The Second Minority

In a country where Sinhalese constitute approximately 78% of the population and Tamils are 12%, the 8.9% Muslims constitute the second minority.Footnote ² In the evolution of post-colonial Sri Lankan political governance, Sinhala majoritarianism and minority marginalization has elicited different responses from the three largest ethnic communities. While Tamil leaders had their own alternative vision for the governance of the country, principally through a federal system that would give power of self-government to majority Tamil areas, Muslims chose different paths (Uyangoda Reference Uyangoda2001; De Silva Reference DeSilva1998; Wilson Reference Wilson1988). Muslim leaders have historically preferred to find ways to articulate their interests within a mostly Sinhala-dominated status quo (De Silva Reference DeSilva1998; McGilvray Reference McGilvray1998; Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam Reference Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam1997; Ali Reference Ali1986, Reference Ali1992; Phadnis Reference Phadnis1979). Muslim population distribution has been such that a territorially organized federal system would not necessarily guarantee adequate Muslim representation. Muslims, therefore, preferred not to politicize their ethnicity, opting instead to be ethnically neutral in their pursuit of political office (Ali Reference Ali1992; McGilvray Reference McGilvray1998). There have been Muslims in power from both the North East and the South who have been elected from mainly non-Muslim constituencies and they have been champions of the notion that ethnicization for political ends is not helpful to the country's future. Those Muslim leaders who have emphasized Muslim concerns have accessed power not via Muslim vote banks but through mobilizing patronage networks and personal class connections with the Sinhala leadership (Ismail Reference Ismail, Jeganathan and Ismail1995).

With the evolution of the ethnic conflict, and especially when the significantly large Muslim populations of the Eastern Province became increasingly affected by the violence, it became clear that the ethnically neutral politics practiced thus far were not adequately addressing the needs of the Muslim masses in the conflict areas. Further, the change in electoral systems in the 1980s—the introduction of the proportional representation system for instance—brought about the phenomenon of smaller parties, with the chance of providing the seats needed for coalition governments. This saw the emergence of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) (Knoerzer Reference Knoerzer, Tiruchelvam and Dattathreya1998). Unfortunately, even these changes in the system have had only minimal impact in countering the country's majoritarian governance structures (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2007). The SLMC, although with a consistent vote base in the Eastern Province, has had only minimal success in bringing substantive political gains for Muslims in a system that continues to be organized to undermine minority representation. For instance, the SLMC was a powerful part of the United National Front (UNF) coalition that initiated the 2002–2005 peace process. However, its leader Rauf Hakeem was unable to persuade the government or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to agree to a separate Muslim delegation to the peace talks. Their successes have been limited to individual MPs' resource utilization to uplift the infrastructure in their areas. Unlike in the East, the large numbers of Muslims that live in the Western Province, especially those that live in Colombo (Colombo district has 205,078 Muslims, and they are 9.2% of the district population) live and work amongst religious and ethnic others. Many of the Muslim middle classes in Colombo, decades after the emergence of the SLMC, remain skeptical as to its usefulness and continue to support the larger National parties (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2007).

One other element of Muslim identity politics in Sri Lanka that has to be understood in any analysis of the success of the piety movement is the manner in which the religious category ‘Muslim’ is placed with ‘Tamil’ and ‘Sinhala’—the latter both identify categories based on language. Muslims, a largely Tamil-speaking community, first refused the Tamil ethnic label at the end of the 19th century over the issue of communal representation under British rule (Asad Reference Asad1993; McGilvray Reference McGilvray1998; Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam Reference Zackariya and Shanmugaratnam1997). When the colonial administration, in its move to provide more local control of government, proposed appointing a Kandyan and a Muslim member to the legislative council in 1889, the Tamil leadership opposed this, stating that the Muslims were ethnically Tamil. Muslims protested against such a definition of themselves (Azeez Reference Azeez1957), the British decided to create the seat—not necessarily because of Muslim protest—and Tamil–Muslim difference became institutionalized.Footnote ³ Therefore in Sri Lanka today, Muslim religious identity works on the register of ethnicity as well (McGilvray Reference McGilvray1998; Ali Reference Ali1992). With the advent of the piety movement, religion has come to override all other forms of collective identity for Muslims, even those of language and region. Any analysis of the success of Muslim piety groups in the country cannot be conducted without taking this peculiarity into account. Terminology popular in other contexts such as ‘secular Muslims,’ ‘non-practicing Muslims’ is difficult to maintain in Sri Lanka, given local identity politics. And further, the term ‘Tamil-Muslim’ as it prevails in Southern India is not meaningful in the Sri Lankan context, where to call someone a Tamil-Muslim becomes a highly contested political claim (Nuhman Reference Nuhman2002).

The early Tamil nationalist movement saw some level of participation by Eastern Muslims in the struggle of the Tamil-speaking people. However, since the mid-1980s, with state intervention to arm Muslim civilians, relations between the Tamil and Muslim communities in the Eastern Province deteriorated.Footnote ⁴ The most significant LTTE attacks on Muslims occurred in 1990 with the massacre of male Muslims at prayer in Kattankudi and Eravur. Then the entire Muslim community of the Northern Province—75,000 persons or 5% of the province's population—was expelled by the LTTE in an act of ethinic cleansing in October 1990 (Hasbullah Reference Hasbullah2001).

This violence and the ethnic cleansing by Tamil militants were not directly experienced by Muslims in the south and west of the country, and served mainly to further exacerbate the sense of insecurity with which they lived among the Sinhala majority. The current generation of Southern Muslims' experience of ethnic violence was mainly as witnesses to the 1983 pogrom against Tamils organized by Sinhala nationalist elements of the state (Wilson Reference Wilson1988). In the wake of the 1983 riots, there were many government ministers in Colombo who spoke of Muslims as the ‘good minority’ and many Muslims who witnessed the violence were also eager to underscore their own allegiance to the state and the fact that they—unlike the Tamils—knew their place as a minority (Ismail Reference Ismail, Jeganathan and Ismail1995).

Muslims in Sri Lanka, therefore, feel beleaguered as a socially, politically and economically weak minorityFootnote ⁵ within a context where interethnic relations have often been defined by violence. Recent religious self-assertion has given the community self-confidence in ways that the idea of a Muslim political community—a distant possibility as a geographically dispersed second minority—has failed to do (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2007). Given the political realities within which Muslims currently have to live, the minority consciousness that they inhabit infuses even the religious precepts that they advocate. I read Al Muslimaat's attempts to transform notions of ‘Muslimness’ amongst its constituency as informed by just such a minority consciousness. Religious revivalism amongst Muslims has given them a greater appreciation of their own identity, but has transformed their relations with ethnic others in a way that mirrors the polarization that has taken place amongst the different religious/ethnic groups during 25 years of conflict.

Al Muslimaat and the various other actors of Sri Lanka's piety movement are a part of globalized Islam and hugely influenced by movements that participate in what Roy has described as a quest for a non-national, homogenous Umma (Roy Reference Roy2004). However, in the Sri Lankan case the local plays a fundamental role in the logics through which the piety groups operate.

Al Muslimaat

The core group at Al Muslimaat and the bayan (lay sermon) attendees were from a variety of middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. They included ladies who were dropped off in air-conditioned Japanese cars driven from the more affluent Colombo areas of Colpetty and Bambalapitiya, as well as those who took the bus or a dusty three-wheeler ride from the closer Dehiwela suburbs. Al Muslimaat is well known in middle- and upper-middle-class Muslim circles for its da'wa activities—proselytization work through which the new orthodoxy is propagated among the fellow Muslims—as well as for its social service work. Founded in 1990, when the wider piety movement was gathering strength throughout the country, today it is an institution well established in the community. It received added impetus with the return of the charismatic Dr. Mareena Reffai after she completed her postgraduate studies in Ophthalmology at Sheffield University. Al Muslimaat's stated purpose is, ‘To do Da'wa with emphasis on social and welfare activities, for the upliftment of women in particular and the society at large in Sri Lanka.’Footnote ⁶ Given that the much more widespread Tablighi Jamaat movement propagates the segregation and seclusion of women, Al Muslimaat activites are frowned upon by some; this impacts on the way in which they work. Although the group elects different presidents each year, Dr. Marina Reffai is their public and most vocal member. Her status in the community as a respected doctor, her family connections to the late A. C. S. Hameed (a powerful foreign minister in successive United National Party governments) and the fame of her bayans make her the undisputed force of the group. Al Muslimaat also runs a marriage bureau, organizes an Ulhiya sacrificial service during Haj and Ramazan festivals, conducts job placements for women, runs an Islamic nursery school, distributes free hijabs to the poor, runs the Ummul Muhmineen residential certificate program for girls between secondary school and university (or marriage), conducts weekly radio programs on Islam in Tamil and English, visits Muslim inmates at the Welikada women's prison and gives public lectures on invitation. Their ‘social service’ activities include working with Muslims expelled from the Northern Province by the LTTE in 1990, with those affected by the 2004 Tsunami and with people displaced from Mutur (in the East of the country) by the August 2006 fighting between the LTTE and government forces. In the aftermath of the Tsunami, Al Muslimaat took the lead in coordinating aid activities amongst Muslim organizations.Footnote ⁷ In the 1990s they worked extensively with the expelled Northern Muslim population, conducting health clinics, providing funds and coordination for building toilets at the camps, building makeshift homes and paying salaries for two school teachers and three maulavis (teachers of religion) in the Western Coastal district of Puttalam where most of the expelled now live. They are a registered organization that runs on donations and institutionalized funding. Their organizational upkeep is based on members' personal contributions, and funding received for projects like building wells, or toilets are fully utilized to produce such wells and toilets. They take great pride in one aspect of their work, that they, unlike other NGOs, do not charge ‘institutional overheads’ on charitable projects. Al Muslimaat conducts daytime bayan for housewives on Wednesdays (English) and Thursdays (Tamil).Footnote ⁸ Their office (a spacious house on Initium Road, Dehiwala) with its community activities and its large rooms, offers women a refuge from their everyday lives that is considered socially legitimate within conservative Muslim middle class society, since it is a space for prayer as well. Emphasizing both learning and service, Al Muslimaat and its da'wa and social service activities have offered both medium and space of expression to middle-class Muslim housewives beyond the duties of wifedom and motherhood, and a chance to participate in the ongoing community improvement. Those who join the Al Muslimaat inner circle are instructed in the history of Islam, Arabic language, Qur'an interpretation and the importance of da'wa. In common with many such groups worldwide, Al Muslimaat made it possible for women to enter the traditionally exclusive territory of male UIema. At Al Muslimaat, religious exegesis was the focus of intense discussion, with the intention of better incorporating religion into women's everyday lives (see also Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Torab Reference Torab1996; Brenner Reference Brenner1996).

A Space for Change

In some of the focus groups I organized amongst Al Muslimaat activists, I tried to elicit what they thought about the role of the organization amongst the Muslim community as a whole. Kamila, one of the more active committee members, said,

Many of the women at Al Muslimaat that I spoke with had a narrative of transformation similar to that of Kamila's and all recounted how much stronger they felt for being able to participate in the organization's activities. Al Muslimaat provided a space of high social and moral significance for women to be legitimately active outside their homes, and their increased personal piety, the social capital that many earned through their participation in da'wa activities, transformed them.Footnote ⁹ In the Sri Lankan case, and particularly in the case of Al Muslimaat then, I want to draw attention to two aspects of the transformative experience of da'wa. The first, as has been extensively discussed in the literature, is the discovery of the path to increased personal faith; the second is the experience of improving society through the da'wa and social service activities. Both aspects of the transformative experiences are equally important. The sense of increased self-worth that Al Muslimaat members talk about, therefore, is not limited to greater personal piety alone.

The specificity of da'wa work in Sri Lanka—making it different from any other narrative of Muslim evangelicalsFootnote ¹⁰ elsewhere—lies, I argue, in the manner in which the piety movement has transformed significant sections of a minority community—traditionally considered conservative and backward, and with little social presence—into a highly energized hive of visible activity and change within the country's fractured polity. Al Muslimaat represents one of the centres of women's activity of this movement through its mobilizing of Muslim housewives in the semi-urban Colombo neighbourhood of Dehiwela.

Saba Mahmood, in her investigation of Women's Mosque Movements in Egypt, attempts to read the manner in which Muslim women's making of their religious selves can be understood outside of liberal feminist frameworks that view the world in terms of the binaries of subordination and subversion (Reference Mahmood2005). Mahmood frames her discussion of women and the mosque movement as a challenge to received notions of agency and emancipation traditionally upheld by liberal feminism. Through discussing the dispositions in operation in these women's ‘training’ of their selves to be better Muslims, Mahmood demonstrates the logic of self-making that is actively pursued in the name of proper religious practice. Discussing the cultivation of Sabr (patience) and that of Haya (modesty), Mahmood demonstrates the manner in which these women participate in a discipline of cultivation of a particular self, desired in the name of proper practice. Mahmood understands such a self-making as different from even the reiterative logic of femininity and masculinity articulated by Butler. In the case of the Egyptian women, performative repetition—in the proper usage of dress for instance—builds upon earlier performances. The framework proposed by Mahmood, then, is different from Butler's schema, where each performance is either a successful or failed repetition of an ideal (Reference Butler1990). The difference lies fundamentally in the differential positing of intention. Mahmood proposes a certain agency in the desire that motivates the performance, whereas for Butler intention is very much a part of the structural working of power; while in Mahmood's reading of Butler, agency sits only in the performative resistance—through parody for instance—to sedimented ideals of male and femaleness.

In Mahmood's case, there is a fetishizing of intention—in keeping with the liberal notion of choice—without a concomitant analytical interest in the larger context in which such a self is desired, or the social consequences of choosing such a self. As a part of a broader project on Muslim minority self-assertion within Sri Lanka, here I attempt to understand the workings of gender as they operate in the worlds that Al Muslimaat women occupy. However, my own interest is not so much in reading the Sri Lankan case as a test for liberal feminist politics, but rather with analyzing the transformations of gender roles—both male and female—that are experienced and negotiated in this particular context. Having observed the advent of the piety groups and their first tentative forays while I was growing up in Sri Lanka, and conducting research into their later more assertive inroads and the impact they have had in forming the social habits of today, I find myself needing to look beyond the point at which Mahmood rests her investigation. For example, amongst those at Al Muslimaat, wearing the hijab was not a religiously transformative experience in and of itself, nor was it always a part of a project oriented towards making a more pious and aware self in the manner Mahmood describes. In Sri Lanka, Muslim women across class and region, unconnected to any piety group, now wear the hijab and even the abhaya. Today, this dress has become a marker of cultural difference; more a sign of Muslimness in a multiethnic polity and less of a newly and consciously embraced personal piety. Therefore the selfhood embraced is Muslim, but not always radically religious. My critique, or at least qualification, of Mahmood's delineation of self-making through the adoption of a pious demeanour is that such a practice shifts in meaning with each generation, but Mahmood offers no discussion of the normalization that occurs with the passing of time. Practice is meaningful in the manner described by Mahmood for those who embrace it through conviction in a social field not necessarily familiar with it or sympathetic to it, but it becomes something quite different to the next generation of practitioners. For many of those in Sri Lanka who follow the practice today, it is a sign of the religious; but it is also part of the everyday, without the potent meanings of self-transformation associated at an earlier moment. Wearing the hijab then, loses much of its affective power over the self when, as those first promoting it had intended, it becomes regularized as a required, everyday practice amongst women of a certain group or class. It is for this reason that I prefer to address the remaking of community that women at Al Muslimaat perceive themselves to be engaged in, and the creation of a new normative Muslim femaleness. At Al Muslimaat, embracing the hijab (at minimum, a scarf pinned at the throat or under the ear, that covers the hair and neck) and, more often, the abhaya (long cloak over everyday clothes) with a scarf covering hair and neck certainly does mark an embracing of piety. But the personal piety and modesty that is signified by the wearing of hijab is merely the first step; the real work is yet to be done. Learning the rules of proper practice, unlearning what was considered orthodoxy under a different regime of knowledge and conveying that knowledge to one's family and peers in a manner that maintains community networks and does not unduly disturb gender norms constitute the more substantive work at Al Muslimaat.

I share with Mahmood the desire to understand what motivates these women in their work, but I want to do so in a manner that recognizes the positive social transformations as well as the personal piety that these women see themselves as achieving in the process. I will therefore foreground both the intention that Mahmood points to and the additional contextual question of the consequences of imagining a religiously ethical selfhood for a beleaguered minority community wedged between two highly majoritarian political projects. Therefore the emphasis I place is not just on the techniques of personal practice, but also on how the embracing and propagating of such techniques can be understood as impacting social relations among Muslims as well as transforming Muslims' place in a tensely plural multiethnic polity.

Today, nearly 16 years after its inception, the Al Muslimat challenge is not to introduce the hijab to local Muslims; this has already taken place, and they are quite proud of their role in bringing this about. The challenge today as already stated is to inculcate the basics of the new orthodoxy, and maintain Al Muslimaat's position in a context where different ways of being piously Muslim are in intense competition.

Changing Gender Roles

In Sri Lanka, Muslimness—and particularly Muslim maleness—is not obviously validated within the dominant national culture. There are no widespread Muslim-identified media institutions, while representation of Muslims in popular culture reflect their marginal status. As already suggested, Muslims in the South additionally feel that constant vigilance is to be practiced everywhere, against an amorphous potential violence from the Sinhala majority. The dynamic between Muslim men and women, newly energized by the movement for greater piety, have to be understood as located within this minority sensibility. The re-reading of injunctions and the compulsive preoccupation with proper practice that Al Muslimaat advocates often brings about shifts in gender relations. Al Muslimaat by its very presence has recalibrated hierarchies between Muslim men and women. There is a structure of feeling, brought on by the subtle reordering of kinship linkages among the urban middle classes, that are transforming male/female relations amongst the Muslim middle classes as well. Marina Reffai of Al Muslimaat also advocates a method of doing da'wa work that does not question or challenge community notions regarding women's roles, thereby minimizing any threat that Al Muslimaat may be perceived as posing to community gender hierarchies. The changing urban context, as well as Reffai's constant vigilance, helps maintain Al Muslimaat's position, enabling members to remain active. As Osella and Osella explore in their recent work (2007) there is a shift across South Asia towards contemporary globalized forms of companionate marriage and nuclearized family structures; these pertain amongst those engaged with the piety movements in Sri Lanka as well, and helps Al Muslimaat members to minimize and manage threats to the gender status quo.

One day Reffai talked about head-covering practices in her natal village. Reffai described the manner in which, in Akurana, during her childhood, women often covered their heads in front of their husbands during mealtimes.

This was one of a series of instructions regarding thinking about the various forms of practice that have become naturalized among Muslims. Reffai's bayans constantly urged women to refrain from ‘blind following’ of the practices they were raised with and to be self-conscious about prayer and practice. Here she drew attention to the ways through which the injunction to cover yourself when going outside in the presence of strange men was reduced to covering the head at mealtimes in front of your husband. I find this discussion interesting not because of the manner in which it denigrates existing practices and insists on new orthodoxy—many have noted this feature in new piety movements—but because of the manner in which denigrating this particular practice draws on a notion of companionate marriage and nuclear family to propagate a particular form of piety. For instance, arguing against the compulsory covering of head in front of the husband—popular amongst Sri Lankan Muslim middle classes of a previous generation—Reffai alters the meaning of the head cover. It is no longer practiced in the service of hierarchized marital relations within the home—the head was formerly covered as a mark of respect for the husband—but rather in the service of a particular public Muslimness that wearing the hijab today entails. Reffai saw head covering in front of the husband as a misreading of the practice, a perversion of its true purpose. The previous set of meanings associated with head covering is rendered dated, irrelevant and requiring transformation.Footnote ¹² The current meaning—brought about in the name of orthopractice—is one that calls attention to women's responsibility to maintain a norm of Muslim femaleness outside the home. In other words, it acknowledges women's expanded area of action in the wider world as well. Secondly, such a reading valorizes the sexual bond within marriage. Such a recasting of head covering indicates that the marital sexual relationship—and, I would argue, companionate marriage in general—is sacred under the new Islam, and is an essential part of the practice of piety. The marital relationship then is cast as unique—another feature of companionate marriageFootnote ¹³—and outside other hierarchies of kinship that normally organize Muslim society (one's mother, for instance, is outside of the space that is rendered sacred to a woman and her husband).Footnote ¹⁴ The current emphasis on the nuclear family over the extended system of an earlier generation, increasingly popular amongst urban Sri Lankans, is becoming entrenched amongst Muslims as well and, in the case of Al Muslimaat, is drawn upon to propagate the idea of public female piety. The argument I am making here is that the gender roles that are propagated by this piety group are not reducible regardless of their claim, to their Muslimness alone. They are in fact much more in line with the requirements of class and of the larger, globalized late capitalist world.Footnote ¹⁵

My conversations with some Al Muslimaat women regarding the practice of nikab further underscores this ‘structure of feeling’. Many of these women did not practice the nikab, although they termed it a ‘very highly recommended sunnah’ (i.e. among practices valued by the prophet—considered meritorious but not termed compulsory for Muslims). It was not a farl or a wajib (compulsory practice), they told me. To many of them, wearing the nikab was inconvenient and unrealistic. Talking to the garbage collector, the water-meter reader, the electrician and so on will either be forbidden or will all require wearing the nikab even in the house; taking the children to the doctor would be difficult when a woman dons the nikab and is not supposed to talk to non-maharam (related) men. Therefore, a family has to have a great many readily available ‘facilities’ in order to practice nikab, they said. I asked these women activists whether it was necessary for one to have a lot of money for servants, private transport, etc. to facilitate the adoption of such a practice. My research with some wealthy Tabligh Jamaat women had indicated just that.Footnote ¹⁶ For my Al Muslimaat friends, however, it was not so much a matter of money as the husband's commitment to do the additional work required to support a nikab wearing wife. One of the primary requirements of the nikab, they said, was the husband's willingness to take on the responsibility of helping the wife. The added burden of running some household activities—paying bills, taking the children to the doctors, grocery shopping, etc.—that the nikab wearing wife should ideally no longer undertake will now fall on others. In a middle- or lower-middle-class household without the resources needed to employ servants to take care of such tasks, only the husband can take on these responsibilities. What would essentially be the wife's ‘subjection’, her retirement into further symbolic and material seclusion, then requires husbands' greater participation in the smooth functioning of the domestic sphere. Thus, in the Colombo urban and suburban context, there must be a necessary disruption of normative gender roles for the accommodation of the wife's embracing of nikab. I am not claiming here that such a sharing of responsibilities always takes place, or that women are not called upon to both cover their face and venture out into the world to take care of household needs. I want to draw attention, rather, to women's articulation of practices in terms of the necessary negotiation of household duties.

The impact of piety groups on notions of masculinity remains another perspective through which to address this ethnographic material. It is also significant that Al Muslimaat women refuse to take on what they see as the marker of an extra element of piety on the basis that it was not ‘practical’ for them. Such a claim indicates that decisions regarding transforming everyday practices to be more in line with new orthodoxies are normally family decisions taken by husbands and wives in conversation with one another, and requiring complicated reorganization of their lives. Here, men are called upon to participate—in partnership with their wives—in formulating the family's position regarding piety. The Muslim self-embraced by women at Al Muslimaat then cannot be imagined without taking into account the consequences for their immediate kin.

Preserving Community

As I have described elsewhere (2007), the piety movement in Sri Lanka includes the Tablighi Jamaat, Sunnat Jamaat, Tauheed Jamaat and so on. Different groups' orientations towards practice are quite different, and adherents have strong feelings regarding these differences. Muslim extended families often have members that belong to different da'wa groups and these differences have sometimes to be managed to avoid confrontations. In this context of competition, members of the Tablighi Jamaat and persons from the Salafi identified groups that I interviewed insisted that they preach non-confrontation and try to manage differences without overt clashes between persons holding different views on piety and social transformation (cf. Alam this volume). At Al Muslimaat, although the bayans' rhetoric generally promote Da'wa or preaching (to lapsed Muslims) and criticize ‘unIslamic’ behaviour, there is also a strong message that such preaching should always eschew confrontation. Reffai constantly urges the women at Al Muslimaat that, while it is their duty to inform those who do not know about the ‘correct’ way to practice, they must not take too seriously the burden of convincing believers of the path of true Islam. While transformation of society is emphasized and the importance of missionary activity stressed, there is a firm commitment to the avoidance of fitna (chaos or social break down) within the community of fellow Muslims. Under the frequent invocation of lakum dinukum valiyaddin—the line from Sura Kafiroon that states ‘to you be your way and to me mine’Footnote ¹⁷, women at Al Muslimaath are urged to not be too affected by the many strongly held differences that they will encounter. This generally meant that women were urged by Reffai to avoid confronting normative gender hierarchies head on. While Reffai stopped short of saying ‘don't contradict men’, she promoted ‘patience’ and advocated ‘good sense’ in making judgments regarding the appropriate time and place to intervene. Their task, Marina Reffai's bayans often told women, was only to spread ‘the word’; changing people's hearts was ‘Allah's job’.Footnote ¹⁸

Al Muslimaat members practiced tolerance under trying circumstances in the midst of a social field populated by many different groups competing for supremacy: the Tablighi Jamaat was prominent; Sufi groups (colloquially termed Sunnat Jamaat) that were on the wane during the past few years, due to the prominence of the Tablighi and Salafi identified groups, are now asserting themselves again. Further, groups like the Tablighi—who have a much less public role for women—consider Al Muslimaat to be a forum where there is potential for fitna.Footnote ¹⁹ During one of our discussions, another Al Muslimaat stalwart, Fareeda, recounted the following story.

Fareeda's tale is instructive in a number of ways. The funeral has become an arena where different ritual regimes compete with one another in the context of bereavement and cause much distress. The three things that one must do in the case of a death—reciting the Janaaza (funeral) Prayer, taking care of the deceased's unfinished business and Sadakathul Jariya (charitable deeds in the name of the dead that are beneficial to the community as a whole)—are considered by the Salafi school, to which Al Muslimaat is loosely affiliated, as the only necessary and sufficient rituals of mourning. However, there are much more elaborate practices involving prayers and lamentations which are popularly followed. The seventh Kaththam that Fareeda attended and the Maulud that she mentions are part of these customary practices that were popular among Muslims before the new orthodoxy introduced by the Salafi and Tablighi Jama'at identified groups, and are still diligently practiced by Sufi identified Sunnat Jamaat families. The fact that Fareeda held back in the discussion of such a controversial subject is indicative of the manner in which Al Muslimaat's project of community transformation defers both to the norm of not disturbing social relations and also to the traditional gender hierarchies at play.

Reffai, aware of the competition among the different groups, in her bayans strongly discouraged infighting amongst Muslims on issues of doctrinal detail. ‘Differences of opinion are there’, she said during one bayan, ‘because Allah wanted it that way. So there is no use fighting about it.’ Fareeda's avoidance of fitna indicates a conscious following of these instructions. The insistence on non-confrontation allows for the presence of an array of strongly held dispositions and practices to maintain a difficult equilibrium among the different piety groups. While I also heard the line from Sura Kafirun referred to by members of the Tablighi Jama'at, their particular orientation towards non-confrontation draws on a different philosophy concerning the effacement of the self (Metcalf Reference Metcalf1993).Footnote ²⁴ This incident of giving way—told to me as part of a story regarding the difficult conditions under which da'wa work is done—indicates the importance placed by Al Muslimaat on community. It further suggests that in the case of Al Muslimaat women, transformation of the self has limited efficacy outside of the transformation of community and therefore, for their work to be successful, women need as wide a community acceptance of their presence as possible. Reffai emphasizes the containment of difference, and kinship and class linkages are permitted to override variations in doctrine and practice. At the same time, the existence of Al Muslimaat as an institutional space that endorses their own form of piety as well as their avoidance of confrontation ensured that women were rarely in doubt that their way was the most suitable way. Public disagreements with men and calling attention to themselves while in society at large were discouraged, but this was a strategic stepping back. The safe homosocial space of Al Muslimaat and the relationships growing there amongst women valorized their identities and contributed to these women's sense of self-worth. The authority of pious women, with their access to true Qur'anic knowledge and information, and the constant threat to traditional male/female hierarchies which these women represented, was strategically managed. Normative middle-class Muslim gender hierarchies privileged male status in ways that were not always endorsed outside the community; in this context, women's emerging knowledge and power included the well-honed capacity to avoid overt confrontation. Given that these gender norms were dated and crumbling in day-to-day life in twenty-first century Colombo, women did not seem to find it especially difficult to appear to be deferential of them.Footnote ²⁵

The Place of the Kafir

Muslims in Sri Lanka's commercial capital Colombo live, as observed earlier, in social, political and geographical spaces that are populated with large numbers of ‘ethnic others’. However, many practices of religious self-making persistently call for the cultivated distancing of the religious other and promote a sensibility of community exclusiveness among Muslims. The consequences of the creation of the new pious selves in the urban multiethnic context of Colombo are therefore quite socially and politically different from contexts where there are no discernible religio-ethnic others to contend with.

Discrediting traditional ritual practice is a common feature of new religious movements. In the case of Sri Lanka, this manifested itself as a discrediting of rituals shared amongst the various religions present in the country and it reflects an assertion of Muslim religious exclusivity (not yet overtly politicized other than in the Eastern Province) in the context of Tamil–Sinhala political polarization. According to Reffai's bayans, prior to the advent of the piety movement, Sri Lankan Muslims were steeped in ignorance, in shirk and bidat and needed the awakening that was brought about by the converts of the west.Footnote ²⁶ The affective worship, the highly popular Sufi tariquats that were characteristic of Islam of the South Asian littoralFootnote ²⁷ were thus dismissed by Al Muslimaat as backward and retrograde. Reffai would always open her bayan with a dua (supplication) stating that the two means by which Islam will be ‘damaged’ is by ‘wrong teachers’ and ‘blind following’. I was repeatedly told by members of Al Muslimaat that they were no longer ‘blind followers’ but were informed believers, exercising their choice to practice the religion of their preference. This rhetoric of ‘taking control’, of making their own decisions regarding religion, was crucial to their sense of their own selves and their mission at Al Muslimaat. And a large part of this control lay in identifying, denigrating and purging the community of practices that constitute ‘blind following’.

One day, Reffai related an experience about the practice of placing small sums of money into boxes at roadside places of worship—mosques, temples or churches—for safe passage. These acts are not unique to Muslims, but are followed by Christians, Buddhists and Hindus. The main arterial roads of the island leading from Colombo to Kandy in the central hills, from Kandy to the Northern city of Jaffna, and from Colombo to the Southern port city of Galle, have several such places of worship at which travelers routinely stopped to make offerings.

Reffai mobilized several elements of her reformist logic in this instance: she called for the investigation of intentions, to have acts of charity be meaningful and not ritualistic gestures that require repetition and not thought, and for supplications (dua) to be done according to prescribed rules. These shared practices were also part of ‘blind following’ that most Muslims were raised with, as opposed to a form of worship that was self-conscious.Footnote ²⁸ If you want protection on a journey then you recite the appropriate dua; and if you want to help build a mosque then you give the Alim something for that reason. Most importantly, the task of Da'wa was to get people to think about what they do and wean them away from ‘blind following’. The requirement that rituals be reasonable and be done self-consciously and not ‘blindly’ is an aspect familiar amongst self-conscious piety groups throughout the world—as in the Egyptian Mosque Movement for instanceFootnote ²⁹—and is not of special note. In the Sri Lankan context, these practices were often shared with other religions and their loss, in the name of preventing ‘blind following’, marks yet another arena where the polarization of communities becomes reflected. It is one example of the manner in which groups like Al Muslimaat reference not a local context of shared beliefs—the practice of seeking protection on one's journey through the shared practice of alms at shrines—but rather a global context of reform that devalues local practices as impure. Slowly, ties to local notions of community—those of knowledge and customs shared with ethnic others—are being cast off in favour of orthodoxies common only to selected co-religionists.

A considerable amount of energy is then being expended by groups like Al Muslimaat in transforming the community. The presence of many such groups now makes piety a highly charged arena of community activity among Muslims. The manner in which this newly energized and Islamized community affects the relationships of Muslims to their ethnic others remains a question worth exploring. I regard the cultivation of Islamic religious specificity amongst Muslims—with the personal and community transformation that it has entailed among participants at Al Muslimaat and the many other da'wa groups in the country—as the most substantive indication of a transformative Muslim politics. However, this transformation is one that valorizes and formalizes a pious selfhood in an idiom recognizable to Muslims alone.

The term kafir or infidel—as it functions today to refer to religious others within the everyday language of the newly pious—is an introduction of the piety movement. As Marina Reffai once stated, using terminology identified with Islam was part of a strategy to place Islam at the centre of Muslims' everyday lives. It is an attempt thereby to foreground their Muslimness as the most fundamental defining characteristic amongst a populace that has—as indicated above—a variety of different class linguistic, sectarian and regional allegiances. It is therefore a means of maintaining ethnic exclusivity from religious others as well as one of bolstering uniformity in a context where piety itself is taking many contested forms. The term kafir replaced the more benign term ‘non-Muslim’ as used amongst the middle classes of an earlier time. The emphasis on using assalamu alaikum wrahmathullahu wabarakathuhu instead of ‘hello’; jazakalla khair instead of ‘thank you’; alhamdulillah instead of ‘bless you’; subhanallah instead of ‘Oh My God!’; the calls to refer to time in the terms of the five daily prayers (e.g. after Luhar and not ‘afternoon’, after Magharib and not ‘evening’) is all part of this larger strategy. Reffai constantly and explicitly advocated this change of terminology among those that attended bayans and never failed to refer to religious others as kafirs. The word kafir is powerful in the manner in which it imposes a uniformly homogenizing othering on an obviously heterogeneous mass of persons amongst whom the bulk of the Sri Lankan Muslim population— and especially those in Colombo—conduct their day-to-day activities.

The representation of the ‘kafir’ in the Al Muslimaat bayan speaks to the manner in which an erasure of the others' worth is incorporated into the discourse of how to be a good Muslim.

One day, when Reffai seemed particularly inspired she gave us the following advice,

Reffai's attempt to communicate her own affective experience of piety was impressive. Other than that, the almost dismissive rhetorical reduction of the kafir in the context of her transformative experience is interesting. Reducing the ‘other’—the kafir—to the point of a caricature was a common rhetorical strategy of her bayans. For Muslims in Colombo, interaction with many different ‘others’ was unavoidable. And in many instances, it was more than likely that Muslims' relationships with work colleagues, neighbours and school friends of other ethnicities were of as much significance as the kinship and social relations between Muslims. Therefore, Al Muslimaat bayans attempt to assert the importance of Muslim community over other sorts of community that might be of significance to the Muslims that attend. Reffai's bayans encourage a brand of compassionate superiority through which to maintain the difference. At Al Muslimaat, the kafir was rendered not as the alien and fearful ‘other’, but as the much more benign and less threatening figure of the less blessed, the less fortunate foil to the community of Muslims.

Together with the obvious ‘othering’ through the terminology of ‘kafir’, the intense preoccupation with personal and community piety also adversely affects Muslims' sense of themselves as part of a plural polity that includes persons of other faiths. The intensity of activity demanded of those engaged with the piety groups further endorses the disengagement with the kafir. By filling Muslim participants' imagination and time with many compulsory injunctions, engagement with the ethnic other is rendered minimal. Lists of new injunctions to be followed and the policing of activities to prevent accidental accruing of sin are constantly emphasized. For instance, one bayan discussed the days on which Muslims were forbidden to fast; fasting on the day of the Eid Ul Fitr is prohibited. The question, then, of whether one should fast on the day before the festival, if the day of the festival was ambiguous (due to moon sightings—itself a matter of debate) became a worry.Footnote ³⁰ Then, another preoccupying issue evident in the bayans was that of deciding by what process one learns and memorizes the different duas supplications that have been allotted by Allah for various day-to-day activities. As Reffai once said, ‘Practically for every situation there is a dua: for opening your eyes, for going to the toilet, coming out of the toilet, looking at the mirror, putting on your dress, all these . . . getting out of the house, pain in the back, someone scolding you—a dua. For everything, He has given us a dua’. Further, given the slightly different orientations of the different groups engaged in propagating piety, members of Al Muslimaat, and many Muslims of the Tablighi Jamaat, also became preoccupied with who was following what method and which part of that was correct or wrong, and why. Such issues preoccupied most Muslims having any links to the piety groups and institutionalized social distance from ethnic others. In creating a normative Muslim personhood, ethnic and religious others now hold only the marginal and insignificant place of the ‘kafir’. In this arrangement, extensive everyday engagements with non-Muslim next door neighbours, garbage collectors, water-meter readers, vegetable vendors, trishaw drivers, bus conductors and supermarket attendants were, however briefly, forgotten. For many, due to the time that was now taken up with practicing the new orthodoxy (cf. Huq this volume) interaction with ethnic others was also rendered perfunctory and fleeting. Nowadays interaction between Muslims and ethnic others is limited to supplying instrumentally the needs of everyday life, and does not extend to the qualitative social exchanges of an earlier era. An earlier generation of middle-class Muslims spent time as members of the multiethnic Rotary or Lions clubs; today, such activities are largely replaced by Muslim only gatherings for da'wa work.

While the dehumanizing reduction of the ‘other’ that occurs in the midst of piety groups such as Al Muslimaat is not identical to the othering which is caused by militarization and violence (Haniffa Reference Haniffa2005) it is nevertheless a move which now makes it almost impossible for adherents to consider Muslims' problems as issues which are commonly shared, with themselves understood as part of a common ‘Sri Lankan community’. Da'wa groups like Al Muslimaat consistently emphasize and propagate religious community, referencing a Muslim Umma that lies outside the bounds of the Sri Lankan state. Unfortunately, this emphasis on religious community (that has taken on the same power as language-based nationalism for the Tamil and Sinhala communities) conceives of itself in an idiom that is not recognizable in the terminology of either of the two majoritarian nationalisms. Such an imagining of community—while perhaps inevitable—bodes ill for the future.