The Malabar Raid and the Huraa Dynasty.
Raiders of the Ali Raja of Cannanore abduct the sultan and briefly seize Malé — until Muleege Hassan Maniku drives them out and founds the Huraa dynasty that would rule until 1968.
The Portuguese were not the last outsiders to take Malé. In 1752 a force sent by the Ali Raja of Cannanore — the Muslim Arakkal rulers of the Malabar coast — raided the capital, captured Sultan Mukarram Muhammad Imaduddin III, and carried him off to their territory, where he died in captivity a few years later on the island of Minicoy.
The occupation lasted only months. A Maldivian named Muleege Hassan Maniku (Dom Hassan) rallied a resistance, expelled the Malabar garrison, and — after the abducted sultan's death — took the throne himself, founding the Huraa dynasty.
It is the Maldives' second foreign occupation, and it echoes the first almost exactly: a sudden seizure of Malé, a captive sultan, and a liberation that founds a new ruling line. The Huraa dynasty that Hassan Maniku established would govern the islands — under British protection from 1887 — right up to the abolition of the sultanate in 1968, the longest and last of the Maldivian royal houses.
Continue the timeline.
- Wikipedia — Arakkal kingdom
- H. C. P. Bell, The Maldive Islands (Ceylon Government Press, 1940)
Two thousand years of history — one extraordinary place to experience it.
The atolls in this story are the islands you can stay on today: private-island resorts and overwater villas, planned by a team that works from inside the Maldives.