Editorial
Dhivehi Observer, 25 October 2007
In early 1979, a group of school children from Majeediya and Aminiya School, in their crispy white uniforms, sat nervously in a Television Maldives studio. They have just been told that the religious text that they used in school, written by the revered scholar Mohamed Jameel Didi, did not explain the true Islam that they should follow. Thus, each of them was given a piece of paper with a question on it, which they were told to memorize. Among the students included the Foreign Minister of today, Hon. Abdulla Shahid. During the programme they were supposed to ask the question as if it was their own. The man in front of them will give the answer. He will explain what true Islam was. He was Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, their new President.
This was the beginning of the extremist revolution in the Maldives by Dictator Gayyoom and his cronies that laid the foundation stone for the religious disharmony we see today. Soon after becoming President, he opened the first Islamic Schools, Mauhad, and Arabiyya soon followed. Religious scholars from Egypt were brought to 'enlighten' the Maldivians during the month of Ramadan; some who shocked the moderate Muslim community by preaching how men should beat their wives among other extreme practices. School textbooks were revised to follow the Dictator's version of Islam. A branch of Rabitat-al-Alam-Islamiya, an organization based in the Saudi that co-ordinated "the efforts of Islamic preachers the world over" among other things, was set up in the Maldives. And, similarly, at the peak of Palestinian Liberation Organization's terrorist activities in the 80's, the Dictator was its leader late Yasir Arafat's best friend and Maldives was home to the first embassy of PLO outside the Arab world.
Religious lectures with obvious anti-western overtones were given to students. Large rallies were held, using school children to condemn the Americans in particular and the West in general. Ridiculous rules were enforced on the people under the guise of Islam. People with long hair were persecuted. No sportsman was allowed to grow his hair long and was forced to take a crew cut if they wanted to continue playing their sport. Restaurants that had live music in the evening such as Ice-Ge were closed. Students were banned from having parties unless they got prior permission from the Home Ministry. It did not matter even if it was held in their own homes under the supervision of their own parents. The rule stood. It was only when his own children (who studied in UK and not in Egypt) became teenagers that the Dictator relaxed this rule.
The Dictator enjoyed being the supreme religious authority in the country for well over 25 years. He knew best and no one dared challenged him. Those who criticized him were harshly silenced, especially other religious scholars. Slowly but surely, in front of our eyes, the religious harmony that existed in the Maldives for centuries began to erode and chip away. Slowly the Maldivian culture that we all loved and were proud of, was being replaced by an Arab culture, all under the guise that it was Islamic. No one dared to say that you can still be a Muslim and follow Maldivian culture at the same time because they feared that what they say might be considered un-Islamic. Funds such as the Al-Quds Fund were set up and people were made to feel that it is their religious duty to donate. No one in the Maldives knows to-date what happened to the money in that particular fund.
One of the earliest things that the Dictator did was to replace Dhivehi names by Arab ones, not just the names we could give to our children, but also to everything he could use the Islamic banner on, such as mosques etc. With his group of friends, he preferred the use of Arabic to converse, rather than use Dhivehi, treating our own language with contempt. He lived like an Arab king, claiming that his authority was by divine rule and therefore should never be undermined or challenged. All the time, the poor Maldivians, honestly believed that this was a genuine attempt to show us the true Islam that we should all follow when all it was a guise to prolong and tighten his grip on power.
Fundamentalism, Wahhabism, extremism: you may call it by any name. But this division within our society is something that was created deliberately by this merciless Dictator.
Perhaps it maybe even better to call this extremism …Golhaabism.
Because Maumoon Abdul Gayoom IS the father of Extremism in the Maldives. This is his legacy.
