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Maldives: militant Islamists on the rise

“Congratulations,” said the voice on the crackling phone line from Lahore, “your sons have become martyrs to the faith in Kashmir.” Ever since that call came on January 27, 2007, the families of teenagers Mohammed Faseehu, from the Laam atoll island of Dhanbidhoo, and Shifahu Abdul Wahid of the Dhiffushi island in the Kaaf atoll have been desperately searching for their children.

Despite petitioning both the Maldives government and the Pakistan High Commission in Male, both families have drawn a blank. There is no trace either of Mohamed Niaz, a Lahore-based seminary student from Maldives who called with the news of their death.

But after the September 29 Sultan Park bombing in Male, the first-ever Islamist terror strike in Maldives, intelligence services across the world — those of India, the United States and the United Kingdom among them — have developed a new interest in the missing men.

A rising tide of violent Islamism, the Sultan Park bombing suggests, has begun to surge over Maldives. Dozens of local men who have fought in Islamist campaigns across the region are now preparing to bring home their war. Experts and many Maldives residents fear that the gathering storm could tear apart the island paradise.

Faseehu and Wahid travelled to Pakistan in March 2005 to study at a seminary in Karachi. Soon they moved to the Jamia Salafia Islamia — a Faisalabad seminary whose alumni are several Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders.

More than two decades ago, a young seminary student from Maldives made the same journey. Mohamed Ibrahim Sheikh returned to the islands in 1983, armed with the neo-conservative Salafism he had learned in Pakistan. He railed against the mainstream Shaafi-Sunni traditions the regime of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom propagated. Soon Sheikh was banished from Male to the southern atolls.

Out of sight, he continued to preach his faith though. Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed, Qatar-educated cleric now held for his links with the Sultan Park terrorists, was among his students. Salafi mosques operating without the permission required under the Maldives law were set up in Male. On the remote southern island of Himandhoo, in the Alif Alif atoll, Fareed was eventually to build a Shariah-bound mini-state modelled on the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the flow of students to Pakistan continued. Mohamed Halim, now vice-chief of administration for the Laam atoll, was among the first from Maldives to study at Jamia Salafia. “There were 23 students from Maldives there in 1989,” he recalls in perfect Urdu, “and dozens of others at other seminaries across Pakistan. Some used to go off for training with jihadi groups along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

Among Mr. Halim’s contemporaries was a Fonadhoo island resident Ali Shareef, who has now been held for his alleged role in the Sultan Park bombing. Along with Mohamed Mazeed of Male, as well as Ali Rashid and Mohammad Saleem, both residents of the Kalaidhoo island in the Laam atoll, Shareef plotted to establish a Shariah-based state in Maldives. The plot failed but President Gayoom sent an envoy to Jamia Salafia to insist that the seminary watch its students more closely.

It was a futile enterprise: at the seminary, religious education and jihad were organically enmeshed. Shareef’s contemporaries included, for example, a Faisalabad resident Abdul Malik. As head of the Lashkar’s Umm ul-Qura camp between 1998 and 2003, he trained thousands of Lashkar operatives for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. Operating under the code-name Abu Anas, Malik was eventually killed in a 2003 firefight with the Indian troops near Sangrama in northern Jammu and Kashmir.

Several Maldives students thus continued at the Lashkar-run facilities in Pakistan, some during Malik’s tenure as head of Umm ul-Qura. Ahmad Shah, a Male resident now battling heroin addiction, was put through the daura aam, or basic combat course, in a camp in the late 1990s. “Many students from Maldives were there,” he recalls. Others were recruited from Karachi’s Binori Masjid seminary, which gave birth to the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s Maulana Masood Azhar. A Maldives national, Ibrahim Fauzee, spent time in Guantanamo Bay after intelligence officials learned of his association with Al Qaeda operatives.

In the run-up to the Sultan Park bombing, evidence emerged that these networks were preparing for more aggressive operations. Ali Shameem and Abdul Latheef Ibrahim, now held for their role in the terror cell, were arrested on charges of preparing to join the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. In April 2005, Ibrahim Asif was arrested in Kerala after attempting to source weapons from Thiruvananthapuram. Last year, Male residents Ali Jaleel, Fatimah Nasreen, and Aishath Raushan were arrested for preparing to go to Pakistan to receive jihad training.

Although acquitted for want of evidence, Nasreen made little effort to veil her ideological leanings. In one recent interview, she said of Osama bin Laden: “There are things I support and things I can’t decide on.”

Just why did Islamism flourish in paradise — on islands apparently free from the deep social and political strains that drove its growth in Pakistan or India?

Answers lie in President Gayoom’s complex, ever-changing relationship with Islamists in Maldives. Having risen to power three decades ago on his religious credentials from the famous al-Azhar University in Cairo, Mr. Gayoom used Islam as a tool of social control, often characterising his critics as apostates, or, even worse, Christians. Islam, regulated and propagated by the state, was adroitly used to marginalise his increasingly vocal democratic opponents.

Islamists, often educated at state expense in West Asia and Pakistan, were quick to cash in on the situation. Journalist Aishath Velazinee has recorded: “A few islands even reverted to ‘the Prophet’s time,’ attempting to emulate the Arabian dress and lifestyles of the time of Prophet Muhammad. Men grew beards and hair, took to wearing loose robes and pyjamas, and crowned their heads with Arab-style cloth. Women were wrapped in black robes. Goats were imported, and fishermen gave up their vocation to become ‘shepherds.’ Young girls were taken out of school and married off in their early teens in religious ceremonies said to be sanctioned by Islam.”

Two key social classes in Maldives backed this rightward turn. Merchants and traders, the islands’ traditional elites, saw their influence decline as the power and wealth of new elites rose. Mr. Gayoom’s regime had given birth to an affluent group of entrepreneurs, often linked to the tourism trade, and the traditional bourgeoisie saw piety as a means of reasserting power. Secondly, universal school education created a generation of young people with skills, but few entrepreneurial opportunities. Disinherited and disenfranchised, some turned to drugs and street violence; others to militant Islam.

With democratic voices silenced, religious fundamentalism emerged as the principal language of dissent. In December 1999, Islamists launched incendiary attacks on the regime, arguing that the planned millennium celebrations were part of a plot to spread Christianity. In 2003, posters appeared on the walls of a school on the Edhyafushi island, praising Osama bin Laden. A Male shop displaying Santa Claus was attacked in 2005.

Militant Islam now threatened the regime which had nurtured it. But while the government sometimes used coercive methods to punish Pakistan-trained Islamists involved in violence — some famously had their beards shaved off with chilli sauce instead of foam — for the most part, it chose accommodation. Islamists who accepted the established political order — a group which calls itself ‘super-Salafis,’ to distinguish itself from the jihadi ‘Dots’ – were given considerable freedom.

Ali Shareef, for example, returned to Maldives despite his abortive plan to overthrow the government, and secured an appointment in the judicial service. He used his influence to help build the Islamist mini-state on Himandhoo, which, among other things, ran a Salafi mosque that rejected state-approved liturgical practices. Charges against Ibrahim Asif were dropped after the police chose not to secure witnesses or forensic evidence from India. Jaleel, Nasreen and Raushan, too, were set free.

The police shut down the Himandhoo mosque in 2006 but it was allowed to resume operations within weeks. Ibrahim Shameem, a government supporter on the island who resisted the Islamists, was murdered two months later in a reprisal killing that went unpunished. And while Islamists and the police fought a street battle in June after officials attempted to close down a Salafi mosque in Male, at least two others operated unhindered. One, investigators have now found, gave birth to the cell which carried out the Sultan Park bombing.

Now under pressure, Maldives finally appears to be cracking the whip. Soon after the Sultan Park bombing, troops and the police moved to clear the mini-state in Himandhoo, while Salafi mosques have been closed down. Almost a hundred people have been arrested.

Still, trouble could lie ahead. Elections are scheduled for next year, and some analysts believe jihadists will escalate operations to ensure that their cadre are not won over by mainstream parties such as the secular Maldivian Democratic Party or Islamist Adaalath. Intelligence officials are also concerned at the possible use of the remote Maldives Islands by organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, as well as at the steady flow of funds to local Islamists from organisations in Pakistan, West Asia, and the United Kingdom.

Hell, it would appear, isn’t that far a journey from paradise.

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