 Their view holds that the Sri Lankan Moors were simply Tamil converts to Islam.The claim that the Moors were the progeny of the original Arab settlers might hold good for a few families, but not for the entire bulk of the community.According to some Tamil nationalists, the concept of Arab descent among Tamil-speaking Moors was invented just to keep the community away from the Tamils, and this 'separate identity' intended to check the latter's demand for the separate state Tamil Eelam and to flare up hostilities between the two groups in the broader Tamil-Sinhalese conflict.