Muslims in Sri Lanka are a minority community in a country that has institutionalized the supremacy of the majority as part of its postcolonial nationstate building project. While the majority community itself is not uniform---there are many different Sinhala social and political orientations---they generally concur on the point that minorities should know their social and political place. This dissertation explores the Muslim middle class' response to their social and political marginalization in contemporary Sri Lanka.
The literature on Muslim politics in Sri Lanka posit Muslims as a "good minority" that was adept at adjusting to circumstances, and using the prevalent system to their advantage. This dissertation claims that such an analysis reinforces Muslims' marginalization and argues instead that struggles in the political arena have made many Muslims turn away from any serious engagement with the country's electoral politics. It claims that the success of the piety movement in Sri Lanka, at all levels of class, emerges from a Muslim self-understanding that they are socially and politically marginal to the affairs of the country. It claims that the pious Muslim self that is only minimally concerned with its connections to the Sri Lankan polity, is the result of the search for an ethical self in a beleagured context. This dissertation will thereby show that the local is formative of Muslim piety movements worldwide, and configures their content in significant ways.
This dissertation also posits an earlier form of the ethical self that attempted to address Muslim marginality differently, through participating fully in the modernity that all Sri Lankan middle classes engaged with in the immediate post colonial era. This selfhood currently feels threatened by the piety movement, and attempts to posit an alternative religiosity for Muslims that is less dependent on asserting difference in a tensely plural society such as that of Sri Lanka. This dissertation explores the manner in which middle class Muslims struggled with these two different ways of being a good Muslim while being part of the same community of interaction.
