THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF ISLAM
THREE
Edited byKate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe,
John Nawas, and Everett Rowson
WithRoger 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, andAyman SHIHADEH

LEIDEN • BOSTON2021

maldives

Maldives
The Maldives is a central IndianOcean archipelago of coral atolls that wasIslamised in the mid-sixth/twelfth century.
Early sources describe abrupt political andeconomic transformations as institutional
Buddhism was abolished and mosquesbuilt on royal endowments across several
islands during the sixth/twelfth century.
Over the centuries that followed, integration into trans-regional Muslim circulations of commerce and culture facilitatedthe consolidation of a strong sense ofIslamic identity amongst the population.
Today, citizenship in the modern Republicof the Maldives is constitutionally limitedto Muslims.
1. Ea rly history
The archipelago comprises approximately 1,192 islands, of which fewer than
two hundred are currently inhabited.
The earliest history of human migration
to these islands remains unclear, but carbon dates from a few archaeological sitesaround the country have yielded dates
establishing settlements from at least the
mid-third century CE, although someislands may have been populated considerably earlier. Archaeological work in thecountry has discovered and documented
the material signature of a signif㘶cantperiod of Buddhism in the islands’ earlier
history, with the construction of artif㘶cialmounds at temple and monastery sites on
several islands from at least the mid-fourth
century CE.
2. T h e Dhiv ehi la ngua ge
Dhivehi, the language of the islands’
inhabitants, forms (together with Sinhala)
the Insular Indo-Aryan subgroup of IndoEuropean languages and has historically89

been written in various scripts based on
Indic (Eveyla, Dhives Akuru) and Arabicinf㘶uenced (Hedi Akuru, Affandi) models. Contemporary Dhivehi is written inThaana, a unique script written fromright to left, with nine base symbols forconsonants derived from Arabic numeral
words and others derived from modif㘶ed forms of some Arabic letters (thikijehey thaana), as well as from earlier local
adaptations of an Indic numeral system.
Vowels are indicated by marks (f㘶li) based
upon and expanding the Arabic modelof arakÊt (short vowel marks). Dhivehi
manuscript traditions include religious
endowment grants, devotional texts, royalgenealogies, poetry, correspondence, andlegal documents.
3. Adv e n t o f I s la m a n d th e
I s la m i sa t io n o f t h e i sla n ds
The islands were already visible on thehorizon of an expanding Muslim world by
the third/ninth century and are describedin some of the best-known early geographical works in Arabic. AkhbÊr al-ÂÒn
wa-l-Hind (“An account of China andIndia”), a composite fourth/tenth-century
text, places the islands within the orbit ofSarandÒb (Sri Lanka), the chief island ofal-DÒbÊjÊt (which may also include theLaccadives), but with their own female
ruler. By the mid-fourth/tenth century,
the Arab historian, geographer, and traveller al-Mas{ÖdÒ (d. 345/956) noted thatmerchants from Siraf and Oman wereactive in the Maldives. The primary trade
goods they sought there were ambergris,cowrie shells, and the coir rope used for
rigging and for the stitching of sewn-hullvessels. In later centuries an extensive
trade developed in dried f㘶sh, which wasshipped as far as Aceh (in northern Sumatra) 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 expanding maritime Muslim trading networks
after the turn of the second millennium
CE facilitated the conversion of theislands to Islam. As recounted in the earliest sources extant, the Islamisation of theMaldives was not only early comparedto that of other places along the Indian
Ocean littoral but also strikingly abrupt.
Three Dhivehi-language copper-plate
inscriptions (loamafaanu) from Hadhummathee (Laamu) atoll detail the new governmental and economic order ushered inwith the conversion of the islands to Islam.
Copper plates from Isdhoo and Gan datethe Islamisation of islands in Laamu atoll
under King Gadanaadheethiya to 582
years after Sri Mahammadu PetÊmbarun(the Prophet) “attained Heaven.” Thephrasing of these texts implies that thecount of years was, in this case, fromthe death of the Prophet, which, working from the traditional dating of 12
RabÒ{ al-Awwal 11, would be 1197–8
CE. In the following year, the loamafaanu
from the nearby island of Dhanbidhoo
informs us that the king continued thecampaign of Islamisation on that islandin the same way he had done in Isdhooand Gan: abolishing the institutions of
the Buddhist sa±gha (clergy), demolishingmonasteries, destroying religious images,
conf㘶scating their lands, and reallocating
their endowed sources of revenue to support newly constructed mosques.
The dates of this project of Islamisationin Hadhummathee (Laamu) presented in
the three copper plate inscriptions from

maldivesthat atoll—which comprise the earliest
and most complete texts we have for theperiod—are nearly half a century later
than 548/1153, the date that has become
widely established in both international
scholarship and Maldivian national consciousness for the initial Islamisation of
the country. This is based upon an eighth/
fourteenth-century Arabic inscription onwood that previously hung in the Friday
congregational mosque (Hukuru Miskiyy)
in Malé. This is probably the inscriptionthat the MaghribÒ traveller Ibn Ba¢¢Ö¢a(d. 770/1369) describes reading there during his extended stays in the 740s/1340s,
where he secured an appointment as qÊÓÒand claims to have promoted more extensive observance of the sharÒ{a in the country. In the early ninth/f㘶fteenth century,
the Ming chronicler Ma Huan remarked
on the pure and excellent customs andthe adherence to religious law by the thenentirely Muslim population of the islands.
4. E u r opea n interv entions
With the arrival of the Portuguese in
the Indian Ocean at the beginning of
the tenth/sixteenth century, the Maldivesbecame a new site of contestation inbroader struggles for economic and political dominance in the region, involving theinterventions of the {AlÒ RÊjÊs of Cannanore (Kannur), on the Malabar coast ofIndia (r. 952–99/1545–91) into Maldivian
succession disputes and the reconf㘶guration of trade routes through the Maldivesfrom ports along the west coast of Indiaand as far af㘶eld as the Straits of Melaka.
The Portuguese seized Malé in 965/1558
but were expelled f㘶fteen years later bya campaign led by BoÓu Muammad
TakurufÊnu of Utheemu (d. 993/ 1585),
who was later elected sultan and introduced administrative and military reforms

91

in the sultanate. After the Portuguese
interlude, European imperial interventions
were limited in the Maldives. The islands
were claimed as a protectorate by theDutch in the eleventh/seventeenth century and by the British at the end of thetwelfth/eighteenth, but in both cases theislands were seen largely as distant extensions of their colonies in Ceylon. Neitherpower established any substantial institutions of colonial governance in Malé, butin 1887 the sultan signed a treaty with theBritish that ceded authority over foreign
affairs to the governor in Ceylon.
5. Â~ f is m a n d Sh qf i{ {jurisprudence
Through the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries, Islam in theMaldives was part of the broader worldof ÂÖf㘶sm and ShÊf㘶{Ò jurisprudence thatlinked the shores of the Indian Ocean
world from the Swahili Coast of Africa
to the Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia. This was dramatically demonstrated
in the career of the QÊdirÒ shaykh Sayyid
Muammad Shams al-DÒn from Hamah,
in Syria, who arrived in the Maldives by
way of Aceh in 1097/1686 and advocated a reform of the observance of sharÒ{abefore having to retreat to exile in India
the following year (the QÊdiriyya has historically been one of the most widespreadÂÖfÒ orders in the Indian Ocean world
and claims a lineage stretching back tosixth/twelfth-century Baghdad in its
eponymous master, {Abd al-QÊdir JÒlÊnÒ,d. 561/1166). He was, however, to returnto the Maldives in 1103/1692, whereupon
he had himself proclaimed sultan, rulingonly a few months before his death later
the same year.
Shams al-DÒn was granted the greathonour of being interred in the Medhu

92

Ziyaaraiy (Central Shrine) just opposite
the Friday Mosque in Malé. There herests alongside the sixth/twelfth-century
saint credited with the Islamisation ofthe islands, identif㘶ed by Ibn Ba¢¢Ö¢a as
AbÖ l-BarakÊt al-BarbarÒ but, in botha later inscription and a royal chronicle
from the Maldives, as YÖsuf Shams
al-DÒn al-TabrÒzÒ. Lively traditions ofritual observance at such shrines were adef㘶nitive feature of religious life acrossthe islands for centuries. While the ruinsof many of these structures can be seen
to this day, such practices have been rapidly abandoned over recent decades. Thisref㘶ects a signif㘶cant shift in understandings of Islam in the Maldives that began
in the 1980s, progressing to a point at
which it is today almost unimaginable formost Maldivians to attend festivities or
perform any religious rites in the proximity of a tomb shrine.
The only signif㘶cant exception to thisSunnÒ Shaf㘶{Ò hegemony in the Maldivesrecorded in the islands comes in the formof a diasporic community of IsmÊ{ÒlÒBohras, who came to dominate trade inrice and other goods in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Maldivian
Nationalist reactions in the 1930s, however, led f㘶rst to new restrictions on theircommercial dominance, and then to theirexpulsion.
6. Into the tw enty -fir stc e ntury
The sultanate, which was established in
535/1141 and claimed sovereignty over
all of the country’s atolls for over eightcenturies, persisted through six dynasties
until it was f㘶nally dissolved in 1968 withthe establishment of the Republic of theMaldives. From 1978 to 2008, the country
was ruled by Maumoon Abdul Gayoom

maldives(b. 1937), a graduate of al-Azhar (inCairo) who opened the country to modern international Islamic organisations,which eventually channelled into theMaldives inf㘶uences from Islamic reformmovements in Pakistan, Malaysia, andSaudi Arabia. Towards the end of his
three decades in power, however, Islamists
constituted a signif㘶cant part of the opposition to his authority, and, over the f㘶rst
two decades of the twenty-f㘶rst century,
various movements for da{wa and SalafÒ
religious reform have extended a thorough recasting of dominant models ofIslamic thought and practice in the country. Most traces of “popular Islam” have
now disappeared from the islands of thearchipelago.
B i bl i o g ra p hy
SourcesAkhbÊr al-ÂÒn wa-l-Hind, trans. Tim MackintoshSmith in Philip F. Kennedy and Shawkat M.
Toorawa (eds.), Two Arabic travel books (NewYork 2014), 22–5; Æasan TÊj al-DÒn, TaxrÒkhIslÊm dÒbÊ maal, ed. Hikoichi Yajima, 2 vols.,Tokyo 1982–4; Ibn Ba¢¢Ö¢a, (Rila) Tufatal-nuØØar fÒ gharÊxib al-amÉÊr wa-ajÊxib al-asfÊr,Beirut, n.d., trans. H. A. R. Gibb and C.
F. Beckingham, The travels of Ibn Ba¢¢Ö¢a, AD1325–1354, vol. 4, London 1994; Ma Huan,
Ying-yai sheng-lan. The overall survey of the ocean’sshores, ed. Feng Ch’eng-Chün, trans. J. V. G.
Mills, Cambridge 1970.
Studies
Harry Charles Purvis Bell, Excerpta Máldiviana, New Delhi 1998; Harry Charles Purvis Bell, The Maldive Islands. Monograph on
the history, archaeology and epigraphy, Colombo
1940; John Carswell, China and Islam in
the Maldive Islands, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 41 (1975–7), 121–98; R.
Michael Feener (ed.) The Maldives heritage
survey database, https://maldivesheritage.
oxcis.ac.uk (2018-); Andrew D. W. Forbes,
Southern Arabia and the Islamicisation of
the central indian archipelagoes, Archipel 21(1981), 55–92; A. D. W. Forbes and C. H.

al-malik al-Fqdil i93

B. Reynolds, Maldives, EI2; Sonja Fritz,
The Dhivehi language. A descriptive and historicalgrammar of Maldivian and its dialects, 2 vols.,
Würzburg 2002; Jost Gippert, Early new
Persian as a medium of spreading Islam,in Ludwig Paul (ed.), Persian origins. Early
Judaeo-Persian and the emergence of new Persian(Göttingen 1999), 31–47; Jost Gippert, An
unusual account of the Mi{rÊ, in Elisabetta
Ragagnin and Jens Wilkens (eds.), Kutadgu
nom bitig. Festschrift für Jens Peter Laut zum 60.
Geburtstag (Wiesbaden 2015), 163–82; Amalia E. Gnanadesikan, Dhivehi. The languageof the Maldives, Berlin 2017; Amir Hassan,Islamism and radicalism in the Maldives, master’s
thesis, Naval Postgraduate School (MontereyCA) 2011; Thomas William Hockly, The twothousand isles. A short account of the people, history,and customs of the Maldive archipelago, London
1935; Ludvik Kalus and Claude Guillot,
Inscriptions islamiques en arabe de l’archipeldes Maldives, Archipel 70 (2005), 15–52; Binu
John Mailaparambil, Lords of the sea. The Ali
Rajas of Cannanore and the political economy ofMalabar (1663–1723), Leiden 2011; Hassan
Ahmed Maniku and G. D. Wijayawardhana,
Isdhoo loamaafaanu, Colombo 1986; Hassan
Ahmed Maniku, C. D. Wijeywardane, andJ. B. Dissanayake, Loamaafaanu. Transliteration,translation and notes on palaeography, Malé 1982;
Egil Mikkelsen, Archaeological excavations of amonastery at Kaashidhoo, Malé 2000; Andrew
C. S. Peacock, Suf㘶 cosmopolitanism in theseventeenth-century Indian Ocean. SharÒ{a,lineage and royal power in Southeast Asiaand the Maldives, in Joshua Gedacht andR. Michael Feener (eds.), Challenging cosmopolitanism. Coercion, mobility and displacement inIslamic Asia (Edinburgh 2018), 53–80.
R. Michael Feener

al-Malik al-{¹dil I
Al-Malik al-{¸dil I, Sayf al-DÒnMuammad b. AyyÖb (r. 596–615/1200–18), sultan of Egypt, Syria-Palestine, andUpper Mesopotamia, belonged to theAyyÖbid dynasty founded by his olderbrother ÂalÊ al-DÒn (Saladin, r. 569–89/1174–93). He was born in Ba{labakk

between 538/1144 and 540/1145 at atime when his father, AyyÖb, governedthat city on behalf of the amÒr of Aleppo,ZangÒ I (r. 522–41/1128–46). Like hisfather and brothers, he f㘶rst entered theservice of ZangÒ’s son NÖr al-DÒn (r. 541–69/1146–74), and he then played a leading role under the rule of Saladin, whosefull conf㘶dence he enjoyed. In 570/1174
he was appointed governor (nÊxib) ofEgypt and charged, among other things,
with quelling the pro-FÊ¢imid revoltsin Upper Egypt. Considered then hisbrother’s presumptive heir, his name waspronounced in the khu¢ba in Cairo following those of the caliph of Baghdad andSaladin’s, and off㘶cial documents wereissued in his name, such as those granted
to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai.
In 577/1182, the promises of marriageof four of his daughters to four of Saladin’s sons and of his eldest son, al-KÊmil,to Saladin’s daughter, all bear witness toa desire to maintain these two branchesof the family united. Saladin could hardly
do without the military and f㘶nancial aid
from his brother, whom he gave Aleppo
in 579/1183, at his request, in exchange
for Cairo.
Three years later, when reorganising
his territories, Saladin appointed al-{¹dilregent to al-{AzÒz (r. 589–95/1193–8) in
Egypt. During the military expeditions
against the Franks of Syria-Palestine in
583–4/1187–8, al-{¹dil regularly sent reinforcements from Egypt and several times
personally participated in the battles. Inreturn, Saladin granted him the fortressesof Kerak and Shawbak in the Transjordan, as well as al-Âalt and the entire
al-BalqÊx region, thus gaining control overthe important caravan route leading fromSyria to Egypt and Arabia. In 587/1191,
he participated in the siege of Acre and