HISTORY | Knowing the Malays

HISTORY | The Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, forming about 58 percent of the nation’s population, with the vast majority of them residing in Peninsular Malaysia.

They form about 24 percent of the population in Sarawak and less than 10 percent in Sabah. Outside Malaysia, there are approximately nine million Malays in Indonesia (mainly Riau Archipelago and the coastal areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan), two million in southern Thailand, 600,000 in Singapore, and about 330,000 in Brunei.

The “Malay World”, on the one hand as propagated by some Malay scholars and activists, encompasses currently more than 350 million people inhabiting areas from Easter Island in the East to Madagascar in the West, to Taiwan in the North, and New Zealand in the South.

Such a broad categorisation includes virtually every group of inhabitants in the Malayo-Polynesian-speaking world.

In the words of Geoffrey Benjamin, a leading social anthropologist, this overly stretched description of the “Malay World” is “as misleading as it would be to refer to the Sinhalese as ‘European’ because they speak an Indo-European language, or to the Vietnamese as ‘Mons’ because they speak a Mon-Khmer language”.

On the other hand...