Sharmila Seyyid: Anti-Islamic Or Radical? Who Am I?
Internationally-known Sri Lankan writer, journalist and social activist Sharmila Seyyid is back in the news again after Easter Sunday bomb attacks.
She returned to Sri Lanka in 2015 after hiding in South India to escape death threats by ISIS-inspired fundamentalists after her comments suggesting the legalizing of prostitution in 2012.
After coming back to Sri Lanka she set up an organisation called Mantra Life. Seyyid has said that “It helps women become economically independent, has a cafe run by a single mothers’ group, and also provides art therapy, yoga, meditation, and inner dance and healing therapeutic training”. It caters mostly to Sinhala women and there are only two Muslims working there including her.
Writing an article to Colombo Telegraph on May 11 titled ‘Anti-Islamic Or Radical? Who Am I?’ she says her multi-welfare social organisation is in trouble. It is not NGO-funded, and the revenue comes from food preparation and yoga classes. She was looking for a place to relocate in a house in the southern coastal town of Wadduwa on a moderate rent. While she was attending to the renovations of the house she was asked to meet the Grama Sevaka and the police, and the former owner of the house who lives abroad asked her to meet the Parish priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit.
The shock of her life awaited in the church, she says in the article. The parish priest summoned her and told her that there could be some opposition from the people in the area as she is a Muslim and suggested that she should move her organization out of Wadduwa.
Seyyid says the fundamentalists in her own religion think she is anti-Muslim and the other communities do not seem to like her just because she is a Muslim.
Her troubles began in 2012
Her troubles began in 2012 when she gave an interview to the Tamil Service of the BBC after the release of her collection of poetry, Sirangu Mullatha Penn (The Woman Who Grew Wings), and when she said that legalising sex work would provide certain protection to women.
Fundamentalists, a section of whom had created carnage in Sri Lanka by bombing churches and hotels on the Easter morning, considered her statement sacrilegious. According to them, the oldest occupation in the world is considered haram (forbidden) in Islam.
Seyyid offered her apologies but the hardliners wanted her to retract her statement which she refused to do. An educational academy she operated with her sister was vandalised and burned down; she was forced to flee the country.
She said, the hate campaign against her cascaded into different dimensions. “Most people thought I was endorsing prostitution. I commented based on my research on ground realities of women in war-affected areas…I found women (and even underage children) who were forced into prostitution by circumstances. Legalisation of sex work will find a solution from the forced human trafficking and help women to seek support against unscrupulous elements.”
She was hounded by fundamentalists for posting her picture on Facebook without a purdah. She says that according to Al-Quran Soorah verse 31 there is no compulsion in Islam to wear a burqa. Islam is not based on dress code or in any sort of identity, she said.
The human rights activist has also said the practice of wearing a head-dress and facial veil is an Arab custom and was brought to other countries as part of commercial ventures. “Our dominating men have been successful in convincing women that these commercial products are a part of Islamic culture and tradition. Islamic women have, therefore, started wearing them as symbols of their identity and also because they fear that refusing to do so would stigmatise them as unchaste, anti-Islamic and even brand them as prostitutes!”
In Sri Lanka a joint-statement has been issued by the Muslim civil society, comprising of over 55 writers, activists, lawyers, journalists and professors. “While we acknowledge that prostitution is prohibited in Islam (as in many other religions), we nevertheless uphold that Seyyid is within her rights and freedoms to express her personal views; and condemn all forms of harassment, intimidation and hatred by vigilante groups and individuals that are justified based on claims to the above”, the statement said.
Seyyid has published two poetry collections. Her novel Ummath exposes the injustices meted out by Tamil nationalists to Muslims who speak the same language, and also critiques the ‘Talibanisation’ of the Muslim community in eastern Sri Lanka.
Both her poetry collections and her novel have received awards from the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers and Artists Association.
While she was living in the conservative village of Ervur in the east, she worked at the Ministry of Cooperatives and Internal Trade and the Eastern Province Ministry of Health, Child Care and Women’s Affairs. After coming back to Sri Lanka she chose to live in Kotte, a suburb of Colombo, where she began Mantra Life.
She has written two poetry collection, Siragu Mallatha Penn (2012), Ovva (2015) and her a novel Ummath (2014) the English translation of which was published by Harper Collins, a rare achievement for a writer of Sri Lankan origins.
A review in Free Press Journal compares Seyyid to writers Taslimia Nasrin and Ayan Hirsi Ali. “Ummath is an honest account of a Tamil Muslim woman who has seen so much,” the review says. “The writer has seen the relentless juggernaut of Sri Lankan Civil War that left the country and community (Ummat) forever scarred”.
The novel which deals with the issue of Muslims forced out of their homes by the LTTE is based on a former woman rebel fighter who is trying to reintegrate into society after the war ended in 2009. Looks like Seyyid’s life is beginning to play like Theivanai’s, one of the three protagonists of her novel, in her attempts to reintegrate into a society fractured by religion and racial tensions. – newstrails.com
