Dealing with Islamist madrasas: To mainstream or to ban them altogether?
Sri Lanka Guardian
January 01, 2021
Children and youth are the most precious wealth just as much as the most productive resource of a country. They are the most creative, and the most forward looking section of any community.
by Rohana R. Wasala
According to a news item carried in The Island/December 28, 2020, Russian Ambassador in Colombo Yuri Materiy forewarned Sri Lanka’s Minister of Public Security Retired Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekera that extremist Islamic terrorist organizations may channel funds to their Lankan counterparts on the pretext of extending COVID-19 aid. ‘In response the Minister said that after the war a new strategy had been formulated by the then Sri Lankan government to increase the intelligence battalions from 3-7 and deported nearly 160 madrasa scholar leaders who under the guise of religious studies were spreading hate and extremist propaganda’. He also told the Russian
Posted on December 29th, 2020
By Rohana R. Wasala
According
to a news item carried in The Island/December 28, 2020, Russian Ambassador in
Colombo Yuri Materiy forewarned Sri Lanka’s Minister of Public Security Retired
Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekera that extremist Islamic terrorist organizations
may channel funds to their Lankan counterparts on the pretext of extending
COVID-19 aid. ‘In response the Minister said that after the war a new strategy
had been formulated by the then Sri Lankan government to increase the
intelligence battalions from 3-7 and deported nearly 160 madrasa scholar
leaders who under the guise of religious studies were spreading hate and
Colombo, Sri Lanka – Muslims in Sri Lanka are outraged over the forced cremation of a 20-day-old COVID-19 victim last week against the family’s wishes, the latest in more than a dozen such cremations in the Buddhist-majority country since the pandemic erupted.
Ignoring the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidelines which permit both burials and cremations, Sri Lanka in March made cremation mandatory for people who die or are suspected to have died from the coronavirus infection.
On December 9, baby Shaykh was forcibly cremated in a cemetery in Borella, the largest suburb of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo – the youngest among 15 Muslims to be cremated, thereby denying them Islamic funeral rites.