, incorporated into Sinhala curricula. How its modern commentators choose to gloss Baburu reveals how they place Muslims in the island's history. K. G. Prēmaratna, from whose edition I translated, noted that some read Baburu as African Berbers, while others gloss it as mēlecchayan, meaning “barbarian.” Faced with this choice, Prēmaratna sided with the Berbers. More recently, however, the edition of Girā Sandēśaya published for upper-level Sinhala students for the 2009 public examinations omitted the Berber option altogether (Piyadasun Reference Piyadasun2013, 66), leaving the baburu as only barbarians, thereby erasing both Africa and Islam from the quatrain. After an informal survey of about ten other Girā Sandēśaya editions in bookstores, I estimate a relatively even split between commentators who suggest the Baburu are Berbers, and those who omit this. The push and pull of these interpretations of the past is another drunken dance disjuncturing the present.

Overall, the early sandēśa poems reflect the multiple types of stereotype content defined by psychologists who theorize a conceptual axis of “warmth and competence” that yields stereotypes of envy, contempt, paternalism, or admiration (Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu2002). The rich merchants are characters of low warmth but high competence, engendering envious stereotypes reflective of economic competition. The Baburu, however, show both low warmth and low competence, generating contemptuous stereotypes in descriptions of their wildness. The Muslim women of these poems, on the other hand, considering that they were likely local Lankans who married foreign merchants, fall into a category of high warmth and low competence, leading to paternalistic stereotypes of them as housewives, with beauty as their primary virtue. The mixed nature of Muslim populations at the time therefore created multiple representations of their characteristics, also reflected in the different terms used to designate them.

Some of these stereotypes persist, but at least one has been inverted. The trope of beautiful Muslim women was once powerful enough that the late fifteenth-century Kokila Sandēśaya (Cuckoo's message) likened Muslim ladies (yon liya) to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. They were therefore not only beautiful, but also wise, imparting fine words like goddesses, a combination of high warmth and high competence that creates a stereotype of admiration:

Recently, however, images of Muslim women have morphed. They are still stereotyped as fecund, indeed too fertile in proliferating Muslims, but their beauty has been effaced. With the twentieth-century boom in South Asian labor on the Arabian peninsula, many Sri Lankan Muslims assimilated conservative aesthetics of Salafi Islam. Reform movements have encouraged female veiling and insular piety (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2008). Now representing the anti-sexual, however fertile they remain, black-veiled women are derided as “sack-monsters” (gonibilla) in Sinhala, referencing a bogeyman used to scare children, and also alluding to the monstrosity of Sri Lanka's political violence, when black bags were thrown over the heads of the disappeared (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2015b, 4). The warmth once extended to the idea of Muslim women thus cooled into another contemptuous stereotype. Yet because stereotype contents often mix, undertones of sexualized Muslim women persist beneath the veil in other anti-Muslim media. A parodic Sinhala blog called The Prophet's Commentary (Nabigē Aṭuvāvē), for example, posted an illustration of a woman in a niqab alluringly revealing her legs, captioned, “Having created the Muslim woman to be naked in front of other men, Almighty Allah is silent. If Allah created it, who is responsible for this?”Footnote ² The blog argued that Allah must have made a mistake if women were to be hidden, because they expose themselves to male doctors during childbirth. Aside from the absurdity, the joke also came from the term for “other men”—parapuruṣayan, carrying connotations of an adulterer, thus recycling the stereotype of the cuckolded Muslim man.

Muslim stereotypes therefore fold back and forth over temporalities, layering a stratigraphy of representations that shows the mutations of tropes across changing contexts. Was merchant wealth elegized or derided? Were Muslim women maidens or monsters? This heterogeneous imagination of Muslims forms “the force of ambivalence, central to the stereotype, that . . . ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures” (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, 66). Such fungible representations continue to haunt Sri Lankan Muslims. Those who wish for a present absent of Islam see Muslims as symbols more than persons, manipulable stereotypes of one sort or another in Sinhala discourse, an othering phenomenon that accelerated with European colonialism.

Common Enemies and Comparable Others

Portuguese soldiers arrived in Sri Lanka at the start of the sixteenth century carrying their own Catholic baggage of anti-Muslim animosity, often trying to marginalize mercantile ambitions of coastal Muslims (De Silva Reference De Silva1966). This was part of a broader contest that the Portuguese entered across the Indian Ocean, in a long-standing struggle for control of coasts among local rulers and foreign merchants (Ray Reference Ray and Ray2016). The early Portuguese colonial project therefore held piracy of Muslim ships as a core tenet (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri1985, 68; Perniola Reference Perniola1989, 435–48). In European histories, however, it was the Muslims who were mythologized as pirates. Incidentally, the first extant Sinhala history produced after the Portuguese invasion included this piratical type of Muslim, but also blended it with the traditional “other” in Lankan Buddhist literature: the Tamil.

This history, Alakēśvara Yuddhaya, was likely a composite work, with the first part written shortly after 1562 by a nobleman or officer of the Kotte court near modern-day Colombo (Strathern Reference Strathern2006). Like Kotte's king at the time, this author seemingly converted to Christianity, indicated by references to divine favor from “our Jesus Christ (yēsus kristu)” (Suraweera Reference Suraweera2014, I:8, 18). Alakēśvara Yuddhaya, however, also covered Kotte history prior to the Portuguese incursion, including an incident in the reign of Dharma Parakramabāhu (ca. 1489–1513), when a Muslim attempted to claim the western seaboard's pearl fisheries and elephants, two of the island's most lucrative trade products for local kings or colonial powers (Arasaratnam Reference Arasaratnam, Gupta and Pearson1987). The Alakēśvara Yuddhaya passage about the ensuing battle with Kotte's two sub-kings (yuva-raja) had a special vociferousness in its mention of Muslims:

Muslims were thus in company with the dangerous Tamil other. The Muslim pirate had a Tamil name, coming from a port in southeastern Tamil Nadu, and his forces were described as both “a Muslim army” (yon senāvak) and “the Tamil army” (demaḷa senāva). While the word “Tamil” may literally describe the language these Muslims spoke, its power as a derogatory term is also active, matching many other stories of battling Tamil armies in Lankan Buddhist histories. This generic Tamil other thereby acted as a catalyst in the proliferation of Muslim stereotypes, as, according to Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994, 77), “the stereotype requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes. The process . . . gives the stereotype both its fixity and its phantasmatic quality—the same old stories . . . must be told (compulsively) again and afresh, and are differently gratifying and terrifying each time.” As Sinhala authors became Portuguese compatriots, two sets of same old stories, those of the evil Muslim and the evil Tamil, joined to tell new tales.

Even when describing events prior to Portuguese arrival, Alakēśvara Yuddhaya, if written by an author sympathetic to Portuguese interests in Kotte, may have singled out Muslims as piratical Tamil enemies in light of recent political events there. Muslim traders had the most to lose from Portuguese incursion, and some mounted attacks against the early factories. Gaspar Correa, present in 1518, was the only Portuguese historian to record these skirmishes, using a stereotype of piratical Muslims who “loaded with pepper and drugs, and sailed whither they wished like very corsairs of the sea” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1935–36, 159). This could also describe Portuguese practices, but for Correa, the Muslims accusing the Portuguese of piracy were liars: “The Moors of those ships had told the King of Ceylon many evil things concerning us, that we sailed the seas robbing and murdering . . . [T]he Moors told him that we entered countries with a show of friendship, and then committed all kinds of robberies and evils” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1935–36, 146–47). Of course, that is exactly what the Portuguese did do in Sri Lanka.

Despite their warnings, the Kotte king refused to aid the Māpilla Muslims of Kerala, supporting their subdual by the Portuguese. The Muslims then turned to the rival king of Sitavaka, who joined forces with them to attack his brother's Portuguese allies, events recorded in Portuguese sources (Barros and Couto Reference Barros and Couto1908, 75, 90–97; Queyroz Reference Queyroz1930, 189–94). Alakēśvara Yuddhaya also alludes to them, describing how the Sitavaka king “brought Muslim Vaḍakkaras from Kolikaṭṭuva [Calicut] and . . . proceeded for war. . . . [T]he great king Bhuvanekabahu sent word that they were ready for peace only when the Vaḍakkaras were abandoned, . . . and when the Vaḍakkaras were destroyed . . . peace was brought about” (Suraweera Reference Suraweera2014, I:15). The author of Alakēśvara Yuddhaya thereby made Muslims a perennial threat to the interests of Kotte, inimical to peace both before and after Portuguese arrival. Likewise, an earlier passage in Alakēśvara Yuddhaya describes a Kotte prince capturing the northern kingdom of Jaffna: “Then a Muslim Vaḍakkara with great vehemence came forward with the determination to attack and split the horse and prince in two. Prince Sapu stabbed the enemy with a spear into his chest in full” (Suraweera Reference Suraweera2014, I:5). With stories like these, Alakēśvara Yuddhaya used the Lankan past to sanction Kotte's alliance with the Portuguese over the Muslims.

Portuguese Catholic and Sinhala Buddhist stereotypes of Muslims thereby mingled in the violence of colonial culture. Relaying an earlier rout of Muslim forces by Portuguese soldiers outside Kotte, Correa describes battlefields “which caused a great marvel, for the Moors who lay dead had only one or two very small wounds which were not sufficient to kill a cat. The people of Ceylon wrote a great deal about this occurrence, describing the Moors and all our folk by their names” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1935–36, 192). No corresponding Sinhala account is extant, but it plausibly depicts how colonial biases could come to color texts like Alakēśvara Yuddhaya. In this atmosphere of Portuguese prejudices, Muslims became a common enemy as outsiders instigating violence, a stereotype that easily overlaid with the Tamil other for Sinhala writers. Thereafter, the story of Muslim piracy in Alakēśvara Yuddhaya formed its own chain of stereotypes in Sinhala literature, absorbed into the Rājāvaliya histories of the seventeenth century and beyond that recorded lineages of Lankan kings and their exploits. There, the name of the Muslim character changed from Adirāsarāyan to Kadirāyana (Suraweera Reference Suraweera2014, II:70), and then was further flattened into a nameless Muslim in Vanni Rājāvaliya, his home only called yon paṭṭalam, “the Muslim port” (Obēsēkara Reference Obēsēkara2005, 113).

Comic Punchlines and Karmic Scapegoats

Of course, not all Muslims in Lanka were foreign traders. Many settled there permanently, driven inland by colonial antagonism and integrated as landholders, becoming known for ferrying trade products from the coast (Dewaraja Reference Dewaraja and Shukri1986). In this way, Muslims drew closer to Buddhist neighbors, but stereotypes persisted, especially regarding trade. A verse of folk-witticism “advice poetry” (upades kavi), for example, used Muslims for its punchline:

The insulting implication is either that Muslim greed in business leaves a wasteland market in its wake, or that partnering with Muslims is a sure path to ruin. Similarly, visible markers of Muslim professionals were depicted negatively. Bullock carts, for example, became evidence of cruelty to animals, as in the seventeenth-century poem Maga Salakuṇa (Road signs), describing a pilgrim's road to Kandy not unlike earlier saneśa messenger routes:

All Lankans likely relied on these bullocks and seashore products, but only the Muslims (yonun) were “drawing demerit” (pava-ḷankara) for furnishing them.

Bullock carts were likewise denounced in village dramas like Kōlam Naṭṭanavā, in which one character portrayed a Muslim, represented by his own mask:

The dancing bullock is the hero of this scene, graciously described in subsequent verses, while the Muslim plays the villain, “a black man of a cruel heart; he is a butcher and kills cows” (Pertold Reference Pertold1973, 80). Muslims thereby became scapegoats for the bullock's suffering, bearing the karmic burden of demerits from animal husbandry. In this way, they were one of many loopholes used by Buddhists to absolve themselves of transgressing ethical precepts (Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere and Leach1968). Being a scapegoat, however, is thankless work, as stereotypes of animal cruelty now contribute to Buddhist campaigns against Muslim commercial or ritual butchery (Yusoff and Sarjoon Reference Yusoff and Sarjoon2017).

Such village dramas of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were suited to stereotyping whomever required it, as “any number of characters could be added without changing the nature of the performance” (Sarachchandra Reference Sarachchandra1966, 79). As the island absorbed new foreigners, Dutch and British colonial officers were also lampooned. Yet Muslims were often stereotyped as a distinctly religious other. The Sinhala folk drama Sokari Nāṭakaya, for example, portrays comical foreigners arriving in Lanka with hints of Muslimness. Across many versions of this play, the main characters originate in different parts of India but are always named Guru and Sokari, coming to Lanka with their low-caste servant Parayā, and experiencing separations, shenanigans, infidelities, and reunions along the way. As Guru regales Lankans with his worldwide journeys in one version, he mentions a trip to Mecca (makkama):

The idea that a Buddha footprint existed in Mecca developed around the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but Mecca remained an extremely figural space for Sinhala authors (McKinley Reference McKinley2018, 218–26). Guru's itinerary also included sailing over the milk, blood, and black oceans before arriving at the salt sea, and his singing of such fantasies while fiddling with his sarong strikes a comic character. In another version, Mecca made a different sort of joke when Guru injures himself and requires the help of a doctor who is cuckolding him. He wails woe to his servant for laughs:

The god of Mecca (makkama devi) was lampooned as a useless last resort for a lost cause, becoming a punchline along with Muslims themselves, as Guru's submissiveness in the face of cuckoldry reenacted the trope of the impotent Muslim husband.

Being a joke in folk theater even pathologized Muslims. In the ritual drama of the sanni demons, for example, Obeyesekere recorded an instance where symptoms of bīta sanniya, the illness of fear or timidity, manifested in mocking Muslim-like behavior. Similar to the “Tamil sanniya” disease that caused a person to play pranks and speak nonsense, this bīta sanniya character “says he wants to say his prayers. This he does by ‘brushing’ his teeth, holding his ears and saying ‘Allah, Allah ve Allah!’ He falls on the ground in Muslim-type worship. He says ‘I believe in the Buddha's teachings’ . . . . He utters Buddhist prayers which happen to be gibberish” (Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere1969, 190). As such figures drew laughter, the idea of Muslims became more imaginary. More dangerous than mere village entertainment, the accumulated stereotypes in Sinhala discourse ultimately infected the ethnic identities of political representation, a process that proceeded full steam ahead under the machinations of British colonialism.

The Weaponization of Representation

Under British rule, Muslims were recognized by a separate code of law, and previous land tenure grants that encouraged reciprocal interreligious patronage were dismantled. Exclusivist religious movements grew in Colombo in the second half of the nineteenth century to rhetorically validate these structural separations of colonial governance. As the British made race part of political representation (Rogers Reference Rogers2004), Muslim leaders defined themselves against other groups by refuting attributions of Tamil heritage, turning to a reimagined Arab ancestry and calling themselves “Moors” (Ismail Reference Ismail and Jeganathan2009). While this helped Muslim elites reserve a political bloc, it also enhanced the foreign merchant stereotype. Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala made inflammatory remarks in this vein shortly before the 1915 riots: “The Mohammedan, an alien people by Shylockian method, became prosperous like the Jews . . . and the result is that the Mohammedan thrives and the son of the soil goes to the wall” (Guruge Reference Guruge1965, 207). Lankan and European stereotypes again comingled, as anti-Semitism and Sinhala bias stereotyped Jews and “Mohammedans” as greedy aliens.

Meanwhile, a modern resurgence of sandēśa poetry redeployed classical tropes to cast Muslims as religious foreigners. The Mayura Sandēśaya composed around 1850 by the monk Välihiṭiyāvē Sumana mentions Muslims with the traditional term yon, as well as a more modern rendering of mahamat samaya for “Mohammedan religion.” Although Ven. Sumana had some kind words for these Muslims, his descriptions were double-edged, coding insults in elegies:

While this describes the beauty of the mosque and its offerings, and casts Muslims (yon dana) as being kind (met kara), their reputation for gem trading was also painted in an unsavory fashion, as it required miners to submerge themselves all the way to hell (avaya). The next verse then turned to alluring women:

At a glance, this verse appears to simply repeat tropes of young Muslim women (yon yon liyo) from earlier sandēśa poems. Yet Ven. Sumana also casts the ladies as an un-Buddhist temptation, causing the agitation of mental pride (man man lesin tavamin). To this end, the next verse functioned as a Buddhist counterpoint against the seductive Muslims:

Ven. Sumana's need to recall the Buddha's enlightenment at this point, and direct the messenger to worship a Buddha image, redirects attention from Muslim lust to Buddhist piety. In turn, the mention of the Buddha breaking the five Maras might also be meant to refute these women. Mara is the foe who tried to prevent the Buddha's enlightenment, and is also pluralized into lists of three, four, or five Maras, which represent various delusions or temptations that disrupt insight, including defilements like sensual desire and pride. In this sense, the Muslim women may even be poetic recreations of Mara's seductive daughters, who tried to lure the Buddha away from meditation.

Beyond metaphors of poet-monks, Muslims were also made into distinctly religious others through the colony's connections to the wider British empire. Political events elsewhere helped ferry prejudicial language to Lanka. The Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882, for example, ended in defeated parties being exiled to Ceylon, where they inspired local Muslim revivals (Dep Reference Dep2011). Yet an account of this war called Arābi Haṭana (Arabi's war), was also published in Sinhala verse in 1883, re-creating a genre of “war poetry” (haṭana kavi) from previous centuries. Its author, reportedly a soldier in the imperial army, derided all Muslims in describing Egypt:

This author followed the colonial habit of casting Muslims as Mohammedans, or “people believing in Muhammad.” Yet he also worked with older tropes of Muslims brandishing weapons and enjoying violence, as seen in sandēśa poems and Alakēśvara Yuddhaya. Print media now disseminated these stereotypes even more widely. An advertisement on the back of Arābi Haṭana proclaimed 1,400 copies had already been sold by mail order, and another 1,600 in bookstores, though initially only 300 copies were planned. More could be ordered in bundles of 25, 50, or 100. Continual consumption of such martial tropes may have helped excuse in the minds of perpetrators the violence turned on Muslims of Sri Lanka.

Arābi Haṭana was not the only war poem about Muslims to have publishing success. Marakkala Haṭane, or “The Moor's War,” was a dramatic versification about communal fallout caused by star-crossed lovers, a Catholic Sinhala man of twenty-five named Sellaṅci Appu, and a Muslim girl of fourteen named Mināci. Sellaṅci Appu ran a carpentry shop across from Mināci's home near Colombo and a relationship grew, encouraged by Mināci's mother who arranged for them to marry. When the Muslim community found out, Mināci's uncle came to take her away. She escaped with Sellaṅci Appu to his village in Moratuwa. A group pursued and a skirmish ensued as the villagers hid the couple. The Muslims filed a case with the Maradana police, who came to investigate, and the couple was arrested on February 25, 1870. The case was heard by the magistrate, and the couple was freed days later. This caused a more serious conflict between Muslims and police, although this brick-throwing campaign was led by eight Europeans who were previously fired by the police and converted to Islam. The police retreated and were reinforced by Sinhala supporters, but this devolved into general attacks upon Muslims and their businesses in the Colombo area on the night of February 28, with the army called in to help arrest rioters (Dep Reference Dep1938, 47–48; Rogers Reference Rogers1987, 169–70).

The Lakrivikiraṇa newspaper covered the ensuing court cases in June. These included a dismissed case by Muslim plaintiffs contesting a mosque had been ransacked and its valuable Qur'ans destroyed, and a successful case against Muslims who attacked the police, with twenty-one people convicted. On appeal, the ruling was upheld on July 9, 1870. Lakrivikiraṇa called these riots “Yon Haṭana” and occasionally “Marakkala Haṭana.” The Marakkala Haṭane poem likewise begins by “telling of the new Yon Haṭana,” and it mentions much talk in Colombo streets about the “Yon Haṭana,” a nickname tagging it as a topic of public discourse (vv. 3, 87, 97–98).Footnote ⁷ Marakkala Haṭane was published that year as a kavi koḷa, “poetry-leaf” pamphlets that sold at popular spots in the city. These poems often recounted current criminal events or mythic love stories, and Marakkala Haṭane fit the bill for both. Its author was likely a Sinhala Catholic from the same Karāva caste as Sellaṅci Appu, although he chose to remain anonymous, “to pass the time in comfort and prosperity as desired” (v. 109). He had reason to avoid association, as the poem is a vehement tirade of anti-Muslim sentiments. Many classic stereotypes return, including the maiden, merchant wealth, and proclivities for violence. Muslims are blamed at every turn, the looting of their shops only ascribed to vagabond drunks, or even as a self-inflicted conspiracy to generate lawsuits (vv. 89–95). The poet takes a moralistic tone to emphasize how Muslim rioters were sentenced to hard labor, and uses the pronoun “we” to mark his Sinhala audience as separate from the Muslims (yonnu). The stereotypes begin on the very first page, with a history of Muslims in Sri Lanka framed by foreign trade, greed, and arrogance:

The poet took special issue with how Muslims transgressed caste conventions by considering themselves superior (vv. 16–22). His preoccupation with status and money may be because the Sinhala Karāva caste, especially those of Moratuwa, had grown from immigrant obscurity into a mercantile elite under Dutch and British colonialism, coming into competition with Muslim traders (Roberts Reference Roberts1982, 80–89, 271–74). The poet even tapped the heritage of haṭana poems to use a key term in competitive economics—avula, meaning disorder or confusion. This once described rival kings, chiefs, or colonizers in early modern warfare disrupting enemy income by redirecting tax tributes (Pirani Reference Pirani2018). Modernized for Marakkala Haṭane, “a Muslim maiden [yon liyek] made a disorder [avulak] for Muslims . . . so as to now live feeling comfort in Moratuwa” (v. 107). The income of Colombo Muslims was therefore disrupted in a fortuitous turn for the Moratuwa Karāva. They won a Muslim maiden to their side who came bearing fine jewelry as a dowry, while Muslims received burned shops in return, and more money wasted on court appeals (vv. 28–29, 32, 90–91, 102).

Whatever specific caste conflicts, economic competition, or personal grievances contributed to the 1870 riots, the stereotypical nature of the ensuing rhetoric flattened these memories into a parodic representation. Marakkala Haṭane, like all Sinhala war poems, was never meant to be an unbiased report, but no earlier haṭana poem had so derided Muslims, and these stereotypes were reproducible at new speeds. The poem was reprinted in 1891, likely helping keep prejudices kindled leading up to 1915, and recently resurfaced again. Perhaps the only extant copy of the 1870 edition, housed in the library of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, was made available to a new generation of Sinhala readers in a 2018 book by Nimēṣa Senevipāla. She researches the event well, identifying key actors and reproducing the Lakrivikiraṇa newspaper sections to compare with Marakkala Haṭane. Yet her introduction reaffirms the stereotypes in the poem, reifying them with statements like “being merchant workers is especially part of Muslim nature [muslimvarun svabhāvayen],” enshrining these tropes as an essential element in the very being of an entire group (Senevipāla Reference Senevipāla2018, 12).

Marakkala Haṭane is certainly one indication that the 1915 pogroms were not spontaneous but motivated by long-standing economic grievances. George Rowell (Reference Rowell2009, 640) has documented how initial attacks were coordinated by networks of Sinhala extremists who recruited gangs to destroy boutiques and homes, spreading rumors that Muslims defiled Buddhist temples or Sinhala women. As violence escalated over a week, “it is likely that the rumours and looting, once initiated, did develop a momentum of their own amongst a populace whose hostility to the Moor had been well primed.” The history of Muslim stereotypes in Sinhala literature provided the accelerant for this programmed pogrom, and no trope was greater than the greedy Muslim trader. British government agent R. N. Thaine recorded ominous rumors of mercantile conspiracies a year before the riots: “Enquired into a complaint by certain Sinhalese against Moor boutique keepers regarding raising the prices of foodstuffs. It was evidently a complaint based on ‘racial jealousy.’ There was probably some truth in it but as the increase was so very slight, I merely warned the boutique keepers of the consequence of raising prices.”Footnote ⁸ The government agent likely did not expect the consequences to entail nine days of rioting several months later. Two dozen Muslims were killed and nearly two hundred wounded, with over a hundred mosques and nearly 4,500 shops and homes damaged. In turn, several dozen Sinhala men were killed or injured by Muslims defending themselves, or when police fired on crowds. The government agent's diary catalogued destruction in one highland town:

Sinhala violence against Muslims, encouraged by dehumanizing stereotypes, rumors, and Buddhist extremism, created a feedback loop of disregard for human life. In Rambukkana, Buddhists had gathered with weapons at the local temple, responding to rumors that a Muslim attack was imminent, similar to other sites of rioting inflamed by distribution of Buddhist flags and chanting of slogans (Ali Reference Ali1981; Dep Reference Dep2001; Rogers Reference Rogers1987, 188–200). The structures of colonial governance that helped condition this violence then brought down more violence upon subjects. In turn, this martial law reaction further emboldened nationalist rhetoric.

The government agent suggested three months of martial law had repaired relations: “It is a noteworthy fact that all the Moor boutiques along the road from Kahawatta to Ratnapura have re-opened their shops and started business again and that the Sinhalese appear to be as on good terms with them as before the Riots.”Footnote ¹⁰ What lay beneath appearances, however, was the deep well of Muslim stereotypes still available, only requiring the right conditions to reemerge, usually in unfortunate economic circumstances. Amid the global depression in 1934, for example, H. K. B. D. Amarasinghe composed Tarunangana Sandesaya (The young girl's message). Muslims were again on the sandēśa route, in an accusatory mercantile stereotype:

This set mold of the greedy Muslim, imprintable upon any media, is why Ameer Ali (Reference Ali2015) has rightly written of “waves” of Sri Lankan Islamophobia, recurrent over the twentieth century. These waves swelled to dangerous crests after Sri Lanka's civil war ended in 2009, with many instances of boycotting or attacking Muslim businesses, and demolishing mosques or other structures alleged to be on sacred Buddhist ground (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2015a; Heslop Reference Heslop2014).

In June 2014, a pogrom instigated by Sinhala Buddhist extremists swept through the southwestern towns of Alutgama and Beruwala. Four Muslims were killed and dozens injured, with many businesses burned and families displaced (Haniffa et al. Reference Haniffa, Amarasuriya, Wijenayake and Gunatilleke2014), Like the 1915 riots, the 2014 violence was also sparked by political gangs using rhetoric of mercantile monopolies. Such stereotypes circulate faster than ever on social media, which provides daily deluges of anti-Muslim memes cascading down newsfeeds, shamelessly adapting to current events. After flooding and landslides in the May 2016 cyclone, for example, most people posted heroic stories of rescues, but a Facebook page called “New Sinhala Buddhist” had a photo of young Muslim women, more maidens in distress, stepping from a raft with the help of two uniformed men. The caption read, “The manner in which Sinhala Buddhists aid/bless (pihiṭa venna) the Musalmān who cannot be aided even by Allāh.” As visual processing and stereotype activation occur in the same part of the brain (Hebart and Baker Reference Hebart and Baker2016), the negative social conditioning from such a bombardment of biased images cannot be underestimated.

Social media was also blamed for the wildfire of rumor behind anti-Muslim riots in February and March 2018, with the government temporarily blocking Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram. Riots in the eastern town of Ampara were coordinated around a claim that a Muslim restaurant owner hid sterilization pills (vaňda peti) in the food of Sinhala men, though no such drug actually exists (Jeyaraj Reference Jeyaraj2018b). The trope of the impotent Muslim male was thereby altered to make his infertility contagious, invoking a common piece of postwar fearmongering—the alleged Muslim conspiracy to become the majority population. Internet memes accusing Muslims of secretly distributing sterilization pills had been circulating for years.Footnote ¹² The rioting in Ampara, however, was directed not only at the restaurant, but against the local mosque and other Muslim businesses, reiterating the vulnerability of economic visibility. Several days later, a road rage incident became the pretext for more anti-Muslim riots, with two deaths and damage to mosques, shops, homes, and vehicles. Hundreds were arrested, curfew imposed, and military reinforcements summoned, with police even firing on a crowd once, echoing 1915 (Jeyaraj Reference Jeyaraj2018a). Positive counterreactions did follow. Members of Buddhist and Muslim communities met to denounce violence, rebuild, and reaffirm neighborly fraternity, blaming outside gangs for the havoc (Nazim Reference Nazim2018). Still, stereotypical hot spots smoldered, waiting for the next extremist to fan them aflame.

On Easter Sunday 2019, homegrown Islamic terrorists carried out a suicide bombing attack on luxury hotels and Catholic churches known for multireligious patronage in Sri Lanka. Over 270 lives were lost and more than 500 injured. Backlash against Muslims was fierce, with boycotts, harassment, random arrests, and a whirlwind of recirculated stereotypes about foreignness and violence, even as most Muslims also condemned the terrorists and worked with officials to root them out (Ethirajan Reference Ethirajan2019). One of the strangest retaliations was the weaponization of sterilization stereotypes against Dr. Seigu Siyabdeen Mohamed Shafi, who worked as an obstetrician and gynecologist for the Kurunegala hospital. The mainstream Sinhala daily Divayina published an unsubstantiated report on May 23, 2019, that Dr. Shafi had sterilized 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist women during C-section surgeries (Randuṇu Reference Randuṇu2019). He was arrested the next day by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), “regarding the suspicious nature in which he had amassed wealth” (Ada Deraṇa 2019a). Fueled not only by Divayina, but also larger news outlets like Ada Deraṇa, the CID then began to crowdsource its investigation, urging “the public to come forward with any complaints of . . . illegal sterilization” (Ada Deraṇa 2019b). Within two weeks, nearly 800 complaints had been lodged by Buddhist women claiming sterilization. As investigative journalists began to dig, however, the facade of the case crumbled. Most complaints were only suspicions, or blamed Dr. Shafi's “sterilization” for ailments from back pain to diabetes. It was also learned that Dr. Shafi was a parliamentary candidate in 2015, and had already been questioned twice by police about his wealth in the wake of the bombings (Fonseka Reference Fonseka2019). After interviewing all hospital staff who worked with him, the CID admitted to the Kurunegala magistrate on June 27 that the sterilization accusations were baseless and the doctor had no ties to terrorist groups (Wipulasena Reference Wipulasena2019a).

Still, Dr. Shafi was not released. He remained remanded for another month to allow the CID to submit a report from the Kurunegala hospital director. A few dozen women came forward to be tested, but no irregularities were ever found. The hospital director tried to suppress these results by declaring that tests could not be administered because the hysterosalpingogram method was unsafe, while extremist monks and protestors made spectacles outside court hearings, including when Dr. Shafi was finally granted bail on July 25. Meanwhile, journalists reported that the initial complaint filed with the CID had been fabricated in a conspiracy that included the deputy inspector general, hospital administrators, and even the magistrate (EconomyNext 2019; Wipulasena Reference Wipulasena2019b;).Footnote ¹³ Although Dr. Shafi was released, the damage was done, with assets frozen, his family driven from their home, and no guarantee of future employment or freedom. The last ruling from the magistrate on December 12, 2019, assigned a new police team “to re-record the evidence in the case against Dr. Shafi” (The Sunday Morning 2019), a defensible order in the political climate of the militant Sinhala Buddhist nationalist Gotabaya Rajapaksa, elected president in November 2019.

Overall, Dr. Shafi's case indicates how extensively anti-Muslim sentiments were activated among the public. The fact that the case began about wealth before morphing into allegations of sterilization confirms stereotypes are at work. What was wrong with the doctor was the same thing that was wrong with Muslims in Marakkala Haṭane, that, “in how they speak, with all faces as one, they trade sterilely, the group always striving to become rich with their own clan” (v. 20). Just as Muslim wealth was equated with the sterile or infertile (nova saru) during disputes in 1870, a wealthy Muslim was used in the wake of the 2019 bombings as a symbol of the sterilization of Sinhala Buddhists, whether economic or physical. Dr. Shafi was therefore typecast as a villain, and however his case is ultimately closed, the stereotypes used against him will remain open and adaptable.

The Nonconclusion of Stereotypes

Those today designated as “Muslims” have had many names in Sri Lanka. These range from descriptors that were initially geographic, like yavana, yona, or baburu, to names based on sailing vessels, like marakkalayā or hambayā, to derogatory diminutives like tambi, meaning “little brother” in Tamil, to the European catchall of “Moor.” In this article, however, I have translated them all as “Muslim” across time, to demonstrate how stereotypes can flatten identity at any point in history, illustrating Chakrabarty's (Reference Chakrabarty2000, 109) point that “a plurality of times existing together” shows how “humans from any other period and region . . . are always in some sense our contemporaries.” This is why the foregoing analyses of Muslim stereotypes flashed back and forth between past and present, even as the larger argument moved steadily from precolonial times to the modern day. It is impossible to pinpoint a true origin of stereotypes. Even if sandēśa poems are designated as the oldest extant Sinhala discourse on Muslims, they do not prove originality, as using baburu for Berber may have only refashioned a trope of forest-dwelling Väddas. Since stereotypes layer, there is no hope of finding a sure bottom. Likewise, colonial contributions built on what was already there, resonating with conventional clichés of greedy merchants and gleeful violence.

Stereotypes in general are inextricable from life in all times, as rough tools of “social cognition,” which “amplify systematic differences between groups, even if these differences are in reality very small” (Bordalo et al. Reference Bordalo, Coffman, Gennaioli and Shleifer2016, 1757). Stereotypes therefore process reality to try and see a bigger picture, but distort it with broad strokes. In the case of Sri Lanka, “Muslims are traditionally known as a trading community, although only a small portion of them are actually traders. However, they visibly engage in commercial activities mostly in Sinhala dominated urban areas” (Nuhman Reference Nuhman and Holt2016, 41). This small but highly visible sample of Muslims was as present in precolonial and colonial times as it is today. The Muslim merchant stereotype thus persists across Sinhala literature, albeit deployed for different ends, whether in elegies of Beruwala, criticisms of bullock carts, or complaints of economic conspiracies.

Context still matters for this reason. Not all stereotypes are active at all times, nor are all intentionally prejudicial. New ones emerge, others disappear, and some invert. New technologies speed the spread of stereotypes, and global politics shapes standards of good and bad Muslims. As Sri Lankan Muslims turn to an Arab-oriented Sunni identity, abandoning the term “Moor” and using “Muslim” to mean religion and ethnicity, their differences from Sinhala and Tamil communities are systematically reinforced, creating further conditions for stereotypes to proliferate. This led Dennis McGilvray (Reference McGilvray and Holt2016, 76) to speculate on “a more secure basis for Moorish identity. A revised version of the earlier Sonahar identity might serve this purpose, shorn of its Arab racial pretensions and its colonial (‘Moorish’) connotations, and celebrating its own Tamil literary heritage.” McGilvray essentially suggests a Sonahar counter-stereotype to replace the villainous Muslim. Promoting counter-stereotypes has been shown to increase acceptance of others, and may even improve creative cognition (Gocłowska, Crisp, and Labuschange Reference Gocłowska, Crisp and Labuschange2012). Still, it is impossible to equate an “earlier” Sonahar with “better,” even in a “revised” sense. Identifying as Sonahar still leaves Muslims open to the many yonā stereotypes carried in centuries of Sinhala literature. Nor does there seem attachment to these old terms. Many young Muslims are already making their own counter-stereotypes, spreading internet memes in Tamil, Sinhala, and English that present Islam as peaceful and compassionate and show Muslims cooperating with Sri Lankan neighbors. Yet they do not disconnect from being Muslim in a global sense either, with a focus on Arab Islam, especially among the many families split between Sri Lankan homes and jobs on the Arabian peninsula. Of course, success of any counter-stereotype depends on its widespread public dissemination, which would need to exceed the echo chambers of social media.

This history of Muslim stereotypes in Sinhala literature is therefore unending, just as it has no clear beginning. I thereby try to meet the challenge of postcolonial theorists like Ananda Abeysekara (Reference Abeysekara2012, 234) to think about “the contemporaneity of the past and future, which ultimately and fundamentally must do away with the very division of time, if not time itself. ” Although this history has not abandoned time entirely, filled with dates and historical actors, its illustrations of the simultaneity of stereotypes are meant to challenge any easy narrative about how anti-Muslim animosity originated or where it is going. Facing the volatile perpetuity of stereotypes, one can only say with certainty “not so much how things change in its history but what forms of affective practice and sensibility, opposed to others, are rendered possible” (Abeysekara Reference Abeysekara2018, 35). This history of stereotypes has therefore explained which sorts of discourses make Muslims into affective ideas, whether as poetic ornaments or political opponents. In this capacity, the past does help prepare for future stereotypes, which eternally return to old otherings in the offing.