By Mohamed Harees –

On 26 August, under the patronage of President AKD, elaborate arrangements have been made to hold this year’s National Milad-un-Nabi celebration in the Gampaha District, under the theme of “Coexistence, Brotherhood and Unity.” Alongside the main event, the government has allocated Rs. 10 million to develop mosques in the district and organised a “Visit My Mosque” programme inviting people of other faiths to see, for themselves, what happens inside a place many of them may not have entered. On paper, it is exactly the kind of small, deliberate gesture a plural society needs.

Within hours of the announcement, social media in Sri Lanka did what it now reliably does: it turned an act of reconciliation into evidence of conspiracy. Comment sections filled with claims that the funding was proof of creeping “Muslim expansionism,” that the state was underwriting a demographic project rather than a religious commemoration. It is the same rhetorical machinery that, in recent years, has produced rumours of Muslim doctors secretly sterilising Sinhala women and Muslim traders lacing food with contraceptives — stories with no evidentiary basis whatsoever, and yet stories that have repeatedly preceded real violence. This is worth sitting with, because it is the precise inversion of everything the day being commemorated is supposed to represent.

Who Milad-un-Nabi Actually Commemorates

Milad-un-Nabi marks the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (OWBP), and across the Muslim world it is an occasion to reflect not only on doctrine but on biography—on how a man widely reviled and violently opposed for much of his early mission chose, again and again, not to answer cruelty with cruelty. The traditional accounts are worth returning to, because they are not abstractions. They are specific, remembered choices.

When the Prophet travelled to the city of Ta’if seeking support, he was driven out by a mob that pelted him with stones until he bled. Tradition holds that when the angel of the mountains later offered, in effect, to crush the city between two peaks in retribution, he refused, saying he hoped that if not the people themselves, then their descendants would one day come to worship God alone. That is not a minor detail. It is a man given the power of total retaliation, in the immediate aftermath of physical assault, choosing patience and the possibility of future reconciliation instead.

Prophet Muhammad (OWBP)’s enemies in Mecca did not stop at ridicule and boycott. They drove him and his followers out of the city altogether, forcing the migration — the Hijra — that took him to Medina in 622. He arrived there not as a victor but as a refugee taken in by strangers. What he did next is arguably the more remarkable part of the story: rather than consolidating power around his own community alone, he set about uniting Medina’s fractious, often warring Arab tribes into a single polity, and extended that same political bond to the city’s Jewish and Christian communities. The resulting Constitution of Medina — among the earliest written pacts of its kind — bound Muslims, Jews, and other tribes of the city into a shared political community with mutual obligations of defence, explicitly protecting the religious practice of communities that were not his own. It was, in substance, a live-and-let-live covenant negotiated by a man with every reason, after exile and persecution, to trust no one outside his own faith.

Years later, when he returned to Mecca — the city that had exiled him, boycotted his followers, and killed many of them — he did so not as a conqueror exacting vengeance but issuing a general amnesty: “no reproach upon you today,” he is recorded as telling the very people who had persecuted him and his community for over a decade. In his final sermon, he declared that no Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor a white person over a black person, except by conduct and piety — a striking statement of human equality delivered at the height of his authority, when he had every incentive, and by the standards of his era, every social permission, to entrench hierarchy instead.

Prophet Muhammad (OWBP) is arguably the most vilified individual in human history, subjected to relentless mockery, slander, and personal attacks throughout his mission—yet he met every insult with extraordinary grace, patience, and reasoned forbearance rather than retaliation. He also reframed insults with logic and optimism.  His life offers many examples of the Qur’anic injunction to “repel evil with that which is better,” and of transforming enmity into friendship through moral excellence.

These are verified accounts transmitted through Islamic tradition, weighted with the reverence appropriate to a religious commemoration. But whatever one’s own faith or lack of it, the pattern across these episodes is unmistakable: power restrained, injury met with the offer of relationship rather than retribution, and identity — tribal, racial, religious — explicitly refused as grounds for domination. That is the substance behind the theme Sri Lanka has chosen for this year’s commemoration. The question worth asking is whether the society hosting the commemoration is actually practising what it claims to be marking.

A Country That Knows This Story from the Other Side

Sri Lanka does not lack for its own history of communal rupture, and it would be dishonest to discuss this year’s Milad-un-Nabi without naming it plainly. Black July in 1983 saw pogroms against Tamil civilians that helped ignite a war lasting more than a quarter-century. In more recent years, it is the country’s Muslim minority — roughly a tenth of the population — that has repeatedly found itself on the receiving end of engineered fear. In February 2018, a rumour spread on Facebook that thousands of sterilisation pills had been seized from a Muslim pharmacist in Ampara, intended to be slipped into food served to Sinhala customers to undermine Buddhist demographic dominance. There was no truth to it. Riots followed regardless — mosques burned, Muslim-owned shops destroyed, two people killed — and the same unfounded fear resurfaced weeks later in Kandy, with a senior Buddhist monk publicly warning his congregation, “those who ate from these shops will not have children in future.”

The pattern repeated with even greater cruelty after the Easter Sunday bombings of April 2019, when suicide attacks by a Muslim extremist group brutally killed more than 260 people in churches and hotels. In the weeks that followed — while a grieving country was still burying its dead — a newspaper published a front-page story, sourced to anonymous police and hospital contacts that were never produced, alleging a Muslim doctor named Shafi had secretly sterilised 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist women after caesarean deliveries. The claims were, by every subsequent account, entirely unsubstantiated. That did not stop mobs from destroying Muslim homes, shops, and mosques across the Northwestern Province days later, in violence that left at least one person dead and displaced many more. The overwhelming majority of Sri Lanka’s Muslims had nothing whatsoever to do with the bombings; many were themselves horrified by an ideology that had nothing to do with their own faith as they lived it. They were unfairly made to answer collectively regardless.

There is a further, uncomfortable layer to the Easter Sunday story that has only become clearer with time, and it complicates the easy narrative in ways worth stating carefully. A 2023 Channel 4 investigation, and subsequent inquiries by Sri Lanka’s own criminal investigators, have produced serious — and still unproven, still actively contested — allegations that elements within the state’s own intelligence apparatus may have had foreknowledge of, or even facilitated, the attacks, in a climate where a security crisis stood to benefit a particular political camp electorally. In February 2026, Sri Lanka’s former State Intelligence Service chief, retired Major-General Suresh Sallay, was arrested on charges of conspiracy and aiding and abetting the bombings — charges he denies, and which remain to be proven in court. Whatever the investigation ultimately establishes, the mere fact that such an inquiry exists, and has reached the point of arrest, should give pause to anyone tempted toward a simple, communal accounting of who was responsible for that day. Nevertheless, there is much weightage to suggest that past political actors within Sri Lanka’s own establishment need to bear some responsibility for enabling and also failing to prevent this catastrophe; then , directing collective suspicion at an entire religious minority was never justice. It was, at best, a tragic misdirection — and at worst, exactly the kind of scapegoating that lets the actually powerful escape scrutiny.

What the Example Actually Demands

This is where Milad-un-Nabi’s substance becomes more than commemorative sentiment. The Prophet of Islam(OWBP)’s recorded refusal to crush Ta’if, his amnesty at Mecca, his insistence that piety and conduct — not lineage or race — were the only legitimate grounds for standing among people: these were not passive virtues. They were a deliberate, repeated political choice to break cycles of retaliation that every incentive of his time told him to continue. A society that wants to honour that example cannot do so only by funding mosque renovations and holding a ceremony, however genuinely well-intentioned. It has to do the harder thing the Prophet’s own biography models: resist the pull toward collective blame when individuals or factions do harm, investigate wrongdoing wherever it actually lies rather than where it is politically convenient to locate it, and refuse rumour — sterilisation pills, expansionism, whatever the next invented fear turns out to be — the power it keeps being handed.

Sri Lanka has been offered, this year, a genuine opportunity to build bridges between communities that have been told to fear one another by people with something to gain from that fear. Whether it becomes more than a gesture depends on whether the country can do what the great man being commemorated did at Ta’if , at Mecca  and Medina— hold onto the capacity for patience and build cohesive relationships among peoples, precisely when retaliation would be easier, and precisely when someone else profits from making sure it never arrives.

The current government has, at least in its own words, staked a claim on this point. In his address to the first session of the Tenth Parliament, President AKD committed to building national unity by not permitting “the resurgence of divisive racist politics” or any form of religious extremism — an assurance that will only mean something if it survives contact with the next manufactured rumour, the next election cycle, the next moment when stoking communal fear looks politically useful to somebody. Critics are right to withhold full confidence until that test actually comes.

The laudable assurance given by the highest in the land should be followed through and initiatives undertaken to promote an inclusive society. In fact, the underlying instinct the promise gestures toward is not naive, and it is not merely official rhetoric: survey after survey, and the ordinary experience of daily life in Sri Lanka’s mixed neighbourhoods, markets and workplaces, suggests that most Sri Lankans, across every community, want nothing more exotic than to get on with their neighbours in peace. A comparatively small number of politically motivated actors — those who profit, in votes or in power, from a frightened and divided public — keep manufacturing reasons why that should not be possible. Milad-un-Nabi marks the life of this great social reformer who, having handed every justification to hate, chose otherwise and brought hope to a world which again and again refuses to learn apt lessons from history about the ill consequences of hate and bigotry. It is as good an occasion as any to insist that the country’s genuine majority instinct toward coexistence should not keep losing to its most cynical minority.