Royal Editorial

26 February 2005

The Maldive republican authorities impose names on children of Maldive nationals. Parents have to apply to a government committee to have the proposed names for their children approved. This system was introduced in the 1990s by the current discredited administration. Although there may be a set of irrational written rules as to what a permissible name is and what is not, ultimately it depends on the whims and fancies of the final arbiter of names who is the president of the republic.

It is generally understood that a permissible name must:

• be in Arabic, the language of the colonial and ideological masters of the Maldive republican rulers.
• be in a language regarded by the Maldive republican rulers as being totally assimilated into the culture of their Arab masters, such as Urdu or Persian.
• be able to be written (in the opinion of Maldive bureaucrats) in the Arabic script. By insisting on this, the Maldive republican rulers are inadvertently insulting the language of their colonial masters. They probably do not realise that names of "unmentionable" people such as George Bush, Ariel Sharon and John Paul II can also be written in the Arabic script- even Arabic is not that clumsy.
• under no circumstance be Jewish or sound Jewish or be derived from a Jewish name. Exceptions are only granted to close relatives or in-laws of the president of the republic who may wish to name their child, for example, Jude (a Jewish name meaning "giver of joy"). Some Jewish names mentioned in the Koran are permissible, if appropriately mispronounced.
• under no circumstance be in a Western language of the "despicable, wine-drinking, pork-eating, nudist" Christians.
• under no circumstance be in the Divehi (Maldive) language which is ear-marked for ultimate obliteration and replacement by Arabic, the language of the master race and official language of the future Islamic Arab Emirate of el-Maladifiyin.

It makes these meaningless rules all the more comical when we find out that there are several Maldivians who already have names such as Roy, Donmaniku, Jennifer, Nimal and so on. These names were chosen by parents before the oil sheikhs "donated" enough funds to persuade their blind Maldive followers to accelerate the pace of Arab colonisation. There was a time when the authorities in the Maldives were more enlightened.

When we gave our son the first name of Dylan and the middle name of Arias, frightened well-wishers contacted me to say that Dylan would spend a lifetime as a non-person because his names represented a deliberate affront to the Maldive Name Nazis. Many people attempted to bully relatives into persuading me to change Dylan's name. I was told that I had blatantly contravened not one, but three sacrosanct rules of the Name Nazis. Dylan’s first name is Western and allegedly cannot be written in the Arabic script and his middle name Arias is (God forbid) in Divehi, the language of his forebears.

Like the once-proud civilisations such as Egypt, Iran and the portions of India now known as Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Maldives is fast becoming part of the Arab homeland- thanks in part to the Name Nazis.

Click here to read another article on Maldive names

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