ABSTRACT
Since 1915, sporadic episodes of short-lived violence between Sinhala and Muslim communities have occurred amid prolonged periods of peaceful coexistence. While religion is often perceived to be the driving force behind conflict, it is neither its singular cause, nor is it wholly innocent. Rather, it is the hegemonic influence of Dharmapala’s Sinhala Buddhist ethnonationalist narratives that has racialized national identity in the unequal organization of state-society and human-nature relations. Increasing occurrences of ethnic violence have deepened feelings of vulnerability among Muslims and Sinhalese, particularly after the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019. Continuing reification of Dharmapala’s narrative holds Muslims responsible for the social and economic vulnerabilities of the majority community, which have been exacerbated by the introduction of neoliberal economic policies in 1977 and the crisis of popular legitimacy of the state, despite the fact that they have impacted all faith communities equally. Through specific examples, I demonstrate religiosity’s complicity with injustices in the racialization of collective identity and neoliberal development, which I refer to as hyper-religiosity, and is fundamentally responsible for producing vulnerabilities among all faith communities and their opportunistic political exploits. I therefore argue for emancipating spirituality from racism and capitalism is a necessary precondition to create innovative religious approaches centred on social and ecological justice to combat ethnic violence in Sri Lanka. Creating a culture of peace with justice requires deliberate resistance against injustice as an integral part of personal and collective expressions of religiosity.
