In Memory Of A Righteous Muslim -- Yameen Rasheed

On April 24th, 2017, Yameen Rasheed died from a stabbing he suffered in the stairway of his home in the city of Male in the Republic of Maldives.  He was stabbed 16 times.

What sort of man was this Yameen Rasheed to be assassinated in this way?  According to close friends, he was soft-spoken and funny.  Others describe him as smart, witty and sweet.

So what was his crime?  Why was he targeted for murder?

As Yameen himself explained prior to his murder, he wrote a blog and "did the campaign."  He was known for his satyrical tweets.  In his popular blog,  "The Daily Panic," Yameen often criticized the government for using the religion of Islam in presenting its agenda to the public.

His "campaign" refers to Yameen's effort to find his close friend, Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, who was a journalist for the Maldives Independent.  Ahmed was abducted in 2014 and has not been heard of since.  Recently, under great pressure, the authorities conceded that they had knowledge of the perpetrators of the murders of both Yameen and Ahmed.

What sort of place is this Republic of Maldives?  It's a nation of about 1,200 islands with a population of about 400,000 people southwest of India.  It is a gorgeous vacation destination popular with tourists.  The population, Sunni Muslim, has traditionally been liberal in its interpretation of Islam.  Women went about without covering covering their heads.  But that changed about two or three years ago.  Under the increasing influence of Saudi Arabia, the Maldives began to shift to a more conservative strain of Islam.  One indicator of this shift is the finding of an international security firm that estimates that 200 Maldive people have travelled to the Middle East to fight with ISIS.

This movement to a more Salafist version of Islam was brought about through Saudi offering scholarships to the youth of the Maldives to study in Saudi Arabian universities.  In addition, Saudi Arabia has supplied the Maldives with Saudi imams. who have been rolling out a wide ranging agenda that is Sharia based.  On October 18, 2015, the Maldive Independent reported the sentencing of a woman to death by stoning for the crime of adultery; the first such sentence given in the history of the Maldives.

For more details on what is happening in the Maldives, Google " Maldive Clerics Roll Out Wide Ranging Religious Agenda."  There is a lesson to us in the west in what has happened in the Maldives and it is this:  Muslims are a good people, but the teachings of Salafist imams is destructive of western values.  In the case of the Maldives, Salafism has been spread by a country that permits no churches or synagogues to be built in its own nation but brazenly builds mosques all over the globe.


Credits:  Essential information contained in this entry come from Hassan Moosa, of Male, and Kai Schultz of New Delhi.  Geeta Anand contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.