Terror ripples under calm waters of Maldives

The attack, and a bloody confrontation days later between police and masked Islamic extremists armed with harpoons, stunned this Indian Ocean nation and threatened its careful effort to balance its traditionally moderate Islamic heritage with liberal Western values.

The Government reacted swiftly to crush the fundamentalist movement that had risen amid the palm trees and crystal blue waters of its 1,190 coral islands. Authorities banned the veil, arrested scores of suspected extremists, sealed underground mosques and promised a crackdown on radical preachers.

“We are not taking chances,” Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed said.

So far, the violence has not frightened off tourists, who account for one-third of the economy, he said. But “if there is another attack, then we just close tourism here. And we cannot afford that”.

By far, the most prosperous country in south Asia with a per capita annual income of US$ 2,700, the republic had seemed safe from the worldwide rise of Islamic militancy.

Its longtime ruler, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, had harnessed his nation’s major natural resource — hundreds of small, deserted islands — to create remote, upscale resorts that fueled explosive economic growth. But the country also suffered deep divisions.

While many high school graduates going to Europe or Australia for a liberal education, others studied religion at extremist institutions in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and spread their radical beliefs across the islands, said Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert hired by the Government. He estimated that several thousand of the country’s 300,000 people now follow these clerics. “They are preaching a deviant form of Islam,” he said.

The global outburst of Islamic anger after the US invasion of Iraq and the spread of Internet access to this country’s remote islands played a major role in the growing fundamentalism, said Hassan Saeed, the Maldives’ former attorney general.

“Suddenly, an island nation cut off from the rest of the world became part of the global village,” he said.

So did the Maldives. But despite the relative prosperity, there weren’t enough jobs for the huge population of young people, and many turned to drugs or radical Islam, Saeed said. The Islamic Council, the Government body that runs official mosques, accredits preachers and controls all aspects of religion here, was still distributing decades-old sermons to its imams and was caught unprepared, he said.

The trauma of the 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 100 people here and devastated many islands, also fueled an Islamic revival.

In the wake of the violence, the Government announced it would encourage moderate Islamic scholars, update the religious curriculum to make it relevant and enforce an earlier law prohibiting women from veiling their faces.

But clusters of veiled women continue to walk the streets of Male, underscoring the challenge the Government faces.