Indian Ocean History for the Age of Non-Alignment: The ‘Moorish Connection’ of North Africa and Sri Lanka

Abstract

Western scholarship on the Indian Ocean rarely takes into account the modern indigenous historiography of the region that emerged in dialogue with European depictions. This article traces the institutional then historiographical development of a Moorish identity in postcolonial Ceylon (from 1972 known as ‘Sri Lanka’), with a particular focus on The Moorish Connection, a history book published by the Moors Islamic Cultural Home to coincide with the 5th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, held in 1976 in Colombo. Like most other colonial and postcolonial Lankan Moors, the author of The Moorish Connection was unable to read the Arabic language of his purported ancestors, forcing him to rely on Orientalist works collected in the library of the Moors Islamic Cultural Home that commissioned his book. This produced a kind of nominative historical illusion whereby, when explored through the library of Orientalism, the English (and formerly Portuguese) name of the Moors germinated into narratives of an ancient ‘Moorish connection’ with distant Tunisia and Morocco. As a contribution to the neglected emic formulations of the Indian Ocean’s past, the article reconstructs the development of this Indian Ocean—and Mediterranean—self-history of the Moors through the colonial then postcolonial periods, culminating in its geopolitical deployment amid the soft power diplomacy of the Non-Aligned Movement and the postcolonial forging of new ‘South-South’ alliances.