#eelam musllim

[thozhar]

The Muslim writers and poets too were affected by this trend to varying degrees. Prominent writers like Ilankeeran, H. M. P. Mohideen and Abudalib Abdul Latheef who started writing in the 1950s had close associations with the island’s communist parties, as editors of their Tamil journals. When the communist movement ideologically broke into two camps in the mid ’60s, Ilankeeran and Mohideen aligned themselves with the Maoist wing while Latheef remained with the Moscowwing. All had affiliations with the Progressive Writers’ Association. Most of the Muslim writers and poets of the younger generation also reflected this trend. Maruthoor Koththan, Maruthoor Gani, and several others from the East had sympathies with Maoist ideology and wrote poems and short stories on the theme of class contradiction and social change. I too wrote poetry and other works of this nature during this period.  A. Iqbal, Fazeel Kariyapper and S. L. M. Haneefa from the same region, M.H.M. Shams and Dikwallai Kamal from the South, M.L.M. Mansoor and Pannamathu Kavirayar from the Central Province wrote poems or short stories on social themes under the influence of socialist ideology. Dr. Badiuddin Mahmud, a prominent Muslim political leader and one of the founding members of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), who hailed from the South and who was left leaning, organized a new political party, the Islamic Socialist Front, putting forward the new concept of Islamic Socialism in the early 1970s to draw the attention of the younger generation of the Muslim left in order to get their support for the SLFP. His party also published a Tamil weekly Insaan and most of the writers of the younger generation contributed to it. Many of these poets and writers tried to maintain a Muslim identity with left political ideology, not strictly Marxist, although a few of them identified themselves as secular writers leaning towards Marxism. This trend of active participation of the Muslim left in politics and literature almost came to an end when Muslim identity politics reached a peak in the 1980s because of two distinct political developments, namely, the emergence of separatist politics with the Tamil militant movements in the North and East, and the emergence in West Asia of Islamism as a global political force contesting Western imperial power and domination. The Sri Lankan Muslim left had to choose either to involve itself in Muslim ethnic politics or to remain silent.

— Ethnic Conflict And Literary Perception: Tamil Poetry In Post-Colonial Sri Lanka