The
Maldives
consist of over 1000 small coral
islands stretching over 764 km of the Indian
Ocean west of Sri
Lanka. The country is populated by roughly 180,000
people who call themselves Devehi(s) ('islanders'),
and their language is Divehi,
which is also the ethnographic
term. These islands are grouped mostly into ring-like
coral atols, and since atol is a Devehi
word it should be spelled correctly with one l.
Seafaring explorers of past centuries fancied that
the shape of this chain of atols resembled a garland,
and indeed on a map it does look like this. So the
Archipelago came by the name mala div (garland island,
a common word in Indian languages), and the name
should properly be spelled Maladiv, not Maldive.
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The
Maldives
were populated perhaps many thousands of years ago.
The oral tradition of the Maldives
doesn’t have any reference concerning how
or where the original inhabitants came from. But
it’s most likely that the first settlers came
from the coastal
regions of India and Sri
Lanka.
The
oldest legends tell us that some people came from
the North and became kings, but in all these legends
Maldivians were already living in their islands,
when those events happened.
Thanks
to a great number of archaeological
remains, we know that there was a prolonged Buddhist
period in the Maldives.
The Buddhist
ruins are massive and reveal a great deal of the
skill and craftsmanship of their makers. This Maldive
Buddhist
civilization reached its height during the 9th century
AD, and by then the Divehi
culture, as we know it now, was already formed.
The Divehi language, its script and the cultural
values and practices that are the foundation of
present-day Maldive culture were a product of that
period.
Islam
came relatively late to the Maldives.
Sind and the Malabar Coast already had Muslim communities
by the 7th century AD. However, the Maldivians remained
Buddhist
still for a long time and it would be more than
five hundred years later that they converted to
Islam.
Islam,
however, is given the star role in all Divehi
chronicles. When one reads books of Islamic history,
one of the most common assertions is that in a particular
country "before Islam
there was Jahiliya, the age of ignorance."
According to this manner of interpreting facts,
history is rewritten in a manner where truth and
serious historical inquiry become irrelevant.
The
flourishing of a genuinely Maldive Buddhist civilization,
on which the present-day Divehi
language, customs, manners and ceremonies are still
largely based, is deliberately ignored. Solid historical
evidence goes unheeded, even though ancient Maldive
ruins plainly testify that none of the buildings
built after the twelfth century is anywhere near
as grand as the stupas that were built by Maldivians
in most inhabited islands towards the end of the
first millennium AD.
Still,
some of the old skills were allowed to continue
for a few centuries, well into the Maldive Islamic
period. Thus, mosques built in a syncretistic style,
with beautiful woodcarvings and lacquer work still
manage to give us a glimpse of the ancient cultural
splendour of the Maldivians.
