How The Maldives Buried Its Pre-Islamic Past

The Maldives have an ancient Buddhist past that the Muslims, who have controlled the land since 1153, when the last Buddhist king converted to Islam, refuse to recognize. But more evidence of that rich pre-Islamic history is being uncovered and studied, mainly by foreigners. More on this revelation can be found here: “Islam our shield: Maldives’ Muizzu on 900 years of Buddhist kingdom’s conversion,” by Sushim Mukul, India Today, September 15, 2026:

In 1879, the British steamship Sea Gull struck a reef in the Indian Ocean, near the present-day Maldives. Years later, the wreck of the steamer brought colonial official Harry Charles Purvis Bell to the archipelago to investigate the accident. But beyond the broken ship, Bell found several mysterious mounds that would help uncover another wreck buried under centuries of history — the Hindu-Buddhist past of the Maldives.

The Maldives on Sunday (September 12) marked 900 Hijri years since its conversion to Islam with a ceremony led by President Mohamed Muizzu. He launched the logo and slogan for a year-long commemoration and described Islam as the “shield protecting the island nation’s sovereignty and independence”.

The anniversary commemorates the conversion of the Maldives’ last Buddhist king in 548 AH, or 1153 CE, which transformed the kingdom into an Islamic sultanate. Because the Hijri year is about 11 days shorter, the Maldives is marking 900 Islamic years, which are 873 Gregorian calendar years.

Before the advent of Islam, Buddhism had for centuries shaped the Maldivian religion, its kinship, architecture and sculpture. Archaeologists have discovered stupas, monasteries and coral-stone carvings bearing Buddhist as well as broader Hindu-Buddhist, Mahayana and Vajrayana iconography, which have shed light on the archipelago’s ancient past and its links with India and Sri Lanka.

“Islam is the essence of the Maldives’ cultural sovereignty and independence,” Muizzu said on Sunday, adding that the nation’s “strongest safeguard is its continued existence as a 100% Islamic state.”

But how did the Buddhist kingdom become an Islamic sultanate? Why did the Buddhist king embrace Islam? And, what do the ruins, royal records and legends reveal about the Maldives’ pre-Islamic past?…

The most dramatic account of the Maldives’ conversion was recorded by Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited the islands during the 14th century. It involves a Muslim preacher, a terrified population and a sea demon called Rannamaari.

According to the story narrated to Ibn Battuta, the demon arrived once every month and demanded that a young woman be left inside a temple. A visiting Muslim scholar, identified as Maghribi (western) Hafiz Abu al-Barakat Yusuf al-Barbari, volunteered to spend the night there in her place, according to American historian, Stephanie Honchell Smith’s research paper, Sufis, Sea Monsters, and Miraculous Circumcisions.

Maghribi Hafiz al-Barbari reportedly recited verses from the Quran throughout the night. The demon did not appear, the woman was spared, and the incident was presented to the Buddhist king as a miracle.

The king then embraced Islam and asked his subjects to follow suit, according to their chronicles. Maldivian tradition identifies him as Dhovemi, the last Buddhist ruler, who adopted the Muslim name and title Sultan Muhammad al-Adil and inaugurated the Islamic sultanate in 1153.

For context, when Islam was adopted and enforced in the Maldives, the Delhi Sultanate in north India was 53 years old. This was also about 442 years after the Arab conquest of Sindh.

The origins of Abu al-Barakat, the Islamic cleric, remain disputed. Ibn Battuta described him as a Maghrebi, who is often interpreted as a Moroccan. Another version traces him to Somalia. However, historians, including Honchell Smith, regard the Rannamaari episode as a conversion legend, not an independently verified account….

That is the myth that Muslims in the Maldives have created, about a brave Muslim scholar, Abu al-Barakat, who took the place of a woman who was to be sacrificed to the sea demon, and  reportedly recited verses from the Qur’an throughout the night, which caused that sea demon to disappear. This incident was presented as a miracle to the Buddhist king Dhovemi, who promptly converted to Islam, and then, on the principle of “cuius regio, eius religio” — a Latin phrase meaning that “the ruler’s religion automatically becomes that of his realm” — all of his subjects followed suit.

The islands supplied cowrie shells, which were used as currency across parts of Asia and Africa, along with coir, coconuts, spices and dried fish. Regular contact with Muslim traders and scholars probably prepared the ground for the king’s conversion and helped draw the Maldives into the Islamic commercial world….

There was no miracle that overnight turned that Buddhist Maldive king, Dhovemo, into a Muslim, but rather, the effect of his and his people’s increasing encounters with Muslim traders and scholars, who over time converted some Maldivians to their faith. But just as important was the Muslim conquest by force of some of the Maldivian islands.

Over the past two decades, the Maldives has faced Islamic extremism and shrinking space for secular voices and other faiths. In 2012, a mob stormed the National Museum in Male and destroyed 99% of its pre-Islamic collection, including irreplaceable Buddhist artefacts.

Artifacts from the pre-Islamic period of jahiliyya, the “Time of Ignorance,” in Muslim eyes are not worth keeping. They are even dangerous, because they may focus the intention of some Muslims on their own pre-Islamic history, when Islam and only Islam should be the focus of their attention.

Muslims have denied, hidden, or destroyed the signs — artifacts, burial mounds, written records, stupas, ruined temples — of the pre-Islamic Buddhist past of the country. No non-Muslim can be a citizen of the country. The Maldivians are convinced that the country became Muslim overnight, when a miracle performed by a Muslim scholar, Abu al-Barakat, to make a sea demon disappear, caused the Buddhist ruler, Dhovemi, to convert at once to Islam, which in turn led to the mass conversion of those he ruled to the same faith. We know there was no such miracle, but a slow process, involving economic ties between the Maldivians and Muslim traders from as far away as the Hadramaut, in Yemen, but also violence — Muslims conquering Maldivian islands until, over time, the Buddhists shrank in population as mass conversions to Islam took place, not because the king became a Muslim overnight, as the national fairy tale has it, but in order to avoid being killed or reduced to the onerous status of dhimmi by their Muslim conquerors..

In the Maldives, the pre-Islamic history has long been ignored. But historians, including even some intrepid Maldivians, have been unearthing that past. They have found the evidence of Muslim violence, such as the remnants of destroyed Buddhist monasteries and stupas. One wonders whether the Maldivian government will be brave enough to include in the school textbooks that true story of violent Muslim conquest, or if it will continue to insist that a miracle-working Muslim’s feat managed to cause a Buddhist king to immediately convert and, on the principle of cuius regio eius religio, so then did his people.