The Deconstruction of Dafther Jailani: Muslim and Buddhist Contests of Original History in Sri Lanka

Although quests for religious origins have been theoretically deconstructed by scholars, discourse about religion in much of the public sphere remains enamored with originality, especially to bolster claims among groups competing over shared spaces. At the Sri Lankan Sufi shrine of Dafther Jailani in Kuragala, an obsession with origins has dramatically reorganized the space, used to justify the physical deconstruction of Muslim pilgrim buildings by the Sri Lankan military. Dafther Jailani also faces other threats from arbiters of originality, including orthodox Sunni Muslims who claim to be stewards of authentic Islam, alongside the Buddhist nationalists who seek to make Kuragala a protected archeological site synonymous with non-Muslim space. Both Buddhists and Muslims have mixed mythical narratives and empirical evidence to advance their claims, and even artifacts from human prehistory at Kuragala are appropriated to provide a new secular excuse for extremist Buddhists to enact an absence of Muslims. Such debates over origins are shown to be a zero-sum game, as one group must lose for another to gain. Yet these gains are ultimately hollow, as mutually valued spaces are emptied of living history to better resemble an ideal past. To combat such erasures, historians of religion must strike a balance between the empirical and ethical, critiquing not only factual errors in these arguments, but also correct information being used incorrectly, to argue in the normative terms of the religious actors themselves that there is much lost and little gained in primordial preoccupations.