Muslim-Buddhist Contestations and Sufi Shrines in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Sufi shrines in Sri Lanka are vital nodes of Islamic piety and materiality amidst a landscape of Buddhist majoritarianism and ethno-religious violence against Muslim minorities. Contemporary shrine cultures are a generative prism through which to understand this political, social, and religious context. In my ongoing fieldwork, spanning ten years, I have been mapping Sufi shrines to understand both their historical and contemporary developments, especially in relation to saints (awliya). In this paper, I show that though stories of saints via shrines embed the islands’ geography within Muslim cosmological and metaphysical roots and routes, they are also fragile archives due to the island’s ongoing ethno-religious contestations.