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| Opinion 25 June 2005
The official abhorrence of Christianity in the Maldives
The hatred for Christianity promoted by the government in Maldives is so extreme that it has probably no equal in any other nation in the world. In December 1989 the foreign owner of a European restaurant in Malé got the fright of his life when a member of the Maldive paramilitary police (NSS) stomped into his premises wearing combat fatigues and carrying a submachine gun. Then he stared in amazement as the scowling soldier not only ordered him to throw away the Christmas tree he had set up, but even brutally destroyed it and dumped it in the dustbin right there, before his very eyes. This is something that not even the most hardened Palestinian terrorists would do. Many Maldivians are unaware that their country is so extreme and radical; they think all Muslim countries are like this. Few Maldivians know that Christmas is celebrated in Palestine. Although Christians are a minority there, Palestinians know how to show respect to Christian symbols, and it is a well known fact that some members of the Al-Fatah organization are Palestinians of Christian background. Even in hard-line Saudi Arabia, Christian Arabs can find a job, but not in Maldives. An Egyptian psychologist who applied for a job in the Maldives in 1996 was denied a visa as soon as the Government realized that he belonged to the Coptic Christian minority. All the viciousness of the Maldive authorities is directed towards the extermination of anything Christian in the country. One of President Gayoom’s most reactionary traits, and one which is incompatible with running a modern country with an economy based on mainly European tourism, has been his paranoid obsession against Christianity. The consequence of Gayoom’s hysterical stance is that the Maldive establishment has made the word ‘Christian’ synonymous with something terrible. And the opposition MDP politicians, instead of correcting course towards democracy and human rights, have taken Gayoom's extreme anti-Christian paranoia, and developed it to even more preposterous levels.
It is common to see Maldive politicians accusing each other mutually of being a ‘Christian’ in the media. The Maldive Government routinely blames the members of the opposition MDP of being ‘Christian agents’ and the MDP in turn (conveniently in articles which are printed only in the Maldive language for the benefit of the locals), accuses Gayoom of being a ‘Christian Missionary’ because during his tenure it was ‘discovered’ that some people running a foreign clinic in Malé were Christians (note that even in Yemen there are Christian missionary hospitals, but they have not been closed by the government, unlike in Maldives, where in 1998 after a brutal police operation the Christian hospital was closed and all foreign staff expelled). This charade can reach grotesque proportions when it comes to cartoons portraying President Gayoom with crosses, or digitally manipulated pictures of opposition figures wearing a crucifix. The fact that both the Maldive government and its opposition like to indulge in playing clown, using the word ‘Christian’ as an insult, could be dismissed as a joke if it were not a symptom of a much deeper malaise. The terrible truth is that we, as Maldivians lack the elemental human right of choosing our own spirituality.
We are fooled by the government and the mullahs into believing that it is an honor to be a 100% Muslim country, but the reality is that we are being treated like animals, like cows who are branded with a hot iron by their owner. Instead of being given a choice about what we want to believe, we let the government make the most intimate personal choices that we should have been allowed to be made on our own, if the Maldive authorities would have acknowledged that we have any dignity and self-respect left in ourselves. And as if this was not enough, after allowing our government to decide that we are Muslims, we are subjected to Islamic propaganda all our lives. School classes, radio, TV, books, magazines, Quran reading contests, conferences with foreign mullahs in Ramadan, keep flooding us with Islamic ideology from cradle to grave. The government makes sure that we have only access to Islamic religious material and keeps away from us any other religious books, especially Christian ones with special ruthlessness and determination. The only Maldive Christian radio programme has been hated by the government with exceptional ferociousness since it started . We are not sure, but we think it’s only half an hour every week, and even so the Maldive government has tried by hook or crook to stop this little radio programme since it began seven years ago. We think it is just ridiculous that the Maldive authorities who can broadcast from their formidable array of media, since they own TVM and have so many radio channels as they want, available for them for almost 24 hours a day, get so crazy and upset at one merely half-an-hour-weekly weenie programme.
And how upset the government gets! They have been spewing venom and bile against it, and crudely insulting and slandering the Maldive lady who is in charge, calling her all the most horrible names under the earth. And they have done this rude abuse during the last seven years by means of the official Maldive radio and TV. The Government also jammed the airwaves and blocked the radio programme website so that it was not accessible for Maldivians. They even sent a delegation to the Seychelles in order to stop this half-an-hour-a-week broadcast, trying to apply diplomatic pressure on the Seychelles government. And all this fatuous ado for a tiny Christian radio programme in our language! The choice of deciding what to believe is important in modern civilized countries. Muslim propagandists like to boast about such and such Western Christian people who have become Muslims. In fact they gloat on such events. But few of those people care to observe that, centuries ago, in the ‘Dark Ages’ it was forbidden in European countries to change from the traditional religion. The people would have burned such a person at the stake, or the inquisition would have tortured and executed the man or woman who would have dared to become a Muslim.
Now thanks to civilized constitutions and bills of rights, as well as secular institutions protecting their democratic choices, Europeans have the freedom to decide whether they want to become a Muslim or not and nobody can threaten them. It is a well-known fact that most Muslim missionary organizations are based in European countries. We write to promote awareness about human rights among Maldivians; the rights that both the government and the MDP opposition keep denying our fellow citizens. We do not want to change anybody’s faith. We don’t believe that anyone can do that. That is something only God could do. But if a Muslim wants to become a Christian or a Christian wants to be a Muslim, then anyone should have the freedom to do so, for it is a right enshrined in the Human Rights Charter of the United Nations. In fact, if anyone would want to stop a Christian from becoming a Muslim, most Christians themselves would get angry! They would defend that person on the basis that it is a human rights issue.
However, while the world is evolving and becoming more civilized, Muslims want to remain in the Dark Ages, they want to deny their own people elemental human rights. Like in the middle Ages they want to keep killing people for choosing a different religion from the traditional one. In Maldives they want to keep denying the rights of a person who chooses to follow a belief according to his own conscience, making that person the target of insults, social ostracism and even violence. They don’t realize that this backward, selfish and hysterical attitude doesn’t honor Islam and doesn’t honor them as Muslims either.
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