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I'm Hani the human and this is my blog.

Maldives Twitter wakes up to a fever dream where everyone is Ali Rameez

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At 12AM on Friday the 23rd of November 2018, a whole bunch of Maldivian twitter users changed their profile pictures to the one above. It shows a young Ali Rameez leaning back, relaxing his head against his arm. The incident is referred to by some as #NationalAyyaDay.

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Mass confusion spread as everyone’s notifications looked the same.

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To make things worse, many users changed their names to song lyrics by the one time Maldivian king of pop. There was once a time when you could not walk two feet in the Maldives without hearing one of his songs on the TV or radio. I’d post more screenshots of the incident, but most people have already changed their pictures and names back. Guess the world can only take so much Ayya.

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Of course I say one time because Ali Rameez is currently a violent extremist “sheikh” who constantly spreads hate and fear speech against Maldivian minorities such as non-Muslims and LGBTI+ people. While being a massive sexist of course. On top of this, he also regularly promotes such lovely things as child marriage.

In the above screenshot, the Dhivehi text reads “Islam dheenun beyru vejje meehaa; gathul kuraasheve’”, which roughly translates to “Slaughter those who leave Islam”.

The first comment below it reads “It is best if such children move to a country where they can get the freedoms that they want. No space for atheist in this country”.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how this encourages vigilante violence against non-Muslims. I suppose it is also worth pointing out again for the thousandth time that the Maldives is one of the few countries in the world whose constitution bans freedom of conscience.

Ali Rameez promotes these views on his official twitter account and his facebook page, where he also pimps out his extremist buddies from religious NGOs like Jammaiyathul Salaf.

A tale of two Ayyas. 32 x 32 pixel grid. Something I created in Pixaki in honor of the day.

A tale of two Ayyas. 32 x 32 pixel grid. Something I created in Pixaki in honor of the day.

With all this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that Ali Rameez hates his pop star past. He did famously dump all of his CD’s into the ocean after all.

So while people took the opportunity to mock / celebrate him by sharing his music and reminiscing about the days when he wasn't a psychopath, others took the opportunity to gaslight Maldivian minorities by claiming that the good sheikh was being bullied.

This kind of gaslighting is typical from “liberal” Maldivians who fall head over heels to defend extremists yet never utter a single word in support of Maldivian minorities whose very existence is criminalized. As such I am sure these people are not ignorant of Ali Rameez’s extremism. Instead I think they are sympathetic. I think extremists like that say what these people are afraid of saying. What they really think.

You will never get any of these people to admit whether they support something as basic as freedom of conscience. However they will rarely admit they don’t support it either. Instead, they will prop up the extremists who have the courage to actually express such darkness. This is why I respect honest extremists who will say to my face that they want to kill me. I have no respect at all to closet conservatives like this who pretend to sit on a fence while they crap on minorities below. It is not an equal conversation when one side has their existence criminalized.

Can you believe the audacity of such a statement from people who do not think their fellow Maldivians deserve constitutional recognition?

Comments like this one are referring to an incident in the past when a woman on twitter made extremely homophobic remarks. For once a lot of people on Maldivian twitter called out this woman for her blatantly bigoted remarks. Not this crowd of closet conservatives though. Much like this incident, back then they sided with the bigot being roasted. How could you bully such an innocent person they all decried.

This past event, and the common occurrence of conservatives and extremists to claim to be victims of “bullying”, is what has led to the creation of the local meme of “bleeing”.

This type of gaslighting would be funny if it wasn’t the norm. Gaslighting, for those unfamiliar, is when an oppressor makes a person doubt their own memories and self. It is a common tactic used by abusive people against their partners.

Wikipedia defines it as “a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. “

They states that the signs of gaslighting are:

  1. Withholding information from victim;

  2. Countering information to fit the abuser's perspective;

  3. Discounting information;

  4. Verbal abuse, usually in the form of jokes;

  5. Blocking and diverting the victim's attention from outside sources;

  6. Trivializing the victim's worth; and,

  7. Undermining victim by gradually weakening them and their thought process.

Observe this clear example from a tweet calling the original one out.

Look at the response above. Ali Rameez is well known for blaming rape victims and his support for child marriage. Yet the original tweet dismisses this as having a “different understanding”.

The day led to some clashes within the more progressive parts (relative to the Taliban) of Maldivian twitter as well, with some people thinking that the incident downplayed Ali Rameez’s extremism.

Some responses from the twitter cult leader responsible for this madness:

Now that we’ve dealt with the drama and my existential bitterness, here are some of the funnier tweets from the day:

Ali Rameez towards the end of his music career was in a band called “Freeze Band”. Once he gave up music, he capitalized on this by creating “Freeze Brand” - a company that sells dried fish and other products. Gotta admit that some of their stuff is pretty delicious though.

The cat is screaming out lyrics to one of Ali Rameez’s hit songs “Finifenmalakey” (like a rose).

Ali Rameez had a particularly saucy hit video where he sensuously marinates a chicken with a beautiful woman. Probably one of the sources of his paranoia about his past sins.

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Nothing brings Maldivians together like a good roast 🔥.

Maldives Twitter wakes up to a fever dream where everyone is Ali Rameez
Maldives Twitter wakes up to a fever dream where everyone is Ali Rameez

At 12AM on Friday the 23rd of November 2018, a whole bunch of Maldivian twitter users changed their profile pictures to the one above. It shows a young Ali Rameez leaning back, relaxing his head against his arm. The incident is referred to by some as #NationalAyyaDay.

#MenAreTrash hashtag sparks widespread debate and outrage on Maldivian twitter
#MenAreTrash hashtag sparks widespread debate and outrage on Maldivian twitter

The polarising hashtag caused an uproar and week long drama across the Maldivian twitterverse and tweeps debated the controversial topic. Are men trash? Are men trash, but is the wording wrong? Have people who say men are trash actually not met enough men who are not trash? Are women responsible for the men in their life being trash? Can they simply just filter them out? All this and more below. This is of course just a taste. I also did not include some of the nastier stuff from obvious troll accounts.

Maldives twitter last week #6
Maldives twitter last week #6

Here are some interesting things Maldivians talked about on twitter last week. 

Maldives twitter last week #5
Maldives twitter last week #5

Here are some interesting things Maldivians talked about on twitter last week. 

Maldives twitter last week #4
Maldives twitter last week #4

Here are some interesting things Maldivians talked about on twitter last week. 

Maldives twitter last week #3
Maldives twitter last week #3

Here are some interesting things Maldivians talked about on twitter last week. 

Maldives twitter last week #2
Maldives twitter last week #2

Here are some interesting things Maldivians talked about on twitter last week. 

Maldives twitter last week #1
Maldives twitter last week #1

Here are some interesting things Maldivians talked about on twitter last week. 

A collection of Yameen Rasheed's writings on Maldives, Secularism, Standing up for Maldivian Minorities, and Fighting Religious Radicalism #WeAreYaamyn #FindMoyameehaa
A collection of Yameen Rasheed's writings on Maldives, Secularism, Standing up for Maldivian Minorities, and Fighting Religious Radicalism #WeAreYaamyn #FindMoyameehaa

I initially began this post as an interactive timeline of Yameen Rasheed's best tweets, but it soon became too inaccessible due to the sheer amount of relevant posts that he was putting out. 

So instead, here is a collection of some of his best writings. He deals with topics that very few people in the Maldives have the courage to openly write about. More importantly, the fact that he talked about these issues is being erased from the conversation about his murder.

Furthermore, the dangers and threats that he faced were not a characteristic unique to the current administration. He faced these same threats under Mohamed Nasheed's government as well, who is arguably the best and worst president that the Maldives has ever had. Nasheed promised freedom, but ended up granting those liberties only to religious extremists; and in the process condemned those who opposed those extremists to their fate. In an open letter to Nasheed written in March 2009, Yameen says that he was under investigation by the Maldives Police Service, and accused the president of failing to protect the rights of secular liberal minded Muslims like himself. 

He was not your average journalist, blogger, or rights activist. He was of the rare breed that promoted secularism and actively acknowledged the existence of minorities within the Maldives such as LGBTQI people and apostates. There is absolutely no way that the work he was doing was comparable to the output of people who to this day deny the existence of such minorities. 

He was a staunch opposer of the Maldivian constitution, which he called intolerant, for it's lack of the basic right of freedom of conscience. There is absolutely no way that he is comparable to the people who, even in their articles about his death, have failed to mention this extremely important fact of life in the Maldives. 

Challenging religious radicalism was not some one off thing for Yameen. It was his bread and butter. His mashuni and roshi. To say Yameen didn't write a lot about religion is like saying Stephen King doesn't write a lot of horror. Post after post on his blog deals with these issues directly. Yameen was also the founder of the Facebook group "Ban The Adhaalath" - arguably one of the first ever online groups formed to directly tackle religious extremism within the Maldives. 

How can there be a genuine democracy in the Maldives, how can there be genuine freedom, if the right to think differently is illegal?

Contemporary Maldives, Maldivian Social Media, WritingHani AmirIslam, Ali RameezComment