Official records, quoting the legend of conversion, say that Yousuf Shamsuddin-al Tabrezi, popularly known as Thabreyzgefanu, brought Islam to the Maldives in 1153. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, with his penchant for ceremony, has declared the fourth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar as The Day Maldives Embraced Islam. Yet, until the 1990s, Islam was not an issue of contest or control in the Maldives. Rather, it was merely the way things were.
While the Maldives may have adopted Islam nearly 800 years ago, even by the 1970s there were few learned men, and these almost exclusively belonged to upper-class families and their selected pupils. But when President Gayoom, himself holding a degree in Islamic studies from al-Hazhar University in Cairo, rose to office in 1978, there suddenly began a significant new drive for religious knowledge. The young president encouraged and opened up a host of heretofore unheard-of opportunities, including scholarships to study in West Asia. Many of those who have in recent times come forward as political Islamists left the Maldives during this time, including to study in Pakistani madrassas. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of these students had begun their return.
President Gayoom, who had risen to office on his Muslim credentials – and thereafter declared himself as the Supreme Authority on Islamic Affairs – had by then begun to regulate religion through the state, whereby Islamic issues could only be discussed by an authorised few who followed, and subsequently preached, his prescribed form of Islam. As such, Islam, despite its many variations, was essentially fed to the people of the Maldives as hegemonic. The president's oft-repeated slogan became a reference to how "homogenous" the Maldives was.
The newly-arrived scholars had brought with them a diversity of ideologies from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, Libya and Egypt, and to each, his version of Islam represented the absolute truth. Furtive dissent to Gayoom's form of Islam slowly emerged and grew. By the 1990s, women were beginning to wear the full burqa. The president reacted by officially banning the covering of the face – purportedly in the name of security – and detaining any men who publicly seemed to be moving away from Gayoom's Islam. Hussein, one of many who were detained for following another form of Islam, recalls the torture that he experienced at the hands of the state. "They forcibly shaved me, using chilli sauce as shaving cream," he said recently.