Muslim-Buddhist Contestations and Sufi Shrines in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Sufi shrines in Sri Lanka are vital nodes of Islamic piety and materiality amidst a landscape of Buddhist majoritarianism and ethno-religious violence against Muslim minorities. Contemporary shrine cultures are a generative prism through which to understand this political, social, and religious context. In my ongoing fieldwork, spanning ten years, I have been mapping Sufi shrines to understand both their historical and contemporary developments, especially in relation to saints (awliya). For instance, tombs to 40 feet long Sufi saints (or giants) dot the island and are believed to be descendants from prophetic times while shrines to women saints draw women from across religious and ethnic communities, such as the Nachia saint in Colombo who disappeared into a cave while being chased by assaulters. Still, some of these shrines are also targets of state and intra-communal violence, due to the pervasive presence of reformist movements (anti-Sufism). One such example is found in the ongoing contestation at Dafther Jailani/Kuragala, a mountainous Sufi hermitage site (with a cave mosque) associated with Abdul Qadir Jilani (d. 1166), which some Buddhists organizations have claimed to be originally a Buddhist hermitage site (McKinley and Xavier 2023). During the Covid-19 lockdown, the state military built structures (stupas, shrines, shops, hotels, roads etc.) and transformed this natural mountainous reserve into a Buddhist pilgrimage and tourist site, while some Muslim communities with anti-Sufi tendencies looked away. So, though stories of saints via shrines embed the islands’ geography within Muslim cosmological and metaphysical roots and routes they are also fragile archives due to the island’s ongoing ethno-religious contestations.