Abu al-Barakat al-Barbari

Abu al-Barakat al-Barbari was a man from the Maghrib known in the Rihla only through what the people of the Maldives told Ibn Battuta: that he knew the Qur'an by heart and that the islands became Muslim at his hands ¹. Ibn Battuta took the account from a group of trustworthy islanders, among them the jurist Isa al-Yamani, the jurist and teacher Ali, and the qadi Abdallah ².

Ibn Battuta reports from them that the islanders believed a demon appeared to them every month from the sea, and that they drew lots for a virgin girl to be left overnight in the idol-house ². Abu al-Barakat was lodging with an old woman on the island of al-Mahal and found her and her family weeping because the lot had fallen on her only daughter; he offered to go in her place, being beardless, and they took him into the house by night in a state of ablution, where he recited the Qur'an until morning; they say that when the demon came within hearing of the recitation it plunged into the sea ¹. They took him to their king, Shanuraza, to whom he offered Islam; the king asked him to stay until the next month, but became Muslim before it ended, with his family, his children and his court, after which they broke the idols and the people of that island and of all the others became Muslim ¹.

Ibn Battuta says the islanders adopted Abu al-Barakat's school, that of Imam Malik, that in his own day they still honoured Maghribis on his account, and that he built a mosque known by his name ¹. He says he read, carved in wood on the maqsura of the congregational mosque, that Sultan Ahmad Shanuraza became Muslim at the hands of Abu al-Barakat al-Barbari the Maghribi ¹. The whole account is the islanders' as Ibn Battuta relays it, and he gives no date for the conversion.