Comprising 7 % of total population of Sri Lanka, Muslims and their Islamic culture have been the integral part of Sri Lankan society for thousand years. History records that Arab traders from the Middle East visited the southern part of Sri Lanka for their business and later settled in the island. The Muslim community in Sri Lanka came to its dominant growth by the 10th century A.D. Muslims in Sri Lanka has preserved the Islam doctrines derived from Arabia while adapting some social conditions of South Asia.

The religion of Islam was founded in the seventh century A.D. by the Prophet Muhammad who experienced a series of messages from God in Mecca, a trading and religious center of Arabia. The word islam in Arabic means "submission" or "surrender"; that means people who are adherent to Islam summit to the law and the will of the only one God, Allah.

According to Islam, the God is eternal, and he endowed both men and women with immortal souls. All human beings have only one life, and at death, their souls go to either heaven or hell depending on their behavior on earth. The decent behaviors for ascending heaven were determined by the God and were sent through his messengers (Prophet) who in turn revealed the divine will for people to follow. The religious text of Qur'an is believed to be the revelations of the God transmitted through Prophet Muhammad. The Qur'an is then not only religious text rich of theology and moral system, but at the same time includes a body of laws and customs for Muslims to follow.

All Muslims share a belief in the five pillars of Islam which are the basic duties: the recitation and acceptance of the Creed (Shahada) (by saying "there is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is His Prophet"; daily prayer (five times a day ideally); paying ritual alms (Zakat or Zakah); observing the fast of Ramadan; and making the pilgrimage to Mecca (Haj).

By the fifteenth century, Arab traders dominated the trade routes through the Indian Ocean and South East Asia. Many of them reached Sri Lanka, and decided to settle down in the Island, making them detaching from Islamic culture in the Middle East, their homeland. Although they still preserved the basic doctrines and Islamic law, they also adopted some local social customs, particularly language. Instead of speaking Arabic language, they adopted Tamil as their spoken language. Probably, Tamil was the language used widely in business and trade along the southern coast of India and northern coast of Sri Lanka during that time; they abandoned their own language for the matter of their trades. Hence, Muslims in Sri Lanka were not part of early Islamic society in the Arabian Peninsula, but developed in its own way under the different circumstances.

The community of Muslim traders was dramatically persecuted when the Portuguese took control over the Island in the sixteenth century. Many of them had to relocate from the southwest coast to the Central Highlands or the east coast, and still retained their religious identity separately from the other ethnic groups. The growing ethnic consciousness during the last two centuries resulted in the Islamic revivalism which appealed for their identity. The movement included an interest in the Arabic roots of the community as the basis of understanding the Qur'an and the separate schools for Muslim children. There emerged occasional agitation among Muslims against the government's attempts to regulate Muslim marriage and inheritance. So far, the conflict of Muslims and the other ethnic groups is still intractable.

With the arrival of Arab traders in the 8th century, Islam began to flourish in Sri Lanka. The first people to profess the Islamic faith were Arab merchants and their native wives, whom they married after converting to Islam. By the 15th century, Arab traders had controlled much of the trade on the Indian Ocean, including that of Sri Lanka's. Many of them settled down on the island in large numbers, encouraging the spread of Islam. However, when the Portuguese arrived during the 16th century, many of their descendants- the Sri Lankan Moors- were persecuted, thus forcing them to migrate to the Central Highlands and to the east coast of the country.

During 18th and 19th centuries, Javanese and Malaysian Muslims bought over by the Dutch and British rulers contributed to the growing Muslim population in Sri Lanka. Their descendants, now the Sri Lankan Malays, adapted several Sri Lankan Moor Islamic traditions while also contributing their unique cultural Islamic practices to other Muslim groups on the Island.

The arrival of Muslims from India during the 19th and 20th centuries has also contributed to the growth of Islam in Sri Lanka. Most notably, Pakistani and South Indian Muslims have introduced Shia Islam and the Hanafi school of thought into Sri Lanka, however although most Muslims on the island still adhere to the traditional practices of Sunni Islam.

In modern times, Muslims in Sri Lanka are handled by the Muslim Religious and Cultural Affairs Department, which was established in the 1980s to prevent the continual isolation of the Muslim community from the rest of Sri Lanka. Today, about 8% of Sri Lankans adhere to Islam; mostly from the Moor and Malay ethnic communities on the island with smaller numbers of converts from other ethnicities

Sri Lankan Moors

The Sri Lankan Moors make up almost 95% of the Muslim population and 7.2% of the total population of the country. They are predominantly Sunni Muslims of Shafi School. The Moors trace their ancestry to Arab traders who settled in Sri Lanka some time between the eighth and fifteenth centuries. The Arabic language brought by the early merchants is no longer spoken, though various Arabic words and phrases are still employed in daily usage. Until the recent past, the Moors employed Arwi as their mother tongue, though this is also extinct as a spoken language. Currently, the Moors in the east of Sri Lanka use Tamil as their primary language which includes many loan words from Arabic. Moors in the west coast are fluent in Sinhala, an Indo-European language spoken by the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka, but use English within the community. Thus, the Moors are a multilingual ethnic and religious group, lacking linguistic cohesion.

The Sri Lankan Moors lived primarily in coastal trading and agricultural communities, preserving their Islamic cultural heritage while adopting many Southern Asian customs. During the period of Portuguese colonization, the Moors suffered from persecution, and many moved to the Central Highlands, where their descendants remain.