Singapore Malays: Being Ethnic Minority and Muslim in a Global City-State by Hussin Mutalib

Author:Hussin Mutalib [Mutalib, Hussin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781136307324
Google: eoKbXUT7EbkC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-26T13:48:05+00:00

Not surprisingly, as other ethnic communities in Singapore prospered and were ready to face the twentieth century, the same could not be said of the Malays. Williard A. Hanna in his study of the Malays of that period described them as follows: ‘While the rest of Singapore went speeding ahead into the twentieth century, the Malay loitered on in the early nineteenth century’ (Hanna 1966: 6). This observation was similarly echoed by Betts a decade later: ‘Malay community... by the modern era, was spatially and socially un-integrated and... only marginally participant in the economic and political life of Singapore’ (Betts 1977: 43).

Although not as easily correlated, the significance between British colonialism and the current structural disadvantages confronting Malays could perhaps be seen in other ways. To begin with, as the indigenous community, Malays were denied the necessary educational and occupational opportunities, and thus were ill-prepared to confront the arrival of the modern world. In this sense, compared to the newer immigrants, the Chinese and Indians, they had a late start towards modernization, as it were. Second, by adopting an outright secular orientation to life’s pursuits, the British colonial state deepened the secular-religious (and its later offshoot, modernist-conservative) fissure that not only characterized Malay leadership in the final decades of British rule but led in due course to its impaired effectiveness. Third, the colonial practice of ‘divide-and-rule’ in managing the plural, multi-ethnic society impeded the post-Independence quest for national integration of the polity, a quest deemed even more pressing upon the departure of British officials in the late 1950s. Finally – though the list is not meant to be exhaustive – the British’ subjugation of the Malay royalty, together with the latter’s other attitudinal lapses (to be discussed later), rendered the Sultans’ leadership over their Malay subjects ineffectual, at the same time sowing the seeds of the dissolution of the Sultanate institution in modern Singapore.

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