From the beach the colour of molten silver, crowned by coconut palms that reached the sky, the preacher watched his jailers slowly recede into the great wash of cerulean that surrounded the northern Alif atoll. For the crime of preaching jihadism, the prominent Islamist ideologue Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed’s long beard had been shaved off, with chilli sauce serving as foam before he was banished to the remote island of Himandhoo. The cleric contemplated the idyll that was to be his prison and began imagining it as another kind of paradise.
Invisible to the gaze of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s grim autocracy in Malé, Fareed inspired the island’s residents to build a state modelled on the Prophet Muhammad’s proto-state in Medina, like the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan.
The men, journalist Michael Van Es recorded, “grew their beards and hair, took to wearing loose robes and pyjamas, and crowned their heads with Arab-style head-cloths”. “Women were wrapped up in black robes. Goats were imported, and fishermen gave up their vocation to become shepherds.”
Goats do not do well on Indian Ocean islands—but when they died, the story goes, Fareed’s Middle East financiers just sent more.
This week—as three deputy ministers in Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s Islamist-leaning government were suspended for making insulting remarks about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—New Delhi has been discovering the depth of hatred nursed by the Maldives’ religious Right against their country.
Long before President Muizzu rode to power promising to evict India’s small military presence in the Maldives—including Dorniers involved used for medical evacuation missions from remote islands—protestors had stormed a yoga event in Malé, claiming it was anti-Islam. Former President Mohamed Nasheed was targeted for assassination by jihadists claiming he was an apostate, and critics of harsh punishments for blasphemy and adultery were threatened with violence.
The effort to evict India is, thus, part of a larger campaign of religious reaction. Laws prohibiting Christmas celebrations on islands inhabited by residents were strictly enforced after President Muizzu took office. The new president has promised to place Islam at the core of governance.
Islands of identities
Long a crossroads for trade across the Indian Ocean, Maldives’ traditional culture had relatively relaxed attitudes to personal freedoms. In the 14th century, the traveller and cleric Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta wrote he had “commanded the women to wear clothes,” but “could not get it done.” Though Battuta introduced punishments like the amputation of thieves’ hands, he also recorded that practices like temporary marriages with visiting sailors remained entrenched.
Following the end of its existence as a British colonial protectorate, the Maldives remained an authoritarian state, ruled by King Muhammad Fareed Didi until 1968, followed by President Ibrahim Nasir for the next 10 years, and then Gayoom.
Educated at the al-Azhar seminary in Egypt, Gayoom legitimised his authoritarian rule by introducing a process of state-controlled Islamisation, historian Mehwish Hafeez has recorded. Gayoom cast the Maldives as an Islamic state, with capital punishment for offences ranging from apostasy to adultery.
The regime’s opponents on the religious Right, though, used the same language to discredit his rule. In December 1999, critics of Gayoom charged that millennium celebrations were part of a Christian missionary plot. Posters praising jihadists began to appear on remote islands after 9/11. In 2001, when US authorities arrested Maldivian national Ibrahim Fauzee in Karachi, it became clear al-Qaeda had been recruiting through networks on the islands.
In a 2010 letter recovered from slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 architect noted his organisation included “a number of brothers from the Maldives Islands.”
Fourteen hundred Maldivians, former police commissioner Mohamed Hameed said in 2019, are estimated to be committed to jihadist ideology —“to the point where they would not hesitate to take the life of the person next to them”. According to Hameed, some 423 Maldivians sought to join the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq, with 173 succeeding in doing so. In addition, Hameed said, hundreds more travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Also read: Maldivian ministers crossed a red line by insulting Modi. They must apologise and be sacked
A tsunami of violence
Following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which claimed several hundred lives, a millenarian religious frenzy washed over the islands. “Preachers began touring the islands, armed with cash from Islamic charities who had arrived from Pakistan and the Middle East,” writer Yameen Rasheed, himself later assassinated by jihadists, told me. “Their message was simple: Maldivians were paying for their sins, and must atone to avoid Allah’s wrath.”
Local pro-Islamist communities illegally married underage girls, and refused to vaccinate their children or send them to school. Efforts to stamp out the all-enveloping buruga, or veil, failed.
In early 2012, mobs destroyed an ancient head of the Buddha at a Malé museum. Ironically, the head was only part of the statue to survive terrified villagers on the island of Thodoo, who attacked it soon after it was discovered by archaeologists in 1959, believing it to be a demonic totem.
Terrorism also surfaced. In 2007, the Himandhoo exile Sheikh Fareed’s students Mohamed Sobab, Moosa Inaz and Ahmed Naseer bombed Chinese tourists visiting Malé’s Sultan Park—mistaking them to be Japanese, investigators later found.
The previous year, in 2006, Maldives national Ali Jaleel became the first citizen of the country to become a suicide-attacker, dying in a strike on the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Ali Assham, a Maldives national alleged to have been involved with the Lashkar-e-Taiba network and accused of attacking the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 2005, was deported from Sri Lanka to Maldives. Despite Indian demands, he was never prosecuted.
Mohammed Faseehu, from the Laam atoll island of Dhanbidhoo, and Shifahu Abdul Wahid of the Dhiffushi island in the Kaaf atoll, were killed fighting Indian troops in Kashmir in 2007.
The jihadists systematically targeted secular writers and activists, undermining efforts at liberal constitutional reform with violence.
Also read: Chinese op-ed slams India on ties with Maldives
A new Maldives
Like elsewhere in the world, the success of jihadism came in the context of a deepening cultural crisis among young people. Even though the Maldives is an upper-middle income country, its tourism and fisheries industries did not generate jobs for a new generation of youth. The social consequences—among them drugs, gang violence, and high divorce rates—created a prison population vulnerable to proselytisation by the religious reactionaries with whom they found themselves sharing cells.
The pop star Hassan Shifazee famously dumped his music career and turned to neoconservative Islam after successive nights of dreams that he was fighting alongside the Prophet. In 2014, Shifazee died fighting with al-Qaeda near Areeha, in Syria. The former pop star’s wife Mariam and two sons, four-year-old Nuh bin Hassan and two-year-old Umar bin Hassan, are suspected to have been killed.
Forty-eight per cent of the Maldivians who travelled to fight jihad overseas had criminal records and 39 per cent were members of Malé’s criminal gangs, according to former police commissioner Hameed. The Islamist brotherhoods they found in prison may have replaced the sense of community missing in their urban milieu, and given a sense of redemption for their past lives.
Education, ironically, contributed to the problem. A Class IX Islamic studies textbook told students, “performing jihad against people that obstruct the religion” is an obligation. It promises that “Islam ruling over the world is very near.” Promising a caliphate, the textbook says: “This is something that the Jews and Christians do not want. It is why they collaborate against Islam even now”.
Anti-Islam politics in India contributed to the radicalisation process, too, often putting the Maldives government in an uncomfortable position. India was cast, by Right-wing politicians, as an enemy of Islam and the Maldives’ distinct identity.
Even though the government of President Nasheed, dislodged by the military, and his successor President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, acknowledged the problem, they proved unable to roll back the Islamist tide. The capture of power by Islamists through democratic means will have profound consequences for New Delhi’s ambitions in the Indian Ocean—but it also takes the Maldives into dangerous, uncharted waters.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)