Muslim Fear Psychosis?

Was Sir Razik in the wrong in refusing to intervene?

by Izeth Hussain

(August 21, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Just before I started writing this article I had an email from a usually reliable and well-informed Muslim friend stating that a campaign has been going on trying to turn the Sinhalese Buddhists against the Muslims. In that connection he provided some supporting details, but I don’t want to go into them because what seems to me important is to find out why Sinhalese-Muslim relations are too often troubled. There could be several reasons for that fact, not just Sinhalese racism as many Muslims tend to assume. In this brief article I will comment on two possible reasons: one is the Muslim fear psychosis, and the other is the tendency of Muslims to immure themselves apart from the mainstream of national affairs.

I can provide a very convincing illustration of the Muslim fear psychosis based on what has been told to me by my friend Nawaz A. Rahim. Sometime in the early fifties, he and other devotees who used to go for prayers at the Wellawatte mosque were disturbed by a Buddhist procession which halted in the vicinity and engaged in drumming precisely at the hour of prayer. It was obviously meant as an act of hostility towards the Muslims. I must clarify that in those days there was no loudspeaker call to prayer, nor were traffic problems caused outside mosques, which later became familiar irritants to non-Muslims. What Nawaz and the others were experiencing was therefore entirely unprovoked gratuitous hostility towards the Muslims.

Nawaz and a group of Muslims therefore went to meet Sir Razik Fareed to request him to intervene in the matter. I must explain that at that time Sir Razik had the reputation of being the only Muslim leader who was prepared to speak out on Muslim grievances. The other Muslims with a politically representative capacity were for the most part notorious for their silence on Muslim grievances, which was the consequence of both selfishness and the Muslim fear psychosis. But Sir Razik would have nothing to do with the matter. He held that it was precisely the problem of a Buddhist procession going past a mosque that led to the 1915 anti-Muslim riots. He was factually right about that, but he was deliberately ignoring the context in which those riots took place, about which I cannot go into details here. Suffice it to note that he was clearly displaying the Muslim fear psychosis.

But Nawaz and his fellow devotees were not content. They went to see Dr Colvin R. de Silva who was at that time a Parliamentarian. After listening to them Colvin said something like this, "Nothing is more important than religion in this country," meaning more important politically. That surprised and pleased those Muslims because for most of them Marxism had to be anathematized as a godless creed. He next proceeded to telephone the OIC of the Wellawatte Police Station who happened to be a Malay Muslim by the name of Miskin, and after faulting him for not being aware of the problem, requested him to go to the Buddhist temple in the area and on Colvin’s behalf request the Chief Priest to take action to stop the nuisance. Colvin expected a reply within half an hour and a positive response from the Chief Priest came quickly. Colvin then told those Muslims that if nevertheless the nuisance continued they should come to him, and he would personally lead a mass demonstration to stop the nuisance. Those Muslims decided among themselves that they would attend Colvin’s funeral when it took place. Only Nawaz did so, because the others had passed away or were not in Colombo.

Was Sir Razik in the wrong in refusing to intervene? Many Muslims will still hold that he was quite right because his intervention would have complicated matters whereas the intervention of Colvin, a prominent Sinhalese politician, led to an immediate solution. It is an outlook that still persists widely – how widely I don’t know – as I have found in writing about alleged anti-Muslim racism in cricket etc. Many Muslims believe that I am only aggravating a difficult situation, while others are strongly supportive. The obvious question to be asked is this: if the Muslims themselves fail to speak up on discrimination against them, how can corrective action ever be taken? In indulging their fear psychosis they are not serving their own legitimate interests, nor are they making any contribution to the promotion of ethnic harmony and nation-building. In effect, they are self-declared aliens. It was a realization of that fact that led to the formation of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress in the eighties. It is significant that it quickly established itself as a force to be reckoned with in our national politics, though its performance has been well below potential because of its internal divisions.

I will now provide a very convincing illustration to show that speaking out on anti-Muslim discrimination can have very positive results. From the seventies to part of the nineties there was a widespread perception among Muslims that the press was strongly prejudiced against them, even to the extent that that they were not allowed the right of reply when unfavorable material about the Muslims was published. Some Muslims went to the Press Council and got redress. Siddiqe Ghouse for instance told me that on a decision of the Press Council several of his rejected articles had to be published by a prominent newspaper. After 1994, that is after the return to power of the SLFP, such complaints ceased, or rather they became far less insistent and persistent. There are still complaints, as for instance over a recent superb article which could not find publication. But I believe that anti-Muslim prejudice is not the major factor leading to such complaints. It is rather the constraints imposed on the "free media", here and all over the world, by governments, the advertisers, special interest groups etc.

It may strike many readers as extremely odd that I should make out a case at all to establish the efficacy of speaking out against anti-Muslim discrimination. After all, everyone knows that throughout history and all over the world the underprivileged – such as the blacks, the feminists, the gays, some ethnic minorities – have got their rightful place under the sun only by speaking out against discrimination and campaigning for their legitimate rights. Why have the SL Muslims been allergic to doing so? The reason of course is the Muslim fear psychosis, But that fear psychosis is excessive as it cannot be warranted by the facts. The average Sinhalese may be ethnocentric and have prejudices like every ethnic group under the sun, but he is not innately anti-Muslim and is surely appreciative of the fact that the Muslims stood by the Sinhalese in the struggle against separatism. The crucial fact is this: the Muslims have no claim to a homeland and cannot ever take to separatism, and consequently they can never pose a serious threat to the legitimate interests of the Sinhalese.

We now have to seek an explanation for the excessive fear psychosis. I must add parenthetically at this point that the Sinhalese racist, just like racists everywhere, is nasty, brutish, and almost totally impervious to reason in relating to the Other. But he is in a minority, and the fear psychosis is therefore excessive. I believe that it had its origin in the 1915 riots, but the memory of those riots has largely faded over the decades. By the time of Independence there was a Muslim perception that D.S. Senanayake and other Sinhalese leaders were out to push Sinhalese interests at the expense of the minorities, but at the same time there was a Muslim perception that those leaders were essentially decent, humane, and well-meaning people, and there was a basic confidence that the Muslims could live happily in Sri Lanka in reasonable accommodation with the Sinhalese. But that confidence has been eroding in subsequent decades, mainly I believe because of the root-cause underlying most ethnic problems: the mass aspiration for upward mobility and the struggle for scarce resources. After 1983 a Muslim fear arose as a consequence of assiduously promoted covert propaganda that it would be the turn of the Muslims next. That fear is being revived at the present moment.

But what I am describing above are familiar features of most ethnic problems, which cannot explain the excessive fear psychosis. For that I have to turn to another paradigm: the tendency of Muslims to immure themselves apart from the national mainstream. It is a complex problem requiring another article. In the meanwhile I will refer to a visit paid to me around 1980 by the late Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe to discuss what he saw as the essential Muslim problem. He had extraordinary prescience about the ethnic horror that was to descend on us, and was therefore holding meetings to promote ethnic understanding. He said that he was struck by the fact that Muslim participation in the meetings was of a perfunctory order with no real commitment to the process. A Tamil representative, he said, saw that as an expression of Muslim selfishness, whereas I would see it as an expression of their fear psychosis. Anyway, Bishop Lakshman forecast that the tendency to hold themselves apart would result in the Sinhalese coming to see the Muslims as no different from the Tamils, as people who did not belong to the nation. Retrospectively it seems to me that he was right.

( The writer can be reached at izethhussain@gmail.com )