THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF ISLAM THREE Edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson With Roger ALLEN, Edith AMBROS, Thomas BAUER, Johann BÜSSOW, Ruth DAVIS, Ahmed EL SHAMSY, Maribel FIERRO, Najam HAIDER, Konrad HIRSCHLER, Nico KAPTEIN, Alexander KNYSH, Corinne LEFÈVRE, Scott LEVI, Roman LOIMEIER, Daniela MENEGHINI, Negin NABAVI, M’hamed OUALDI, D. Fairchild RUGGLES, Ignacio SÁNCHEZ, and Ayman SHIHADEH LEIDEN • BOSTON 2021 maldives 89 Maldives been written in various scripts based on Indic (Eveyla, Dhives Akuru) and Arabic- The Maldives is a central Indian infuenced (Hedi Akuru, Affandi) mod- Ocean archipelago of coral atolls that was els. Contemporary Dhivehi is written in Islamised in the mid-sixth/twelfth century. Thaana, a unique script written from Early sources describe abrupt political and right to left, with nine base symbols for economic transformations as institutional consonants derived from Arabic numeral Buddhism was abolished and mosques words and others derived from modi- built on royal endowments across several fed forms of some Arabic letters (thiki islands during the sixth/twelfth century. jehey thaana), as well as from earlier local Over the centuries that followed, integra- adaptations of an Indic numeral system. tion into trans-regional Muslim circula- Vowels are indicated by marks (fli) based tions of commerce and culture facilitated upon and expanding the Arabic model the consolidation of a strong sense of of arakt (short vowel marks). Dhivehi Islamic identity amongst the population. manuscript traditions include religious Today, citizenship in the modern Republic endowment grants, devotional texts, royal of the Maldives is constitutionally limited genealogies, poetry, correspondence, and to Muslims. legal documents. 1. Early history 3. Advent of Islam and the The archipelago comprises approxi- Islamisation of the islands mately 1,192 islands, of which fewer than The islands were already visible on the two hundred are currently inhabited. horizon of an expanding Muslim world by The earliest history of human migration the third/ninth century and are described to these islands remains unclear, but car- in some of the best-known early geo- bon dates from a few archaeological sites graphical works in Arabic. Akhbr al-n around the country have yielded dates wa-l-Hind (“An account of China and establishing settlements from at least the India”), a composite fourth/tenth-century mid-third century CE, although some text, places the islands within the orbit of islands may have been populated consid- Sarandb (Sri Lanka), the chief island of erably earlier. Archaeological work in the al-DbJt (which may also include the country has discovered and documented Laccadives), but with their own female the material signature of a signifcant ruler. By the mid-fourth/tenth century, period of Buddhism in the islands’ earlier the Arab historian, geographer, and trav- history, with the construction of artifcial eller al-Masd (d. 345/956) noted that mounds at temple and monastery sites on merchants from Siraf and Oman were several islands from at least the mid-fourth active in the Maldives. The primary trade century CE. goods they sought there were ambergris, cowrie shells, and the coir rope used for 2. The Dhivehi language rigging and for the stitching of sewn-hull Dhivehi, the language of the islands’ vessels. In later centuries an extensive inhabitants, forms (together with Sinhala) trade developed in dried fsh, which was the Insular Indo-Aryan subgroup of Indo- shipped as far as Aceh (in northern Suma- European languages and has historically tra) and China [Illustration 1]. 90 maldives Illustration 1. Map of the Maldives. Map courtesy of the Maldives Heritage Survey, R. Michael Feener. Increased integration into the expand- phrasing of these texts implies that the ing maritime Muslim trading networks count of years was, in this case, from after the turn of the second millennium the death of the Prophet, which, work- CE facilitated the conversion of the ing from the traditional dating of 12 islands to Islam. As recounted in the ear- Rab al-Awwal 11, would be 1197–8 liest sources extant, the Islamisation of the CE. In the following year, the loamafaanu Maldives was not only early compared from the nearby island of Dhanbidhoo to that of other places along the Indian informs us that the king continued the Ocean littoral but also strikingly abrupt. campaign of Islamisation on that island Three Dhivehi-language copper-plate in the same way he had done in Isdhoo inscriptions (loamafaanu) from Hadhum- and Gan: abolishing the institutions of mathee (Laamu) atoll detail the new gov- the Buddhist sagha (clergy), demolishing ernmental and economic order ushered in monasteries, destroying religious images, with the conversion of the islands to Islam. confscating their lands, and reallocating Copper plates from Isdhoo and Gan date their endowed sources of revenue to sup- the Islamisation of islands in Laamu atoll port newly constructed mosques. under King Gadanaadheethiya to 582 The dates of this project of Islamisation years after Sri Mahammadu Petmbarun in Hadhummathee (Laamu) presented in (the Prophet) “attained Heaven.” The the three copper plate inscriptions from maldives 91 that atoll—which comprise the earliest in the sultanate. After the Portuguese and most complete texts we have for the interlude, European imperial interventions period—are nearly half a century later were limited in the Maldives. The islands than 548/1153, the date that has become were claimed as a protectorate by the widely established in both international Dutch in the eleventh/seventeenth cen- scholarship and Maldivian national con- tury and by the British at the end of the sciousness for the initial Islamisation of twelfth/eighteenth, but in both cases the the country. This is based upon an eighth/ islands were seen largely as distant exten- fourteenth-century Arabic inscription on sions of their colonies in Ceylon. Neither wood that previously hung in the Friday power established any substantial institu- congregational mosque (Hukuru Miskiyy) tions of colonial governance in Malé, but in Malé. This is probably the inscription in 1887 the sultan signed a treaty with the that the Maghrib traveller Ibn Baa British that ceded authority over foreign (d. 770/1369) describes reading there dur- affairs to the governor in Ceylon. ing his extended stays in the 740s/1340s, where he secured an appointment as q 5. fism and Shfi and claims to have promoted more exten- jurisprudence sive observance of the shara in the coun- Through the tenth/sixteenth and elev- try. In the early ninth/ffteenth century, enth/seventeenth centuries, Islam in the the Ming chronicler Ma Huan remarked Maldives was part of the broader world on the pure and excellent customs and of fsm and Shf jurisprudence that the adherence to religious law by the then linked the shores of the Indian Ocean entirely Muslim population of the islands. world from the Swahili Coast of Africa to the Spice Islands of eastern Indone- 4. European interventions sia. This was dramatically demonstrated With the arrival of the Portuguese in in the career of the Qdir shaykh Sayyid the Indian Ocean at the beginning of Muammad Shams al-Dn from Hamah, the tenth/sixteenth century, the Maldives in Syria, who arrived in the Maldives by became a new site of contestation in way of Aceh in 1097/1686 and advo- broader struggles for economic and politi- cated a reform of the observance of shara cal dominance in the region, involving the before having to retreat to exile in India interventions of the Al RJs of Can- the following year (the Qdiriyya has his- nanore (Kannur), on the Malabar coast of torically been one of the most widespread India (r. 952–99/1545–91) into Maldivian f orders in the Indian Ocean world succession disputes and the reconfgura- and claims a lineage stretching back to tion of trade routes through the Maldives sixth/twelfth-century Baghdad in its from ports along the west coast of India eponymous master, Abd al-Qdir Jln, and as far afeld as the Straits of Melaka. d. 561/1166). He was, however, to return The Portuguese seized Malé in 965/1558 to the Maldives in 1103/1692, whereupon but were expelled ffteen years later by he had himself proclaimed sultan, ruling a campaign led by Bou Muammad only a few months before his death later Takurufnu of Utheemu (d. 993/ 1585), the same year. who was later elected sultan and intro- Shams al-Dn was granted the great duced administrative and military reforms honour of being interred in the Medhu 92 maldives Ziyaaraiy (Central Shrine) just opposite (b. 1937), a graduate of al-Azhar (in the Friday Mosque in Malé. There he Cairo) who opened the country to mod- rests alongside the sixth/twelfth-century ern international Islamic organisations, saint credited with the Islamisation of which eventually channelled into the the islands, identifed by Ibn Baa as Maldives infuences from Islamic reform Ab l-Barakt al-Barbar but, in both movements in Pakistan, Malaysia, and a later inscription and a royal chronicle Saudi Arabia. Towards the end of his from the Maldives, as Ysuf Shams three decades in power, however, Islamists al-Dn al-Tabrz. Lively traditions of constituted a signifcant part of the oppo- ritual observance at such shrines were a sition to his authority, and, over the frst defnitive feature of religious life across two decades of the twenty-frst century, the islands for centuries. While the ruins various movements for dawa and Salaf of many of these structures can be seen religious reform have extended a thor- to this day, such practices have been rap- ough recasting of dominant models of idly abandoned over recent decades. This Islamic thought and practice in the coun- refects a signifcant shift in understand- try.