As a centre of trade and lucrative shipwrecks, the Malé sultanate was considered a prize for pirates and raiders sponsored by covetous kingdoms from India. Within the Maldivian court itself, family disputes often led to factions recruiting foreign allies. The learned and virile Moroccan adventurer Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century quickly found himself enmeshed in petty politics and treachery when he accepted the position of Chief Judge in Malé.

Two hundred and fifty years later, François Pyrard, aboard the first official French voyage to the Indian Ocean in 1602, survived shipwreck on Baa atoll and malaria, and spent a few years trading in Malé as the unwilling 'guest' of the Sultan. Along with detailed observations of Malé court life, the perceptive Frenchman portrays the son of Mohamed Thakurufaan, Sultan Ibrahim III, as a paranoid, capricious, violent and lecherous ruler.

Pyrard's Malé of the early seventeenth century is a busy commercial centre trading with Bengal and Acheh in Sumatra, as well as southern India and Sri Lanka. The wealth of this trade, and the constant threat of sea-borne attack, gave Malé politics an aggressive and violent form unmatched in any other atolls.

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Addu students in traditional dress, Hithadhoo 1996
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Encouraged by government regulation, regular visits by Islamic traders and holy men, and Maldivian pilgrims returning from the Haj to Mecca, the islands assimilated Islam into their customs and superstitions. Sufi Islam was popular and worship at the grave sites of prominent saints, or other legendary figures, was common and often linked to rituals for success in fishing or giving birth.

Portuguese colonisation for fifteen years during the sixteenth century was the first serious threat to Maldivian Islamic identity. Folktales from the period record that after encouragement and threats from the Portuguese garrison and Christian members of the Malé elite, almost the entire population of Malé converted to Christianity. Although it was a time of economic prosperity, Maldivian historians consider the Portuguese occupation as a period of servitude and brutality.

The hostility of the fanatically Christian Portuguese towards Islam prompted the Maldivian liberator, Mohamed Thakurufaan, to revive and enforce religious observance. This enshrined Islam as an essential part of Maldivian ethnicity and independence, as well as the official ideology of its state. After victory the Thakurufaan clan moved into Malé from Utheemu, and also reorganised and strengthened the administration of the atolls, no doubt drawing on their personal experiences operating from the outlying atolls during the war. The collection of southern atolls previously known and administered collectively as Suvadive were separated into Addu, Fua Mulaku and Suvadive (Huvadhu).

Thirty years after liberation in the early seventeenth century, Pyrard records disapprovingly that judges were also tax collectors, functioning as feudal overlords:

The Naibs, or chiefs of the provinces, are priests or doctors of the law, who have an eye as well to all matters of religion and education... the administration of justice... giving their orders to the priests under them.... The Naibs four times a year go the circuit of the islands in their several governments... This brings them great revenues, for it is then the people pay their dues, besides which they receive many presents from a multitude of people, and of such they are very greedy.

Whatever the practical realities of their rule, the Thakurufaan clan characterised their assumption of power as the glorious return of Islam to the Maldives after the dark night of Portuguese Christian rule. The Arabic-style script Thaana was created and introduced to provide easy literacy and enable the comfortable assimilation of Arabic words into the written language.

An even more potent symbol of the government sponsored Maldivian Islamic renaissance was the heralded return of a renowned indigenous scholar, Jamal Uddeen, from long residence in Yemen to take responsiblility for Islamic law and learning. After training judges in Malé, he retreated to the ancient island of Vaadhoo in Huvadhu atoll and established a small but enduring tradition of education in Islamic law which spread across the Equatorial channel into Meedhoo on Addu atoll.