Muslims and ban on cattle slaughter

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”-Mahatma Gandhi

Sri Lanka has an ancient culture. We have been told about vehicles that flew, birds that announced the birth of gods: a wonderment of unexpected pleasures. Our myths speak of a land in which all living things flourished, where humans communicated directly with animals and people had learnt that it is the purpose of life to engender more life. As Creation is the supreme force in the universe, the beneficence of life and its comprehension through love, is to facilitate as many expressions of life as possible. We have an ancient tradition that a man may become a god by emulating the qualities of the divine. As the sun is the source of life on the planet, our forefathers recognized it as the fertility symbol nonpareil. As worshippers of Surya, our behaviour would be arya, as elevated and exalted as the source.

Every life is a unique personal undertaking and the only thing an individual can know is itself. Every other knowing is external and it is what Huxley meant when he said we were each an island universe with every experience only conveyable third hand. No one actually can know what it is like to be anyone else. As such, enlightened self-interest is the only personal inquiry we can make, with the all- important caveat that in our self-discovery we may not interfere with anything else’s self-discovery.

Hence ahimsa comes from himsa, and is a crucial aspect of the great or common consensus (Mahasammata) that if Man lives in Dhamma, the land, people, flora and fauna would be safe. This recognition of the sacred nature of life made it incumbent that we live our lives disturbing other living systems as little as possible.

The book, Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives, ed. Chandra Richard De Silva, Ashgate, 2009, highlights that there was no slaughter of cattle in Lanka prior to colonisation:

“… In this country there are many false beliefs sown by the devil, and to eradicate them there is a need for much time and trouble. I mention those that I remember, for I do not know them all. There is a class of gentiles who do not kill any living creature, not even the most poisonous snakes, nor any insect or worm whatever. They do not eat anything that has been killed, whether it is meat or fish. They do not eat bread, however hungry or needy they might be. Their food is made up of the leaves of a certain creeper (betel leaves) that climbs other trees like ivy. These leaves are smeared with the same kind of lime that they use for whitewashing their houses…

“…There is another class of people who do not kill any living creatures, except those they themselves need for their food, such as rats and salamanders and lizards of the forests; for they do not eat beef or the flesh of other animals. There is another class of people who kill fish, and this is only the caste they call paravas. These do not kill any poisonous insect they may find in their house. Yet all these people, if they choose and are able to do so, kill men, and their doctrine does not forbid it. There is another class of people that eats fowl and wild boar and deer, but does not eat the flesh of cows, since they believe their souls enter into cows after death; they will never kill a cow and eat its flesh…”

In the Lanka of Mahasammata, one’s duty to one’s village outweighed any perceived duty to oneself. One must make one’s contribution to the society in which one lived. A vocational caste system handed down secrets to successive generations, in a system where one’s knowledge was one’s wealth, with the Divine as the Supreme Master of one’s craft, one performs one’s duty with an aim to perfection in union of mind and spirit so each attempt brought one closer to the Ultimate Prize. In a land ruled by the Unseen King, in both metaphor and practise, the King embodies Mahasammata and sets the standard for the people. The people know that if they live in dhamma, Dhamma would protect them, and the land would be safe. In this milieu of trust and obligation, anyone who broke faith and violated trust was banished from the village. This was the origin of the ahikuntakayas. At this time beef-eating was punished by banishment from one’s caste and village, as edicts stemming from the advent of the Portuguese indicate.

My teacher, farmer Mudiyanse Tennekoon, believed that only a return to Mahasammata could rescue our nation, as it had become clear that the fate of Lanka was drenched in a post-colonial experience that threatened to smother us in the fire of unrighteousness. It seemed to him that the wisdom of our ancients, which vouchsafed consensus as the legitimate form of governance, had been jettisoned for a system based in dissent and acrimonious debate. Further, it seemed that certain elemental forces of globalist origin were cutting swathes to the interior of our country, such that the viability of the essential core of our island’s life was at risk. If the government continues implementing the various sanctions of the globalist agendas, our subsistence farmers are at great risk, and with them the lifeblood of our country and culture. A re-establishment of ahimsa was a necessary step for the restoration of Mahasammata.

As vouchsafed by Arabi Veediya in Anuradhapura, Arabs have been coming to Lanka long before the birth of the Prophet. Though modern Muslims sometimes scoff at customs and rituals of the oral tradition, and seek their answers only in texts, Kataragama has long been associated in Islamic esoterism with El Khidr, the Green Man of Islam. The idea of El Khidr also predates Islam, as he is commonly held to be the person whom Moses met at the Juncture of two rivers and who instructed him in the Tradition. Consequently, if the Muslims of Sri Lanka were doing something so abhorrent to the culture of the island, when the Portuguese came looking for them, the Sinhala kings would not have hidden them but handed them over to the Portuguese.

On Sep 12, 2014, with some friends we began a campaign to end cattle-slaughter in Sri Lanka, and while I went around the country collecting signatures for a petition to parliament one question I was asked over and over again was this: “What did I expect the reaction of the Muslims of Sri Lanka to be to my campaign?” I replied that many people I had spoken to, some in my own family, had been against this campaign, and many others were wholeheartedly supportive of me, all urged utmost caution. I said that I had been able to make my immediate family aware that this was not a scurrilous exercise, but a restoration of ahimsa that colonialism had destroyed. I appealed to the generally accepted personality of the Prophet, as one who loved amity and good manners, and who, as Muslim tradition would have it, was not a person to hurt the feelings or sensibilities of others. In this I spoke to the spirit of the Revelation, which to me is as much about equity and social justice as it is about transcendental reality.

There is no doubt that Muslims are not barred by tradition, custom or revelation from eating beef; however, it is also plain that a claim to a democratic right to kill is a symptom of our postcolonial dystopia. Mahasammata is nothing less than an exhortation to behave well, to have good manners. And good manners, as my late wife Jeanne pointed out, is never more than consideration for other people and making them comfortable. As such, I believe that as a Sri Lankan Muslim, it is incumbent on me to respect the mores of my compatriots and to live in a way that will lead to greater social cohesion, amity and unity of purpose. Perhaps, Muslims should ask themselves why pre-colonial Sri Lanka fitted every description of Paradise in the Qur’an.

FEISAL MANSOOR

Convenor, Saradiel Movement

Saradiel.com