Conversion to Islam.

The folk version of the story is unforgettable. The people of Malé, according to legend, were tormented by a sea-demon named Rannamaari, to whom the local priests sacrificed a young virgin every full moon. A wandering Muslim traveller — Abu al-Barakat Yusuf al-Barbari — volunteered to take the next girl's place, and spent the night inside the temple reciting the Qurʾān. By morning, the demon had fled into the sea and never returned. The king, Dhovemi Kalaminja, converted on the spot and ordered his people to follow.

Ibn Battuta, visiting two centuries later, identified al-Barbari as a Moroccan. Other sources suggest he was a Somali Berberi from the Horn of Africa. His tomb in the Medhu Ziyaaraiy shrine, opposite the Hukuru Miskiy in Malé, is still a place of quiet pilgrimage.

The real conversion was probably slower, more contested, and more political than the legend admits. The 12th-century Loamaafaanu copperplates — issued barely forty years after Dhovemi's conversion — record royal decrees ordering the destruction of stupas, the beheading of Buddhist monks who refused to convert, and the enforcement of Shariah by a specialised corps of religious police. A millennium of Buddhist institutional life does not end in a single night of Qurʾānic recitation.

But the cultural fact is undeniable: from 1153 onwards, Islam is the spine of Maldivian identity. The Hukuru Miskiy built in 1658 on the ruins of an older mosque still stands, its coral walls intricately carved with Arabic calligraphy and Thaana script — a monument to eight centuries of continuous Islamic presence.