Ravana's Kingdom by Justin W. Henry;

Author:Justin W. Henry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Ravana Balaya gained notice in 2013 for staging a 250 kilometer “pilgrimage” from Kataragama to Colombo to present a petition to then President Mahinda Rajapaksa insisting that the government stop spending resources on the certification of Halal meat.21 The group has since then demanded that Muslim refugees from Pakistan be closely monitored by the government,22 advocated a ban on imported Tamil films, threatened to throw eggs at Sri Lankan cricketers defecting to Indian teams,23 and interrupted a number of Christian Evangelical prayer meetings in Polonnaruwa (responding to alleged complaints over pastors converting Buddhists and Hindus in the area).24 The Ravana Balaya’s opposition to cow slaughter on Buddhist humanitarian grounds recapitulates a hot-button issue for Indian Hindu nationalists, with obvious implications for Muslims who eat beef but not pork.25

A principal concern of the Ravana Balaya is the preservation and memorialization of historical sites bearing significance to the Sinhala Buddhist heritage, from their point of view. The most contentious such site at present is Kuragala, a town in the remote hills of the island’s south-central highland, seat of the devotional cult of Muhiyadeen Abdul Qadir al-Jilani (1078–1166). Al-Jilani was a Persian Sufi mystic whom local Muslims believe to have visited Sri Lanka during the twenty-five-year gap in his recorded biography, having spent this time meditating for twelve years in a secluded cave at Kuragala, while looking out a small aperture in the rock toward Mecca. Interest in the site was renewed in the late nineteenth century through the Muslim merchant community of nearby Balangoda, with an open-air mosque—Dafther Jailani—constructed in 1922. On the basis of second-century Brāhmī inscriptions noted in the area, from the 1970s claims began circulating that Dafther Jailani had in fact been built on the ruins of an ancient Buddhist temple, spurring demands that the government step in to intervene against Muslim destruction of a Buddhist archaeological heritage site. Under the authorization of the Archaeological Department, the state’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs proceeded to build a “reconstruction” of a small reliquary mound at the summit of the hill above the cave associated with al-Jilani. The dagoba was left unfinished due to the successful legal intervention of the chief trustee of the Dafther Jailani shrine, H. L. M. Aboosally, at the time Member of Parliament for the Balangoda constituency.26

The campaign to reclaim Kuragala for Sinhala Buddhists intensified again in 2013, when, at a rally in Kandy on March 17, Bodu Bala Sena leader Rev. Galagodatte Gñānissara told the crowd to “get ready to celebrate Wesak [the most important annual Buddhist holiday] at Kuragala!” Supported by the Sinhala Ravaya and Ravana Balaya, the Bodu Bala Sena publicly advocated that Dafther Jailani be dismantled and relocated to the town of Balangoda, thus leaving the disputed premises free for archaeological exploration and, eventually, reclamation as an active Buddhist devotional space.27 The following month, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, at the time Secretary of Defense (currently the nation’s President), intervened ordering the Defense Ministry to clear the Dafther Jailani shrine’s four-acre premises of all buildings except for standing Muslim tombs and the mosque itself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.