write important features of Maldives
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Maldivian Way of Life
Maldivian Way of Life
Away from the tourist resorts, the Maldivian people live and work on their home islands much as they have done for centuries. This traditional and hard-working lifestyle is key to understanding the country. The combination of ancient and modern, Muslim and secular, and conservative and progressive elements in Maldivian society may be contradictory, but getting to know how locals live day-to-day is an enormously rewarding flip side to only meeting Maldivians working in resorts.
National Psyche
Maldivians are devout Muslims. In some countries this might be considered incidental, but the national faith is the cornerstone of Maldivian identity and is defended passionately at all levels of society. Officially 100% of the population are practising Sunni Muslims, and indeed, under the 2008 constitution, it’s impossible to be a citizen of Maldives if you are a non-Muslim. There’s no scope for religious dissent, which presents some serious human-rights issues, and apostasy for locals is still punishable – in theory at least – by death.
This deep religious faith breeds a generally high level of conservatism, but that does not preclude the arrival of over a million non-Muslim tourists to the islands every year, coming to bathe semi-naked, drink alcohol and eat pork. It’s definitely an incongruous situation, and one that has come under some strain since the tourist industry spread to inhabited islands. While the new guesthouses and hotels on inhabited islands enforce local standards of dress and behaviour, just the regular presence of foreigners on islands that have historically been isolated from the outside world has brought great change to traditional atoll villages.
Not quite Asia, not quite Africa and not the Middle East despite the cultural similarities, Maldives has been slow to join the international community (it only joined the Commonwealth and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation in the 1980s, and withdrew from the former in 2016). Indeed, a deep island mentality permeates the country, so much so that people’s first loyalty is to their own small island before their atoll or even the country as a whole.
Maldivian Way of Life
Away from the tourist resorts, the Maldivian people live and work on their home islands much as they have done for centuries. This traditional and hard-working lifestyle is key to understanding the country. The combination of ancient and modern, Muslim and secular, and conservative and progressive elements in Maldivian society may be contradictory, but getting to know how locals live day-to-day is an enormously rewarding flip side to only meeting Maldivians working in resorts.
National Psyche
Maldivians are devout Muslims. In some countries this might be considered incidental, but the national faith is the cornerstone of Maldivian identity and is defended passionately at all levels of society. Officially 100% of the population are practising Sunni Muslims, and indeed, under the 2008 constitution, it’s impossible to be a citizen of Maldives if you are a non-Muslim. There’s no scope for religious dissent, which presents some serious human-rights issues, and apostasy for locals is still punishable – in theory at least – by death.
This deep religious faith breeds a generally high level of conservatism, but that does not preclude the arrival of over a million non-Muslim tourists to the islands every year, coming to bathe semi-naked, drink alcohol and eat pork. It’s definitely an incongruous situation, and one that has come under some strain since the tourist industry spread to inhabited islands. While the new guesthouses and hotels on inhabited islands enforce local standards of dress and behaviour, just the regular presence of foreigners on islands that have historically been isolated from the outside world has brought great change to traditional atoll villages.
Not quite Asia, not quite Africa and not the Middle East despite the cultural similarities, Maldives has been slow to join the international community (it only joined the Commonwealth and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation in the 1980s, and withdrew from the former in 2016). Indeed, a deep island mentality permeates the country, so much so that people’s first loyalty is to their own small island before their atoll or even the country as a whole.
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