The Sultanate of the Maldives

The Maldive Islands, a great chain of low coral atolls strung across the Indian Ocean south-west of India and Ceylon, had been converted to Islam, according to the islanders' own tradition that the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta records in his Rihla, in the twelfth century, through a Maghribi (by some accounts a Persian) holy man, Abu al-Barakat, who was believed to have delivered the islands from a sea-jinn and brought their king and people to the faith. Out of this conversion grew a small but distinctive Muslim sultanate, a realm not of one land but of countless tiny islands. Its life rested on the sea and the coconut palm, and above all on two products that it sold across the ocean. The first was the small white cowrie shell, gathered live on the reefs and dried in the sun, which served as currency not only in the islands but, carried by the shipload, as small coin in Bengal, in West Africa and elsewhere; Ibn Battuta describes the islanders heaping the shells on the beach until the creature within rotted away and left the clean white shell. The second was coir, the rope twisted from the fibre of the coconut husk, with which the hulls of Indian Ocean ships were sewn together rather than nailed, prized everywhere for its strength in salt water. Because the islands have no stone but the coral of their own reefs, their mosques and better houses were built of cut coral blocks, low and square, rendered white, a coral architecture unlike any on the mainland. Ibn Battuta came to the Maldives about 1343 and stayed more than a year, marrying into the ruling families and being appointed the qadi, the judge, of the islands, in which office he laboured, by his own account with mixed success, to enforce the prayer and the rules of the Sacred Law among an easy-going island people unused to such strictness. He records too that the islands were for a time ruled by a sultana, a reigning queen, which he as a jurist found remarkable. His detailed account is a precious picture of a small, devout and distinctive Muslim society far out in the ocean, tied by its cowries and its coir into the great web of monsoon trade. This scene depicts that island town: the coral-stone mosque with its stepped porch, the cowrie shells drying on woven mats, the coils of coir and the storage jars, and the lateen-rigged boats waiting in the lagoon to carry the goods out to sea. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.