Medieval maps portrayed the islands as threatening ranks of shark-like teeth. This were, after all, the Maldives—sensationally hazardous to mariners, a sublime archipelago of the Chagos Ridge, unseen by blue Western eyes and unsurfed to the hymns of Allah…until now.
Such locales entice adventure and hidden loot. A California delegation sought these floating pearls, steeped in the mystic aura preceding distant Arabias. On tap was The New and Different. What they found were The Idioms of Magic, like only such a place can instill.

In the Maldives, jinnis are cosmic specters existing parallel with tangible life forms, much like angels and humans. Jinnis who deviate, however, are blamed for everything bad that happens to the local people.
Jinnis live anywhere unsuitable for humans—the seafloor, cemeteries, thorny bushes—and emerge at peculiar moments of inconvenience for the islanders, wrongdoers or no. These islanders say the sea surrounding their main atoll is haunted by an evil jinni of enormous power, demanding frequent sacrifice of young female virgins. Girls are kidnapped and abandoned, tied to a pole on the beach at dusk, found raped and dead at dawn.
Ancient Islamic explorer Ibn Battuta: “I looked to sea and there was something like a great ship which seemed as though it were full of lamps and torches.”
Aligulha, or fireballs, are apparitions from the world of jinnis—spirits under the guise of flame. After surfing a dreamy right-hand barrel, a gaunt, engaging fisherman motored up to our boat and described a phenomenon he’d recently witnessed while working with his crew of five a half-mile offshore the isle of Suheli. One twilight, he was tormented by one of these jinnis appearing as a fireball, first clinging to the mast then jouncing atop the sea surface aside the ship, taunting its crew.
The man attacked it with a fishing pole, but struck nothing solid. In the wake of the thing's distaste for the animosity from the man and his crew, the fireball constructed illusions of great dimensions.
"Suddenly we found ourselves in shallow water," the man told me. "Then, on the horizon, a whale surfaced, its mouth wide open, its teeth glowing. It was coming straight at us to swallow our ship!
"We quickly motored back the island and narrowly managed to dodge the whale by reaching the sanctuary of the lagoon. Then, just as soon as it had appeared, the beast and fireball vanished. The lagoon saved us."
Other fishermen regaled us with stories of fireballs, detailing a pattern of similarity in the fireball behavior: they appear magically and stick themselves on the ship's mast. Fisherman then dip a cloth into a fish paste and offer it to the fireball, which will leap onto the ship's deck and roll overboard, not to reappear that particular night.
Origins of the Maldives’ pre-Muslim culture are vague and vulnerable to speculation. Legend says that, pre-Christ, the isles were inhabited by a sun-worshipping society of the Amin people, a pagan, worldly stew of seafaring Romans, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Indus Valleyites. Their home existed in the center of an ancient maritime trading crossroads, renowned for its abundance of white cowry shells, widely cherished units of currency from the mountains of Tibet to the deserts of Mauritania.
The Amin thought their seas to be possessed by jinnis, aquatic demons of many names and shapes, full of black magic, responsible for anything unexplainable by education or religion. One jinni was the Dalhan, which paralyzed shipwrecked sailors with its horrific shrieks before gorging on human flesh, tainting blue sea with red blood. Another jinni required deliberate sacrifice, notably with virgin girls placed at seafront temples at dusk for a jinni’s midnight snack.
Islam arrived in 1153 AD via a North African Arabic saint, who, according to scholars, converted the islands after convincing the Amin king that Islamic faith had the power to control even the most baneful jinni. The king hence ordered his people to embrace Islam, and the saint was rewarded with the title of sultan.
Social life in the Maldives was steeped in fanditha, a mélange of spirit charms, magic, and folk medicine, founded on beliefs and superstitions circa the Amin, but with the addition of Arabic verses from the Quran, Islam’s holy book. Fanditha was used to combat the evil jinnis plaguing fishermen and sailors, many of whom vanished without a trace.
White magic flourished under these circumstances, additionally used in political intrigue, courtship and marriage rites, in launching virgin boats, ensuring good fishing, finding guilty parties when a crime had been committed, and treating the sick. Fanditha assumed less benign forms when it was employed to weaken or kill enemies.
In 2004 AD the Maldives were a pious, barefooted society shrouded in jungle and dense equatorial air, which, on windless days, settled and corrupted all human motion into a lethargic leak of sweat. Here was a valid, smiling people, slight of stature, licorice-skinned, circumspect yet sophisticated, living by selling dried fish, coconut-fiber rope, and cowry shells.
Their islands were infused with magic spanning the entire metaphysical spectrum, today undwelling on the fanditha but focusing on geological mastery and its deft acquittance of all vice, pollution, profanity, occultism.
Blandness and religious deviates cannot remain afloat. Immoral incarnates are unknown, nor are thieves or murderers. Booze and porn are shunned, mirroring the purity of this Laccadive Sea, essentially an aqueous turquoise canvas nurturing multicolored gardens—living colonies of coral polyps—and frequent swells.
Rumors loomed of inconsistency, high costs, flooding, U.S. resentment, terrorism, sharks, lack of access. The locals promised that black magic would maim—possibly kill—us if we ventured into forbidden sea, where fearsome waves caressed the backs of diabolical jinnis hunkered invisibly inside the reef. Black magic created the breaking waves; they had taken many native lives and destroyed many good intentions from eons ago.

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Magic, as we saw it, was a dreamy blue, not black, existing in the perfect lineups spooling around the Maldives’ unseen reef passes—one of those environs you always fantasized of but soundly denied. Viewed bird’s-eye, the islands were convoluted pockmarks of coral, shimmering, idyllic. From the land, they were glary, sandy oases of searing heat, bristling with breadfruit and coconut palms, enhanced by fluorescent lagoons. And from the sea, they were hallucinogenic green smudges on the horizon, trinkets of coral atop a submerged volcanic ridge, wholly unsullied by the 21st century.
Out there, so very far away, wickedness manifested itself as reef lacerations, heatstroke, sunburn, and dehydration. For the surfer, malevolence is boredom and flatness. For the Maldivian, it is garrulousness and unenlightenment. Benevolence for all would be a bounteous sea and absence of serpent-like behavior, both at home and abroad. To the natives, otherworldliness of wealthy vacationers imported occasional drunken conduct and selfish motives. After all, they viewed kayaking and windsurfing as sporty narcissism, roguish myopics with poor taste in music and an overall evil intent.
Our wave-obsessed posture was regarded with frank suspicion. We were not divers or snorkelers or fishermen or honeymooners. We were not European executives working in Delhi or Dubai. We preferred not the calm sanctuary of the lagoon, nor the reefy blue wilderness between the passes. Instead, we sought the hazards of shallow water, of remote, swell-exposed seas fronting uninhabited islands. Sharks and exposed coral heads dunked by whitewater were not a problem.
To the natives, however, we were perverse anomalies among their denseness of tradition, hence latent purveyors of black magic. Our surfboards were harmful spears, our scented sunscreen an elixir of evil, applied over our entire bodies to appease corrupted jinnis living beneath the surf. Like buoys, waves were designed to warn local mariners and the general public that jinnis indeed haunted these places. Reef passes with waves—especially those on uninhabited islands—were akin to the gates of Hell, with Satan lurking below. The lagoons were Heaven, where God walked on water.
These lagoons were avoided. As such, we were investigated.