3/24/2023 0 Comments Sharia unveiledStories of Portuguese wine-drinking and merry-making abound in Maldivian historical accounts of their presence. Unlike latter colonial powers like the Dutch and the British, the Portuguese occupiers did not allow Maldivians autonomy in their internal affairs. The first major threat to the new Maldivian way of life came four centuries later, with Portuguese occupation in the 16th Century. From then on King Kalaminja became Sultan Muhammad Ibn Abdullah and Maldives became 100 percent Muslim. Hundreds of years of Buddhism disappeared, allegedly, without trace. A grateful King Kalaminja converted to Islam, and his obedient subjects followed suit. The Arab traveller sealed the bottle and disposed of it into the deep blue sea, banishing it forever. When the demon appeared, the sound of the Qur’an gradually diminished it in size until it was small enough to be put into a bottle. He stayed up all night reciting the Qur’an. A Berber or Persian, who was visiting Maldives at the time, volunteered to go to the demon in place of the chosen virgin one night. In the morning the demon would be gone, and the virgin would be found dead. As the story goes, the demon appeared like a ‘ship of lights’ once a month, demanding virgin girls to be delivered to it at night to a designated location. In their place is a legend, first told orally then formalised as historical fact and included in primary school text books, which depicts Maldivian conversion to Islam as a reaction to the cruel deeds of a sea demon. These have not been made widely accessible to the public. There are, however, historical accounts that dispute the narrative exist in the form of writing on copperplates ( Isdū Lōmāfānu) dating back to the 12th Century. In the Maldives, it is a widely accepted ‘truth’ that the conversion of the Maldives population to Islam was peaceful-people willingly converted with their King. ![]() The spread of Islam along the Silk Route is well documented. Foreign powers were drawn to the Maldives by its location and its abundance of cowry shells, the currency of many. Just as the rise of China and India, and the US foreign policy’s Asia Pivot, have made the Maldives geo-strategically important today, so it was with the ancient Silk Route. The beginning of the end of Maldivian Buddhism came with Arab domination of trade in the Indian Ocean in the 7th Century. While archaeologists like HCP Bell have uncovered Buddhist structures buried underground, ethnologists like Xavier Romero-Frais have traced the origins of much of classical Maldivian cultural, linguistic and traditional traits to the Buddhist era. Just like the history of the Giraavaru people, however, the digging does not have to be too deep to uncover just how ingrained Buddhist ways and culture had been in Maldivian life for years. Successive governments also made sustained and systematic efforts to wipe out all history of the Buddhist community that had long existed in the Maldives until about 900 years ago. It took a concerted, and often inhumane, effort by the government to finally make them conform to the majority’s norm. The Giraavaru people, although now so totally assimilated into Maldivian society as to be indistinguishable from the rest, maintained a variety of their distinct traditions and culture until as late as the 1980s. They practised an ancient form of Hinduism involving Dravidian ritualistic traditions venerating Surya, the Sun god. Some historians have theorised that the first settlers in the Maldives could have emerged as soon as Greco-maritime trade began in the region making it very likely that the first Maldivians were “Prakrit speaking Satavahanas of the Deccan, Tamil speaking Chera, Chola, Pandyas of South India, and Prakrit speaking Sinhalese of Sri Lanka.”Īmong these early Maldivians who predate the arrival of exiled Indian princes were descendants of the Tivaru people of ancient Tamil origin who later came to be known as ‘Giraavaru people’. More recent Maldivian research, A New Light into Maldivian History (1958), traces Maldivian life even further back to the 3rd Century. The ancient Sri Lankan chronicle of The Mahavamsa connects the origins of Maldivian people to the Sinhalese through the story of excommunicated Indian princes from the Kalinga kingdom in the 6th Century. Long forgotten or neglected history books, however, tell us that life in the Maldives-or Maladvipa Dheeva Maari or Dheeva Mahal as it was known in antiquity-began centuries previously. Popular Maldivian history does not go much further back than the 12th Century, when King Dhovemi Kalaminja converted to Islam and ruled that all his subjects must follow suit. ![]() Maldivian women at an Adhaalath-led rally on 23 December 2011.
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