Muslim Personal Law as contested provision for minority rights of Muslims in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lanka is a multi-religious state with a constitution that provides preferential treatment to Buddhism. Most ethnic Sinhalese (75 %) adhere to Buddhism, while Muslims, considering themselves as an ethnic and religious category, represent about 10 % of Sri Lanka’s population. In this context, Muslims consider religious self-determination as part of political mobilization. The reform of the Muslim Personal Law, legally regulating marriage and divorces and related maintenance of Muslim families in Sri Lanka, showcases such political self-determination within majority-minority dynamics. The reform of this law, which includes discriminatory clauses for Muslim women, involves Muslim organizations, Muslim women’s groups, elitist Muslim women and religious scholars. At the same time, many involved actors attempt to represent community cohesiveness to the majority Sinhalese when discussing the reform of the Muslim Personal Law. Building on ethnographic research between 2017 and 2023, the paper will show that political mobilization around the reform is highly contested and involves different readings of the Muslim Personal Law: religious readings are juxtaposed to human rights discourses. The paper demonstrates that rhetorics are instrumentalized to proliferate either in-group inequality as well as unity as one ethnic Muslim community based on political trajectories.