The writer's latest book 'Malayland' looks at what it means to be a Malay in the 21st century.
WHAT does it mean to be a Malay in the 21st century?
For my latest book Malayland, I met two friends who are purveyors of Malay culture and traditions. Ku Din and Pak Din are two separate individuals.
Here is an excerpt from a chapter entitled “The Ethnocentrists”:
My friend Ku Din deserves a chapter, or even a monograph, of his own. He is a collector of books and keris. His background was very much like that of many other Malay professionals in their forties: a spell at Victoria Institution, a post-university slog up through the corporate world, wasted youthful nights dancing away at Base, Phase II and Faces (and so did I...). But when he bought his first keris, his life changed. Now, he is pursuing his postgraduate studies, specialising in Malay manuscripts, while writing about the keris. Ku Din’s definition of Malayness was very different from the legal version. To him, the Malays must hold to five syarat, or principles, a key aspect of the monarch.
“The king will make use of land for everyone to live peacefully, in harmony, and in adherence to the adat and ultimately to God,” he summarised. And the rest were tools to attain the goals of the syarat to please Allah.
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I spent an afternoon at Ku Din’s home, decorated with keris and other Malay paraphernalia. A koi pond was being built. His quiet, middle-class neighbourhood was home to young couples and their growing families. He assimilated well with his neighbours, keris and all, and was active in the community.
“We just uphold Malay culture and heritage,” he stated boldly, speaking about the circle of friends around him. And so here is the riddle, the enigma at the heart of this chapter. What is someone who is proud of their culture, “race” and language: 1) a supremacist, or 2) simply a passionate student and advocate? And, to stretch the question further, what did that make me?
Being Malay and proud of it did not mean hating non-Malays, he insisted. When his friends wondered why he was pushing the “Malay Agenda”, he denied that this was the case.
The main problem was that the Malays themselves didn’t know who they were. “The Malays prepare their children not to be workers, but to be leaders and survivors. They have to adapt to life, but it does not mean losing their identity. The Malays enter any society, adapting to its norms but do not forget who they are. When a Malay knows his identity, his roots, he won’t turn to extremism,” he insisted.
Going on, from there, in his view, the problem was that our idea of Malayness was coloured by Eurocentric views of our history, and strange ideologies entrenched within society. The Malays could not run away from God, but because their knowledge was limited, Ku Din argued that this lacuna was seen as an opportunity by Orientalists to redefine Malayness. “The reason why Malays are now rising back is because Allah has called them to investigate their histories,” he surmised.
He disagreed with how some Malay writers wrote about our paranormal myths, insisting that these all came about because of Orientalist perspectives. The problem was that the Malays themselves didn’t read Malay manuscripts written in Jawi, the Arabic-derived script around which there is rife confusion today.
Who said Malays didn’t write? Who said they didn’t have the documentation? Thousands of such manuscripts do exist, with many still housed away with records of transmitted oral histories in European museums and libraries. Some of these documents had even been reduced to ash in the burning of Stamford Raffles’s ship, Fame, packed aboard in the nineteenth century before it burned and sank.
“And then writing in Jawi stopped,” said Ku Din matter-a-factly.
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Pak Din is an old friend, and we have flitted in and out of each other’s lives since we participated in a tariqa, or Sufi religious group together. His gifts as a healer began when he was young, back when he and his family attended classes held by a tariqa (Sufi missionary) that they followed. As far as he was concerned, the tariqa was synonymous with Islam, and it was only when he reached adulthood that he found out that other interpretations excluded such circles, most notably those of the Salafis and Wahabbis.
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What I was more interested in, however, was his very visible turn to ethnocentrism. It was only recently that his Facebook postings piqued my interest. No longer just about archery and horse-riding, he has lately been voicing out his admittedly conservative thoughts on non-Malays living in Malaysia, and how Tanah Melayu – as it was historically known – had been desecrated by the Malays themselves in the name of business and multiculturalism.
He lives in a cute white house decorated with flowers, right smack in the middle of an upper-income neighbourhood. The light smell of incense was already salient when I reached the garden, and his big smile greeted us. A former colleague, Nazir Sufari, had tagged along for the interview. He was researching Malay medicine and keen to know more information. Come in, Pak Din motioned, before offering plates of roti canai. His house was peppered with Naqshbandi paraphernalia, such as books, paintings and even a sword. It was oddly zen despite being filled up with objects.
Over lunch, Pak Din expounded on his vision of Malayness – grand, romantic, exclusionary, but also one of worry. To be Malay is to realise that it is a cause to die for. Where the modern, educated Malay would laugh at the perkampungan, the rurality of it all, a true Muslim would see that this world was slowly being dominated by Dajjal and its people through modernity. The conspiracies that many laughed at run as follows: Efforts to weaken or totally eradicate the influence of Malay-Muslims started in the fourteenth century.
These have since been reconstituted by the Orientalists and colonial powers. At this juncture, he gives a list of claims, some wilder than others: the destruction of the Malay kingdoms, of Cham’s end, physically waged by “Chinese-based” and new “races” – a striking echo of the Comte de Gobineau. He spoke of Ibn Battuta’s fabled Princess Adruja Wijayamala Singa, who supposedly lived in the northern parts of the Malay States, perhaps up to Pattani, who stopped the advance of Raja Rama Khamhaeng the Third. I felt that I was being pulled into a storytelling session, led by a powerful tok dalang. Pak Din was engaging all right, and his gift of the gab was undeniable.
Then, there was a sudden silence. (We Malays believe that when such a thing happens, it means that a malaikat [an angel created from Light] has just passed us.) Pak Din was once labelled as a supremacist. In 2009, he took part in a horseback archery competition wearing full Malay regalia. Remarking on criticisms of his dress, he sniggered. He wasn’t trying to promote Malay culture in the United States or Taiwan, but just in Malaysia itself.
“And they say it's racist. ‘Oh, you don't respect other people?’ We have given enough respect to other races, this is our place. What's Malaysia? Malaysia is the short name of Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, Sabah dan Sarawak.
To promote my culture here in this country is racism, oppressing others? No. It’s our character, the warmth, embracing others, allowing other races to come here. Not only that, they got even richer than us!”
Sunday Star columnist Dina Zaman is co-founder of Iman Research, a think tank studying society, religion and perception. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
Dina’s new book, Malayland, is published by co-publishers Faction Press and Ethos Books of Singapore in November 2024. Malayland is now available on advance order at Lit Books and Dina will present it to the public for the first time at Kalam KL on Nov 2, 4pm, at Mountbatten Café KL.
