Who introduced Islam to the Maldives .. A Moroccan traveler or a Somali?

Imran Abdullah

The Maldives may be associated with fascinating beaches, diving experiences and nature of enchanting beauty, but you may miss the history of the islands whose citizens must necessarily be Muslims.

The Maldivian Constitution says Islam is a condition for Maldivian citizenship. There is no Maldivian non-Muslim in the hundreds of small, charming islands known to Arab seafarers and merchants by the twelfth century.

In the heart of the Maldivian capital is the tomb of "Abu Barakat Yousef al-Barbari", and as it appears, he is a Moroccan Amazigh pilgrim and pilgrim who ended one of his trips in one of the ten thousand islands and 87 islands.

The Sultan of Maldives handed over the Sultan of Maldives to Abu Bakrat, followed by his compatriots who worshiped Buddhism and the Sultan built mosques and schools to teach people their new religion in which they all entered.

Maldives and Muslims
The Maldivian tribes voted to choose a girl every month who would be a human victim to quell the wrath of the Ranamari.

The Moroccan Amazigh traveler also told Ibn Battuta during his journey to the islands in the fourteenth century much about the conditions of its inhabitants and customs. He told the story of their Islam: "Then he presented a Moroccan called Abu Barakaat al-Barbari. He was a keeper of the Great Qur'an. He went down to an old house, And he had only one daughter killed by the elf, Abu Bakrat said to her: I am going to replace your daughter at night, and was Amd the face, and I said to her, And they carried him that night, and they brought him into the house of idols, and he was watered "He said.

The next morning, when the old woman and her parents came to take the girl out and burn them, according to their customs, they found their place. The father of the blessings recites the Qur'an. Ibn Battuta completes his novel saying: "They went to their king and he was called Shnuraza. "The king said to him," Stay with us until the next month. If you do so, then you will be saved from the impurity. "

Ibn Battuta completes the events of the following month, when the king handed over and broke the idols, and destroyed the house, "and the safest people of the island, and sent to the rest of the islands, Vslm people, and established the Moroccan most of them and went in his doctrine, the doctrine of Imam Malik, may God have mercy on him, , And built a mosque known as his name.

Ibn Battuta tells of the mosque in the capital of Malé, saying: "I read the interior of the mosque engraved in wood: Sultan Ahmed Shnouraza handed over to the Moroccan barbarian Abu Barakaat.

Although Islam entered the Maldives late through Arab traders in the Indian Ocean by the twelfth century, this transformation was the most important point in the history of the country known to modern Maldivians.

Arab traders were also the reason for the transformation of the population of the Malabar coast (the southwestern coast of the sub-continent of India) to Islam since the seventh century AD, and Sindh and Punjab (now Pakistan) have become Muslim since they joined armies of conquest under the leadership of Muhammad bin Qasim al-Thaqafi in the same time period, While the Maldives remained a Buddhist kingdom for 500 years until conversion to Islam.

With the last Maldivian Maldivian kings of the Maldives turning to Islam, Sultan Mohammed al-Adel was brought in by a dynasty of six Islamic dynasties consisting of eighty-four powers that lasted until 1932 when the Sultanate became an elected state.

The official title of the Sultan until 1965 was the Sultan of the land and the sea, the Lord of the Twelve Thousand Islands and the Sultan of Maldives His Highness.

Arabic was historically the principal language of administration there, rather than the Persian and Urdu languages ​​used in nearby Islamic countries. Another link to North Africa in the Maldives was the Maliki school of jurisprudence, which was used in most parts of North Africa. The seventeenth century.

This is why Ibn Battuta did not find it difficult to follow the order of the judiciary in the Maldives when he visited, where he stayed for years in which he married and wrote about the Islam of its people and their culture and customs in the middle of the 14th century AD.

Was Abu al-Barakat a Moroccan or a Somali?
Some researchers say another scenario is that Ibn Battuta made a mistake about the Maldives, and was biased to the Maghreb narratives in the ratio of the Barbarian Berber to the Amazigh (Berbers), while Abu Barakat Barbary may be descended from Berbera (an old commercial port in northern Somalia).

When Ibn Battuta visited the islands, the governor of the island at the time was the Somali Abdul Aziz al-Maqdishwi (Somali Mogadishu). Abdul Aziz was sultana on the islands by the sultan of Uran, a Somali Muslim sultan who ruled large parts of the Horn of Africa in the Middle Ages.

According to this novel, Abu Barakat al-Barbari was the same as Yusuf ibn Ahmad al-Kunin, who established the family of al-Wushma in the Horn of Africa, which ruled the Sultanate of Effat and the Sultanate of Justice in East Africa.

This novel also helps to explain the use of the Arabic language to govern the Maldives and the dominance of the Maliki school in a non-Eastern geographical context in East Asia.

The Maldives retains the legacy of a mystical Sufi and closes cafes and restaurants during the day in Ramadan and forms the "Islamic law" known in the Maldives as the Saritu Basic Law of the Maldives.