Addu Atoll

Addu is a southern Maldivian atoll, a ring of low coral islands enclosing a lagoon near the equator. The islands preserve traces of both Buddhist and Islamic religious life. On Gan, a former Buddhist monastic building was partly rebuilt as a mosque, known as Walu Miskit. At Hulhudhoo and Meedhoo, old mosques and burial grounds testify to the spread of Islam through the atoll. In the seventeenth century the scholar Ahmad Shihab al-Din of Meedhoo recorded traditions concerning the early history of the Maldives.