More on Buddhist antiquities destroyed in Maldives

Submitted by Arundhati (Sri Lanka), Sep 8, 2012 at 00:16

Dear Dr. Pipes

I had just submitted a comment that included Islamist destruction of Buddhist antiquities in the Maldives a few minutes ago only to view this earlier comment. You may also want to see www.tamilnet.com, a highly ideological website but with useful information at times, on this particular incident,

The Maldives had been a sea front Buddhist civilization before the introduction of Islam. In this sense, it was different from the more land based Buddhist societies in Thailand, Laos, Burma, even Sri Lanka and Tibet. The Buddhist statuary was made of coral and there were interesting Hindu links with southern India. This reflected the earlier Indian Ocean trade. The fact that the Maldivian Islamists were able to destroy so much of their own past with no sense of what it entailed tells me of ideological blinkers.

This information was suppressed in the international media.

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