Government Grants for All

PART ONE

The Maldives in the Indian Ocean
The Maldives are string of attols in the Indian Ocean, a thousand islands nobody could count accurately. They emerge from beyond endless blue horizons. Like a fine rain from a thick cloud. A veil of peace and serenity. Like round crescent moon of the new month in the sky. A pond of water lily leaves adrift in the mid ocean heavy with history. Their destiny has not been written completely in a single book, but that it should unfold wave after wave to the rhythm of the Indian Ocean. Here one can walk along the beach on the wet sand and under radiant moon. The wind from the sea is heavy with cries and smell. A mini world of its own….

The Maldivian archipelago lays in the most strategic position for any navigator who wanted to round the southern point of Asia. The 64 km strait between India and Sri Lanka is full of reefs and too shallow to permit safe sailing. To get around the Indian subcontinent sailing vessels had to go so far south, they would round Sri Lanka, and then they would inevitably have to force a passage through the long chain of the Maldive Islands. The Maldives lay there as a treacherous barrier. No admiral could have planned a better strategic line, if he had wanted to chain off with mines a sailing route obligatory for any mariner who wanted to sail east or west past the southern point of Asia. The early navigators did not know weather they will encounter death or glory. Death will come and then the waves of the sea, they may have thought. They no longer saw land, or sun, or the end of the journey.

The islands are so low above the waves that, were it not for the tall coconut palms they would be invisible until the ship was cough in the surf. Only near the southern end of this long coral barricade there the channel open in two which permit safe passage through one side of India to the other. The dots on the map became alive, green jade neck laces, and scattered emerald jewelry placed on ocean blue velvet and cloudless tropical sky. Total some 1.190 islands. In fact nobody knows for sure for some islets grow out of submerged reefs, and others are eaten away piecemeal by the ocean and disappear. Only 202 of the islands are inhabited although other have the ruins of former habitation.

Ancient maritime station
Maldives was another of the many maritime way stations for some of the great seafaring civilizations. Also the Maldive voyages to distant lands were certainly not the result of mere hazard. Some of the descendants of old local builders and seafarers there still possess knowledge of ports around the ocean that surrounded their own micro world. Ports in India, Yemen, and Somalia were well known.

As early as in the seventh century have the Arabs, mostly Southern Arab, established an oversea trading center in Calicut. The island of Zanzibar, on the other side of the Indian Ocean, for example was part of the pre Islamic Kingdom of Saba from 115 BC to 525 BC, also known as Sheba. It is now suggested that Sabeans may have called on Maldive islands, or possessed knowledge of Maldivian archipelago.

European were the late comers in this ocean. They were only very late visitors to an old maritime Maldivian sultanate. The sun and the monsoon winds had sent the early voyagers from Southern Arabia on the first expeditions into these open parts of the Indian Ocean. The sun suggested the best place to search and the monsoon the best time to come. Seen from afar the Arab dhows may have looked like a procession, from close, a village for which all lands are far away, even the land one comes from or the land one would be crossing. Riches, brother believers, consists not in the things one possesses but in the things one can do without, they chanted.

Cowrie shells islands
The wealth of the people of these islands is constituted by cowrie shells. After woods the Arabs had started to take over the ancient trade routes off the coasts of India when Sulaiman, the merchant in the period AD 850 to 900 recorded how travelers had visited the Maldives and witnessed the importance of the cowrie shells. The islanders sell them for rice to the people of Bengal, where they are used for money he writes. They are sold in the same way to the people of Yemen who use them for ballast in their ships in place of sand. The Arabs, in particular, southern Arabs, have taken over the trade in Maldive cowries up the Tigries river, and to the caravan routes beyond.

Maldives – an important port of call for advanced civilizations navigating the Indian Ocean
The geography, the location of these Maldive islands perhaps combined with the cowrie shells, had made them an important port of call or transit station for advanced civilizations navigating the Indian Ocean. The ruler of these cowrie islands was customarily a queen.

The Maldivians feel strong ties and a sense of debt to the Arabs for the faith and subsequent Cultural Revolution – for that magic year of AD 1153 had brought them when their kings in Male adopted Islam. The population of the islands, however, adopted Islam half a century earlier. The Arabs brought light in a world of shadow. The introduction of Islam over eight centuries ago marked the beginning of the present era.

Ibn Battuta came to the Maldives in 1343.
“I resolved to go to the Dhibat AlMahal, the Arab name for Maldive islands”, he writes in his Rihla. These islands are among the wonders of the world. Ships export from the islands are fish, coconuts, fabrics, the turbans, these last are cotton. The export also vessels of copper, cowries, coir, Ibn Batutta writes further. This cordage is used for joining the boards of their ships, and is also exported to China, Yemen and India. Slaves were brought from Hadhramaut in Yemen twelve generations ago to serve as a selected bodyguard for the Sultan in Male.

Merchandise from all over the world
Ships carrying cargo back and forth between ports in China, India, and Yemen could load and unload in the Maldives almost any merchandise from all over the world, glittering brocade, pearls and precious stones. The history further records how all lines of maritime commerce from China, Indonesia, and India drew together until the tip of South India was rounded and the Maldives were passed. Then they diverged again with different destinations.

A product distribution center in its own right.
Most ships from the east, however upon passing the Maldives would first call at the important harbor of Calicut in the south west India. From there they would either strike westward across the Indian Ocean for Yemen and the Red Sea, or call at the other flourishing ports northwards to Cambay and the Indus valley, and across to the Harmouz straits. What was landed at Aden in Yemen was carried up the Red Sea for delivery to merchants in Jeddah or Cairo.

On the crossroad of maritime nations
The people of Maldives with their favorable location as a midway station were able to furnish water and fresh provisions, benefited greatly from this intercontinental trade in which they themselves took part. They brought their own cowries, and smoked fish to ports as far as Bengal and Yemen. The Arab traveler Abdul Razzak records Maldive merchants among those visiting important port of Calicut and Hormus during his visit there in 1442.

Import and export
Import and export that is what the ships permitted, and how civilization began. The Maldivians settled at a crossroad of all the maritime nations knew that ocean is and always was an open road since man began to build ships.

Early Maldivian history
The earliest Maldivian history has it that an Aryan price found his way through the magnificent, yet perilous sharp coral heads, finding an aboriginal race who marveled at this superb navigator and welcomed him King of Maldives. Whether Prince Koimala is legendary or not, it seems certain that the islands were first settled by Aryan immigrants who are believed to have colonized Sri Lanka at the time around 500 B.C. Further migration from South India, as well as Sri Lanka occured. Historians record the presence of people of Dravidri stock, the Dhivis, Maldivians. Around 947 A.D. the first recorded contact with the outside world began when an early Arab traveler depicts the potential for trade in pearls, spices, coconuts, dried fish and cowrie shells.

Ruling dynasties gave shape to what has become the Republic of Maldives just as volcanic movement shaped the 1.190 islands and coral reefs which rose above the ocean surface some hundred thousand years ago. Recorded in Maldivian history are the names of eighty four Sultans and Sultanas who belonged to six dynasties. The Maley or Theemuge Dynasty lasted 235 years under the rule of twenty six different sultans. The Hilali Dynasty ruled next for over a period of 170 years with twenty nine rulers. During the Hilali period Sultan Kalhu Mohammed invited the first foreign power to Maldives thus opening diplomatic relations with the world. Balmy trade winds brought prosperity to this independent country until the sixteenth century when the Portuguese took more than a passing interest. It is during this time of Portuguese threat that one of the greatest Maldivian heroes, Mohammed Thakurufan, was born on the island of Utheem in the northen atoll of Thiladhummathi. Even today one can hear songs and stories which tell of Mohammed Thakurufaan wiping out the entire Portuguese garrison. Mohammeds twelve years of peaceful reign was one of prosperity and reform. He died 1585 A.D. but his Utheeem Dynasty ruled for 127 years, producing twelve rullers. The winds of war are never calm not even in idyllic islands such as Maldives. The Maldives faced a new treat from the Malabar Coast of South India. Maldivian forces repelled the Malabar forces, drove them back and under the leadership of Ghazi Hassan Izzadden, the Huraage Dynasty was founded. The Huraage Dynasty prevailed until 1968 when the Maldives became a republic.

The Arabs from Hadhramaut
(a province of the modern Republic of Yemen) have been migratory from time immemorial. For over a thousand years they maintained a very special relationship with the Southeast Asia region, the Indian Ocean and its people. Historically, this relationship has been deep and permanent, extensive and continuous, culturally, it has been rich, manifesting itself in a range of ways and in every other sphere it has been pervasive and significant. They have participated in regions politics, histories and economy.

A World without boundaries
The Hadharm, or Yemeni Arabs from Hadramaut cherish a very strong sense of Arab identity which seems to overlap considerably with Islamic identity, to represent the ideal Moslem. The harsh political and economic realities in Hadramaut and the Islamic perception of geography, which considered the world to be a universal unit without territorial frontiers was an important drive behind the migration of the Hadhrami Arabs. The movement of Arabs into the Indian Ocean region was gradual, sporadic and small in scale though always significant. The Arabs engaged in trade, commerce, shipping, shipbuilding, scholarship, missionary activities, diplomacy and even local politics. The most important method the Arabs adopted to achieve this was marriage. It is therefore not at all surprising that many of the national heroes of the region as well as local ruling houses were actually Arab in origin.

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