This article was sent in by its authors after reading a letter to the Editor by an employee of the Maldive subsidiary of the British firm Cable & Wireless PLC, Ibrahim Saeed of Alivaage of Midu village in Addu Atoll (isaeed@dhiraagu.com.mv)

The Maldive government is actively engaged in the promotion of a foreign extremist and xenophobic ideology in order to make effective its disloyal goal of establishing the Maldives as a 100% Arab country.

Because of its stand for the defence of full human rights for Maldivians, this site has frequently received threats from foreign Islamic ideologues or from their puppets, certain high placed government officials afraid of losing their tyrannical grip on the Maldive nation.Without our ancient monarchy we would have been a bunch of fishermen, lacking in juridical personality and unity of purpose

Those attacks were usually secret or indirect, well in agreement with the cowardly and sneaky way of the tyranny’s other face. But, quite extraordinarily, the latest one comes with a name and an address. It is a hate message from a highly-placed person in Dhiraagu, the Maldives communication network. This message, sent by one Alivaage Ibrahim Saeed, Meedhoo Island, Addu Atoll, included insults to our ancestral kings, for it seems to be a fashion lately among the slaves of everything Arab to feel free to throw insults at our ancient Maldive monarchy. Finally Saeed ended up accusing the owner of this website of being an “Enemy of the Islamic Nation”.

Our question is: is there such a thing as an ‘Islamic nation’? If so, Mr Saeed should explain what it is. Is that an official institution? Is Mr Ibrahim Saeed a spokesman for the “Islamic Nation”? Or has that “Islamic Nation” given him an identity card and a passport? Does he refer perhaps to the North American “Nation of Islam” movement of Rev. L. Farrakhan? If so, is Mr. Saeed wearing a bow tie, like the followers of this movement?

As far as we know there is no such thing as an ‘Islamic Nation’ on our ancient planet Earth. Historically, there is a relatively new politico-religious movement called Islam with some branches and subgroups, like the Shafi’, Hanbali, Hanafi, Wahhabi or Salafi movement, etc. as well as an even newer Arab League, and an OIC (Organisation of Islamic Conference). The common point of these groups is that they are all of Arab origin and that all of them are against human rights.

Petro-dollar-funded colonialist missionaries and a collaborator indoctrinating locals

But can these organizations provide passports, protection, history, tradition, and a sense of belonging to their members? The truth is: NO!

The only thing those Arab politico-religious movements give us Maldivians is an albatross we all have to carry around our necks: an ill-defined foreign doctrine. This Arab politico-religious ideology is an unstable and slippery thing: one moment this, the next moment something else. You cannot rely on it, for it claims to speak for peace but ends up getting its followers involved in hatred and murder (never having the manliness of claiming any responsibility for it, but blaming isolated individuals when things look bad). The Islamic leaders are one moment politicians, the next religious “saints”, never making up their mind, and messing up religion and politics at their convenience. This hopelessly muddled system also gives us false traditions, or pseudo-traditions, like the abject burugaa (which our Maldive women traditionally had never worn and which makes them look humiliated and disfigured) and polygamy (a beastly desert custom from an inferior and violent culture that doesn’t respect women as equal human beings), among other backward things.

Women who have diched their emancipated national heritage to embrace non-indigenous costumes. Many Maldivians now regard wearing indigenous costume as unpatriotic.

And yet we Maldivians have a firmly-established actual nation that Mr. Saeed forgets to pay respect and allegiance to. We know that, besides being human beings, we do have our own historical Maldive nation. It is the nation we love, and which provides us with a civil society, a commonly shared history, real traditions, a sense of belonging, a rich cultural heritage, our own language and script, protection, a state, travel and identity documents, and so on.

Anyone even cursorily familiar with world history knows that religions and ideologies may come and go, but that nations or peoples are relatively more stable. Established nations, having a degree of sovereignty in the form of uninterrupted dynasties of kings and queens, have managed to survive better the odds of history.

One can see that this Ibrahim Saeed of Meedhoo doesn’t value or respect his own nation, nor does he appreciate its sovereignty, for he doesn’t think much about insulting our own former kings, overlooking their importance in the establishment and survival of the Maldive nation. To compound matters, he does so in a casual and extremely rude manner that seems fully gratuitous, unworthy of a person of his position who one deems to be educated. Is that plain ignorance?

One should urgently inform Mr. Saeed and his Arab-worshipping ilk, of something they seem to be utterly ignorant of: namely, that all Maldivians are already fully aware that the Maldive kings and queens of every dynasty were human beings, and as such they made errors. We all understand that our kings and queens had shortcomings; nowhere in Maldive history is it stated that we were ruled by angels or saints. But we, as Maldivians, owe our ancestral kings and queens respect not for what they were, but for what they represented, which is something that people without values and manners, like this Meedhoo Saeed, will never know.

The truth is that no man can serve two masters, since he will end up hating one and loving the other. And it is perfectly clear that Mr Saeed is abjectly serving his ‘Islamic Nation’, disregarding the gifts that the Maldive nation gave him and his ancestors. Therefore, it is nothing for him to drag the venerable name of our ancestral kings and queens casually through the mud, for his loyalties are not towards the Maldive motherland, but towards the beloved abstraction of his ‘Islamic Nation’.

Mr. Saeed dares to spit his venomous insults against our Royal Family as if our long line of monarchs were worthless. But it is an irrefutable historical fact that if it hadn’t been for our ancient kings and queens, Maldivians would now not be a nation at all. We would have been a scattered group of tribals, easily overrun by any foreign power.

Without our ancient monarchy we would have been a bunch of fishermen, lacking in juridical personality and unity of purpose. Without our ancestral monarchs, upholding our right to exist as a nation through centuries and millennia, our rights to exist as a separate, independent nation would have gone the way of the rights of the tribes in Africa, the American Indians or the Chagos Islanders, who owing to their lack of sovereignty were easily overrun by foreign powers and are now living not only in degradation and humiliation, but even in exile, kicked out of their own countries. Included in this list are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where they were colonized and humiliated not only by the British empire, but even now by the Indian Union.

It is our own Maldive kings and queens, with all their human failures, and not any foreign politico-religious doctrine that gave us Maldivians dignity and pride. It is our kings and queens that made our Maldive country, although small, a fully sovereign kingdom, worthy of being respected internationally as a civilized haven in the Indian Ocean from time immemorial. The fact that ancient Roman, Chinese and Arab travellers left witness in their historical chronicles about their admiration for the refinement of the ancient Maldivian court and for the civilized rule of law and organization of our country, long before Islam arrived to our shores, doesn’t even need to be mentioned here.

The present Islamizing puppet government routinely tells lies to our children in their adulterated history books, for the true foundation of the Maldive nation is not a foreign politico-religious system, but our ancient kings and queens. It is our Maldive Royals that for thousands of years, even much before Islam or Christianity existed, made e pluribus unum of our country by uniting all the scattered Maldive atolls and the ocean waters in between. And even if Islam had not existed, no big deal; we would still prevail and stand proud as a nation, a Buddhist monarchy like present-day Thailand.

In more recent times, our kings and queens wisely struck treaties with the different economic and political powers that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean, like the French, Dutch, Portuguese, British and others, in order to safeguard our independence. Even during the heyday of colonialism, the Victorian era, our monarchs managed to keep the Maldives free from colonization by Western powers. By means of skilful diplomacy and the respect they earned from the foreign rulers of the time, our kings and queens were allowed to keep the foreign powers away from Maldive internal policies.

Those kings were approached with high regard by ambassadors and plenipotentiaries, and they put our Maldive nation in the world map. Thanks to them we can stand proud as citizens of Maldives. But Mr. Saeed cynically thinks that he has the right to talk about our kings and queens without the respect and high esteem that is due to them from a Maldive citizen worthy of the name. Why?

This Maldive woman may be thinking that she is 95% "awrah". It is good to see a few patriotic women in the background without the Arab-prescribed head napkin- a barbaric garment imposed by jealous old men who were in perpetual distrust of their pre-teen wives.

All slaves of the Arab spiritual imperialism are so taken by it, and so busy promoting the doctrine introduced by them, that the elemental respect for the nation that gave them birth and that fed them doesn’t even cross their shameless fanatical mind. Basically they become nobodies; they cut their moorings from their own nation and end up high and dry somewhere, losing all self-respect. People like Alivaage Ibrahim Saeed don’t even know who they are, hating their own nation, insulting our ancient queens and kings, finding everything wrong with our customs, manners, ways of dressing, and so on. (Incidentally, Sheikh [mullah] Ibrahim Fareed, so respected by the Maldivian “Democratic” Party is also one of those own-nation-haters, one of whose favourite subjects is attacking Maldive traditional female dress in order to promote Islamic pseudo-tradition).

Their ideas are destructive, they look at our Maldives with hatred and contempt, longing to make deep changes, wishing our islands were not what they are, but Cairo, or Jeddah, or Kabul or some other foreign place like that. You will often hear them refer to the foreign imperialistic doctrine that tramples on our human rights as “beloved”, but their lips never will say “our beloved Maldive nation”, because they have no pride in the islands and atolls that gave them birth.

But real Maldivians, worthy of that name, are aware that our nation has defects, and still love Maldives as it is and pay due homage to our ancient kings and queens. That is real love for one’s nation and pride in one’s heritage. We love our nation and its historical heritage like our own mother, because we know how to value it properly. We feel well and comfortable in our Maldive nation because it belongs to us; it is the one and only nation God has given us. Our love for our country and our ancient historical figures transcends all shortcomings, because it is a deep and genuine love, it comes from our souls, it’s like the love for our family and our children.

It is clear that for someone with a mercenary spirit who has sold his soul to the Arab imperialists, like Alivaage Ibrahim Saeed, the innermost wish is to sell our country. Or even to kill our Maldive nation, with the connivance of the present government (a government that doesn’t honor and respect the Maldive nation) and offer it as a sacrifice to the abstract and foreign ‘Arab imperial entity’ which is the ‘Islamic Nation’.

Speaking in plain language, Alivaage Ibrahim Saeed, Meedhoo Island, Addu Atoll, is not a Maldivian, but a traitor, a deserter unworthy to tread the Maldive territory. We wish that people like this would just buy a one way ticket out of our Maldive nation. Let them spread their shameless venom somewhere else and rot at the shadowy ‘Islamic Nation’ they so much love and so abjectly have sworn allegiance to.

Old friend of Maldive ruling mullahs writes courtesy of www.maldivesculture.com In mid-September 2005, an old friend of the head mullah of the supreme council for Islamic affairs and chief "justice" of the Maldives Mullah Rasheed Ibrahim (seated with colonialist missionaries near the top of this page and here on the right) wrote to the site Editor. The gentleman claimed to be a Zanzibar-born resident of the United Arab Emirates, in his early 60s, who was taught Arabic by the esteemed Maldive mullah while the latter was being indoctrinated at the el-Azher medrassa in Cairo in the early 1970s. The following are extracts from his emails and the Editor's reply. I was surfing the Internet searching for some specific information on Maldives when I landed at your website where I came across an interesting article connecting Maldivian Royals to the Sayyidis of Hadhramaut at which point my search became even more interesting....... Alex Hailey ( Author of "Roots") has said, "In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are, and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning; no matter what our attainments in life, there is the most disquieting loneliness." I totally agree with him except that I am both proud of my ancestry and very much attached to it in every respects while Hailey, though proud of his forebears, openly distants himself from their religion - Islam. I wonder how he reconciles between the two! The site Editor's reply follows: ....As for Alex Hailey’s much-celebrated comment that you have quoted in your mail, I could not agree with him any more. I am not sure how far Hailey traced his roots but I am sure his illustrious forebears were not all Muslims. Perhaps that was why he was able to be proud of his forebears and, at the same time, distance himself from what some of them believed. Likewise in my research I have found that, in spite of what is now taught in Maldive schools, the history of the Maldives goes well beyond the Islamic conversion. All indications are that my pre-Islamic Maldive forebears were the architects of a more magnificent civilisation than what their descendants had been reduced to. I am also proud of the Arab heritage on my maternal side. The Arabs had a rich civilisation that went well beyond Islam. Through Ishmael’s mother Hager, the Arab heritage traces back to the ancient civilisation of Egypt. Similarly some of my paternal Maldive forebears, in the 16th and 17th centuries intermarried with the Portuguese nobility in Goa. I believe we may be able to trace our lineage through some very well-known dynasties in Europe back to the Saxons and the Vikings. Compared to their contemporaries in the Maldives and most of southern Asia, the Saxons and the Vikings were barbarians and I will certainly distance myself from their barbaric behaviour. However if they were my forebears, I will still be proud of them. Of the world’s most populous religions of today, my ancestors definitely represented Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

The usage of the words Maldive and Maldivian in the main article above have been changed for consistency with the rest of the site.