Financial management practices of mosques in Sri Lanka: an observation

In accordance with Islamic conception, the mosque is a centre for community development. It has to play a crucial role in various aspects of Muslim life in Sri Lanka context of Muslim minority. For this, it is required that mosque maintains a healthier financial performance. The purpose of the study is to examine the financial practices of the mosques in Sri Lanka. This study utilises a survey along with in-depth observation and interview to examine the nature of this financial behaviour in Sri Lanka. Results revealed that mosque finance is conservative and simple mostly dominated by the condition of resource scarcity. This study also discovered that mosque needs to maintain financial management strategies to conduct more quality and quantity program and mosque needs to recognize the importance of fundraising activity

Urban theory with an outside

This paper critically engages planetary urbanization’s claim that it generates ‘Urban Theory Without an Outside’. It argues planetary urbanization is part of the broader ideological terrain of urban studies whose textual field reifies the city, the urban and urbanization as objects and processes of analyses through a kind of ‘methodological urbanization’. The paper argues the conceptual and political value of delineating views from outside urban studies and planetary urbanization – in particular from domains like area studies – that unmoor the primacy of the city, the urban and particularly urbanization in understandings of socio-spatial processes across planetary space. It suggests how these perspectives can usefully act as ‘supplements’ indifferent to urban studies, reminding urban studies of the limits of its own forms of knowledge production in relation to socio-spatial process and city formation. To do this, the paper sketches an anti-colonial history of Colombo, Sri Lanka

Dissimulated landscapes: Postcolonial method and the politics of space in southern Sri Lanka

This paper puts forward a broadly postcolonial method for engaging with landscapes in South Asia, in this case southern Sri Lanka. It argues that, as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually. In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka's most famous tropical-modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka's south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of 'art for art's sake', it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape's more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony. Indeed, I show how some of the familiar (Eurocentric) concept-metaphors that we might intuitively bring to a reading of this landscape-namely 'nature', 'religion', and 'subjectivity'-hold at arm's length particular kinds of landscape politics that emerge from differently textualized human relationships with the environment. The paper charts a method responsive to this particular landscape, and by doing so insists on the difficult task of retaining the singularity of landscapes positioned beyond the Euro-American staging grounds of the conceptual debates current within contemporary cultural geography

Utopian urbanism and representational city-ness: On the Dholera before Dholera smart city

This commentary responds to Ayona Datta’s critique of India’s smart city agenda by emphasizing the representational work that urban futures require. In the context of Dholera smart city, I draw attention to the discursive terrains – around city-ness and utopianism in particular – mobilized by the state in order to normalize the inevitability of exclusionary urban planning and imaginations. I suggest these representational fields are key battlegrounds for critical urban geography

The 'City' As Text

This commentary develops a postcolonial critique of urban studies, which it distinguishes and delineates from postcolonial urban studies. To do so it mobilizes tools from postcolonial literary theory, regional and area studies, and an older tradition of thinking in the new cultural geography from which the invocation of ‘the city as text’ stands as a methodological guidepost

'Nature', nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka

Ruhuna, or Yala as it is more commonly known, is Sri Lanka’s most famous national park, attracting hundreds of thousands of nature lovers annually. Included in the wealth of attractions that Ruhuna offers its visitors are transcendent landscape experiences amidst what is popularly considered to be its sacred and premodern ‘nature’. This paper traces the powerful connections between this popular poetics of landscape experience and the creation of racialized difference and political enmity, in the context of a modern nation-state that has only just seen the end of a fiercely contested civil war between a Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Tamil separatists. It suggests that movement through Ruhuna’s space variously fosters senses of belonging, attachment and exclusion in relation to Sri Lankan soil. The paper begins with the history of the reinscription of meaning in this former colonial game reserve. It then proceeds to show how the park’s contemporary and sacred meanings shape experiences in the present, mapping subjects’ bodies with historical, religious and territorial discourses that configure Tamils as ‘invaders’ and ‘interlopers’ in national space that has become Sinhalese and Buddhist by ‘nature’. Ruhuna emerges as a powerful tool whose Sinhala history and Buddhist ‘nature’ are not merely palimpsests of a primordial and premodern antiquity, but map and signify Sri Lanka’s exclusive topographies in the present

Managing islamic organization : some preliminary findings from the mosques in Sri Lanka

The managerial processes are keys to Islamic organizations to determine their direction and mission and plan actions to achieve them. The main purpose of this article is to investigate management practices of the mosques in Sri Lanka as a prime Islamic organization. The research design used mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The interview survey supplemented by the observation was conducted to evaluate management processes of mosques. In addition, unstructured interviews were conducted with selected Muslim professionals to obtain their experiences and explanations of the management components from the management inputs to its outputs (functions)of the mosques. The findings show that the mosques in Sri Lanka are managed in different ways influenced by social and economic factors. However, there are no greater levels of organizational structure and managerial processes that are necessary for trustees to articulate a dynamic mission and achieve it effectively. In considering the findings and discussions, it can be concluded that this study has contributed to the new knowledge on mosque managemen

IN THE SHADOW OF ‘THE CITY’ YET TO COME: Auroville, Developmentalism and the Social Effects of Cityness

This article focuses on the planned community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India, founded in 1968. Building on critical readings of the settlement that have drawn attention to the power imbalance in its relationships with surrounding villages, the article delineates the ways that a geographical imagination of cityness has been a key component of the settlement’s development and the forms of neo-coloniality in which it has been implicated. Drawing on archival and published sources as well as ethnographic research, the article discusses three ways in which the settlement performs a sense of its own ‘cityness-to-come’: first, the architectural discourse and planning rationality central to Auroville’s identity; second, its agonistic public sphere vis-à-vis architecture and planning, and third, its ethos of learning and evolution, and the settlement’s developmental teleology. In so doing, the article shows how ‘the city’ conceived as a textual and spatial promise, as well as a utopian aspiration, works ideologically to constitute the settlement itself, but also to precipitate social effects and uneven power relationships with village communities in this region. To sum up, this article develops an argument about the neo-colonial social work done by ‘the city’ conceived as text

Access to information: experience of undergraduates from two universities of Sri Lanka

The study aims to investigate perceptionsof accessing information byundergraduate students of the Department of Islamic Studies of the University of Peradeniya and South Eastern University of Sri Lanka.Cross sectional survey design was employed in the study. Structured questionnaires were administered among all students of the Department of Islamic Studies of the two departments.Four hundred and thirty nine duly completed questionnaires wereselected and analyzed using descriptivestatistical tools. It is found that the first year and second year students of the University of Peradeniya have experienced major difficulties in language to access information.Among the first year undergraduates, 78% admitted that they could not access information properly due to communication difficulties. Barriers in communication with the staff and technical issues are experienced by 61% of the undergraduates.Apart from the above difficulties, cultural differences appear to be a major barrier in accessing information.Undergraduates from South Eastern University have experienced no difficulty in communication. Only 43% of the University of Peradeniya and 41% of South Eastern University undergraduates are aware of Electronic Resources available in the library. Among the total respondents, 82% of the total population prefer to access information through printed materials.It can be concludedthat majority of the selected students from the University of Peradeniya find difficulties in accessing information due to language barriers, technical issues and cultural differences. Also, the study leads to the conclusion that undergraduates from both universities show less awareness of accessing information through Electronic Information Resources available in the library. On the basis of the findings of the study,providing more training, assisting in their library searches and employing more Tamil speaking employers to foster maximum interaction with ethnically diverse undergraduates in the library is recommended. Payingmore insight to requirements of ethnically diverse undergraduate students in designing library orientation programmes is also strongly suggested.The study provides direction to further research on the theme in qualitative manner to understand the phenomenon in-depth and in detail