Paradise Lost and Found: The Ethicolegal Landscape of Romantic Love in the Maldives

This paper examines the role of Islam, local customs, and modernity in influencing Maldivian marriage culture based on ethnographic research. I explore the causes and norms surrounding the divorce rate in the Maldives that is currently the world’s highest and yet unaddressed in Anglophone Islamicist scholarship. While religiously inclined communities are often considered more likely to preserve practices of lifelong monogamy due to their presumed commitment to notions of sexual purity, Muslim societies are thus stereotyped even more frequently not only in orientalist imagination but also by modern Muslims themselves. An increase in marital breakdown in a Muslim society is attributed to Western hegemony and the legacies of colonialism on indigenous legal systems that presumably devalued lifelong marital bonds and encouraged consumeristic, flippant, "transactional" attitudes towards romantic relationships. I question the premises of such binary assumptions by exploring the legal and ethical dimensions of Muslim romantic life in the Maldives.