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Sri Lanka Muslims
Muslims, who make up approximately 7 percent of the
population, comprise a group of minorities practicing the
religion of Islam. As in the case of the other ethnic groups, the
Muslims have their own separate sites of worship, religious and
cultural heroes, social circles, and even languages. The Muslim
community is divided into three main sections--the Sri Lankan
Moors, the Indian Moors, and the Malays, each with its own
history and traditions.
The Sri Lankan Moors make up 93 percent of the Muslim
population and 7 percent of the total population of the country
(1,046,926 people in 1981). They trace their ancestry to Arab
traders who moved to southern India and Sri Lanka some time
between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, adopted the Tamil
language that was the common language of Indian Ocean trade, and
settled permanently in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Moors lived
primarily in coastal trading and agricultural communities,
preserving their Islamic cultural heritage while adopting many
southern Asian customs. During the period of Portuguese
colonization, the Moors suffered from persecution, and many moved
to the Central Highlands, where their descendants remain. The
language of the Sri Lankan Moors is Tamil, or a type of "Arabic
Tamil" that contains a large number of Arabic words. On the east
coast, their family lines are traced through women, as in kinship
systems of the southwest Indian state of Kerala, but they govern
themselves through Islamic law
(see Sri Lanka - Family;
Sri Lanka - Islam
, this ch.).
The Indian Moors are Muslims who trace their origins to
immigrants searching for business opportunities during the
colonial period. Some of these people came to the country as far
back as Portuguese times; others arrived during the British
period from various parts of India. The Memon, originally from
Sind (in modern Pakistan), first arrived in 1870; in the 1980s
they numbered only about 3,000. The Bohra and the Khoja came from
northwestern India (Gujarat State) after 1880; in the 1980s they
collectively numbered fewer than 2,000. These groups tended to
retain their own places of worship and the languages of their
ancestral homelands.
The Malays originated in Southeast Asia. Their ancestors came
to the country when both Sri Lanka and Indonesia were colonies of
the Dutch. Most of the early Malay immigrants were soldiers,
posted by the Dutch colonial administration to Sri Lanka, who
decided to settle on the island. Other immigrants were convicts
or members of noble houses from Indonesia who were exiled to Sri
Lanka and who never left. The main source of a continuing Malay
identity is their common Malay language (bahasa
melayu), which includes numerous words absorbed from
Sinhalese and Tamil, and is spoken at home. In the 1980s, the
Malays comprised about 5 percent of the Muslim population in Sri
Lanka.
Data as of October 1988
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