The official conversion to Islam in 1153, although attributed by Maldivian folk tales to the magical potency of the Quran demonstrated by visiting Islamic holy men, in fact should be seen as a top-level decision in Malé, based on pragmatic economic realities, to align the country with the dominant foreign traders in the Indian Ocean. Maloney writes:

"Arabs were welcome along the Kerala coast because they induced prosperity. The Muslims who settled in port cities represented the widest ranging trade network the world had yet seen, stretching from Spain to southern China... From the eleventh to fourteenth centuries the Zamorins of Calicut gained supremacy of northern Kerala, and this was due largely to their friendship with Arab traders and the Mappilas, whose customs duty was the chief source of income for the Zamorin... The Arab and Mappila trade network served the Maldives well."

The transition from Hindu/Buddhism to Islam was not accomplished without resistance. The earliest surviving Maldivian government record, etched onto copper in an obsolete script and dated 1194, forty years after the official conversion of the country, records that rebellious Buddhist monks from the island of Isdhoo in Laamu atoll were taken in triumph to Malé and beheaded by 'the great king Gadanaadeethiya the Prosperous, the uplifter of the noble Lunar Dynasty... defender of the entire hundred thousand islands.' Pursuing a policy of Islamisation, the king 'refrained from killing those infidels who entered the faith of the noble Prophet Muhammad, got them to utter shahaadhath and freed them having performed circumcision on them.'

Gaaddhoo men on Vadamaga Hawitta Gan island, Huvadhu atoll. Click for larger photo.

The real significance of this record is in the detail of instructions for the maintenance of the new mosque at the site of the desecrated monastery. The monastery's former serfs are reassigned to the mosque and their duties continue very much as before. Islands from as far away as Huvadhu atoll are ordered to continue their former offerings as tribute to the mosque, and poor people are released from their taxation obligations. This startlingly sophisticated government instruction is witnessed by 10 ministers including a Commander-in-Chief, Royal Treasurer, Administrator of Justice, and Chief Judge.