A Clash On "Kanduri"

By P.K. Balachandran, *Lankan police hunt for Muslim preacher from TN* - Express Buzz/The New Indian Express - India
Monday, August 3, 2009

Colombo: Sri Lankan police are looking for Kovai Ayoob, a controversial Islamic preacher from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.
The hunt assumes significance in the context of a clash on July 24 between fundamentalist Tawheed Jamaath and moderate Sufis in the western coastal town of Beruwela in which two persons were killed.

Immigration Controller P. A. Abeykoon told The Sunday Times that he had asked the police to catch Ayoob. As per Ayoob’s visa he is a tourist, but violating the rules he was propagating, through public speeches, the ideas of the radical Wahabist Tawheed Jamaath in Sri Lanka and creating tension between the fundamentalists and the traditional sufis.

Ayoob’s plan to be present at a religious gathering in Kalmunai in the Eastern Province last Friday was called off because of the police hunt. But his speech for the occasion, delivered over the phone, was broadcast with loudspeakers.

In 2006, another radical Islamic preacher from Tamil Nadu, P. Jainulabdeen, popularly known as PJ, was deported for creating sectarian tension in Colombo. Recently, in Ottamavadi in the eastern province, the moulvi of one sect had the moulvi of another sect abducted.

In Beruwela on July 24, the moulvi of the Tawheed/Wahabi Masjidur Rahman mosque publicly dubbed the moulvi of the Sufi Bukari Thakkiya mosque and his congregation as kafirs (rejectors of Islam) because the latter were holding a “Kanduri” feast in honour of a Muslim saint. In the clash that followed, two persons were killed. More than 130 are currently under detention for rioting.

The Wahabis condemn the deification of human beings, however saintly they might have been. They also consider holding feasts, with music and other forms of merriment, in honour of saints as utterly un-Islamic. However, most Muslims in Sri Lanka, being under the influence of South Indian Islam, believe in the worship of saints and observe their anniversaries with feasts.

Surrender Arms: The DIG of the Eastern Province, Edison Gunatilleke, extended the deadline for the surrender of arms by Muslim militants. He believes that there are about 300 Muslim militants in Sri Lanka, most of them operating in the Eastern Districts of Batticaloa and Amparai.

Police believe that some of these militants have links with Saudi Arabia-inspired young Islamic scholars. They could also be part of the underworld in Colombo and also be working for Muslim political leaders.

[Picture: Beach Resort in Sri Lanka. Photo from http://www.beachresortssrilanka.com/index.html]