ABSTRACT
Religion-centric conflicts are not new. The Crusades were long enough to sow the seeds of Christian-Muslim race for supremacy. The connection appealed to the non-Christian cum non-Islamic world which had its own reasons to subscribe to the idea. The Chinese found it handy to promote its Hanification project by othering the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The Islamophobia of South Asia is historically different from Europe, but varies little in terms of content. In India, it has much to do with Hindu nationalism, which has at least a hundred years of history. But only in its present form has it become virulent. The Islamophobia of Sri Lanka is comparatively new. It can be explained through a binary sociology. In the construction of Sinhala nationalism, besides a focus on Buddhism and the Sinhala language, it was also necessary to find an ‘other’.
