The Hon. K. Kader Masthan
Hon. K. Kader Masthan raised concerns over the detention at Customs of around 300,000 Tamil translations of the Holy Qur’an intended for use by Sri Lanka’s Muslim community. He questioned the legal status and authority of the Review Committee appointed to examine the copies, arguing that such a committee should not determine faith-related matters or block scriptures already in common use. He also noted that the same translations are widely accessible through digital platforms and asked the Minister to clarify the Committee’s legality.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Minister, this affects about 2.5 million Muslims living in Sri Lanka. Nearly 300,000 Tamil translations of the Holy Qur’an printed by Baht Al-Qur’an Publishing House have been brought to Sri Lanka. They are similar to the copies currently in use. Even 30 years ago, I used the same edition.
¶ 02 A committee has been appointed to review the Qur’an copies detained at Customs. We ask: what is the legal status of this Review Committee? We need clarity.
¶ 03 The eight members of this Review Committee cannot decide to prevent the Tamil translations of the Holy Qur’an used by 2.5 million Muslims in Sri Lanka from being released into the country. They cannot take our faith-based decisions. You cite the 2019 Easter attacks; but this country faced an even greater war before that. Even then, religious scriptures brought into the country were not subjected to such a Review Committee. Therefore, please state the legality of this Committee.
¶ 04 I also note, youths today can access Qur’an translations via Play Store, App Store, and YouTube—the same translations are available there.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Tuesday, 21 October 2025 ·No. 22635 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
- Permalink
/lk/speeches/29586
Cite as: The Hon. K. Kader Masthan. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 21 October 2025. No. 22635. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/29586