The Malaysian Social Research Institute

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Nine Saints of Java
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1996) Rinkes, D. A.
D.A Rinkes (1878-1954) was a Leiden-trained orientalist who had a lengthy civil service career in the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia. In 1910 he began to publish a series of articles about the Islamic apostles or Saints of Java, semi-legendary figures of great renown. Sic articles followed down to 1912, which are translated here. These works rested upon oral information collected at the holy grave-sites of these men and upon printed and manuscript sources in Javanase. Rinkes originally planned a longer series, but other professional duties took him away from his scholarly work thereafter. The first of Rinkes’ article concerned Abdulmuhyi, a central figure in the legendary early history of the Shattariyya mystic brotherhood in Java. Thereafter he studied figures reckoned to be among the nine Walis (saints), who are traditionally said to have been responsible for the Islamisation of Java in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These were Seh Siti Jenar, Sunan Geseng, Ki Pandan Arang and Pangeran Panggung. The historical reality of these figures is now beyond confident reconstructing, but there can be no doubt of the continuing popular belief in their importance in the Islamization of Java, in their special standing with God and in the continuing capacity to exercise an influence in the lives of their devotees. Rinkes’ articles on the Saints of Java remain a valuable collection of materials and commentary. The continuing relevance of the traditions about these holy figures, and the continuing belief in their extraordinary roles and powers, are confirmed by the fact that very many thousands of Muslims in Java still undertake pilgrimages to their grave-sites every year. Rinkes’ studies of these saints thus remain relevant today. Rinkes’ important articles are here made available in English translation for the first time.
The Real Cry of Syed Shaykh al-Hady
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1999) Gordon, Alijah (Ed.)
Syed Shaykh al-Hady, militant reformer of Islam and Muslims, has yet to be fully recognized nationally in Malaya for his contribution to the liberation of Muslim consciousness. Syed Shaykh has yet to be recognized internationally for the part he played in this Malay extremity of the reformist movement started by the modernising theoreticians of the Islamic world, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Egypt’s Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida and others. Syed was one of the founders of al-Imam (The Leader) in 1906, a Jawi-Malay journal published in Singapore and dedicated to islah, reform and renewal. In 1926-8, now based in Penang, he created al-Ikhwan (Brethren), the newspaper Saudara (Brother), as well as the Jelutong Press. In these Syed Shaykh Mohd. Tahir Jalaluddin, Imam Abu Bakar Ash ‘ari, and others courageously attacked abuses wrongly sanctified by a misinterpretation of what was the intrinsic direction and nature Islam, which they contended was at all times progressive and life-giving. They adamantly stood against taqlid, the blind following of tradition, which Prophet Muhammad had warned would lead us ‘to crawl into the lizard’s hole’ if our forefathers had done so. Cover photograph: Syed Shaykh al-Hady, grandfather and adoptive father of Datuk Dr. Syed Mohamed Alwi al-Hady who stands at his knee; 1925. Reading the criticisms of this Kaum Muda (New Faction) vanguard of over 90 years ago, one is struck by the realisation that many are still valid today, that Malay society in its religious-culture and religious-structure still stands in need of courageous islah thinkers if the life force of the Malay Muslim mass is to be allowed to come out from under the remaining coconut shell where no sun can shine in. This compendium is dedicated to that vision.
On the Way to Exile: Intermediate Needs-Assessment and Sociodemographic Profile of Palestinian Refugees in Malaysia
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2011) Firdous, Syed Sumayya
OBJECTIVES: This study was carried out with the following specific objectives in mind: a) To identify vulnerabilities and exigencies of the Palestinian refugee community in Malaysia b) To generate a profile (resources, strengths and dependencies) of the Palestinian refugee in Malaysia enabling civil society/agencies/voluntary sector to formulate intermediate and long-term assistance and advocacy programs c) To identify protection gaps, emerging service requirements and barriers in assistance programs and services.
I Painted the Snow Black ... Because we're Afraid of the Days. Palestinians Speak.
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2001) Gordon, Alijah (Ed.)
The title I Painted the Snow Black…derives from a card Wissam Dawoud created for his Malaysian sponsor Animah Ferrar and her husband Syed Mohamed Syed Jaffar: “I painted the snow black because we’re afraid of the days.” Nahr al-Barid Palestinian Refugee Camp Lebanon
Chinese New Villages in Malaya: A Community Study
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1973) Nyce, Ray
‘Counter-insurgency’ A methodological rather than an ideological response to revolutionary guerilla warfare, is one of the words that most characterize our epoch. In a wholesale application of a primary method of counter-insurgency, over ONE MILLION persons in Malaya were regrouped or resettled in the early fifties to rupture the links between the Malayan Communist Party’s guerillas and the Min Yuen or supporting masses movement. Six hundred and fifty thousand persons (42% Indian, 38% Chinese and 16% Malay) were regrouped; 78.5% on estates, 12.3% in mines and 9.2% in other areas. Another 573,000 persons, 86% Chinese, were resettled in 480 New Villages. One-seventh of Malaya’s population was brought into coles settlement or resettled in the colonial government’s will to maintain itself. Families in legal or illegal occupation of the land were castigated as ‘squatters’ to justify their being ripped from their environment. Without warning, 573,000 persons were forcibly removed from their homes, loaded into trucks and resettled, which initially meant little more than assignment to a particular area of earth on which to rebuild their lives. New villages were behind barbed wire, flood-lit, guarded and under curfew from sundown. All daytime traffic, in and out, was thoroughly searched, for a spoonful of rice concealed in a girl’s bodice, multiplied by thousands, could give sustenance to those in the jungle. These previously scattered rural masses had no longer the potential of a sea in which the guerilla could swim like a fish. Kernial Singh Sandhu vividly summarizes this traumatic period in his introductory ‘Emergency Resettlement’. Ray Nyce, who worked for years in the New Villages, details the life patterns of these peoples after the first shock of resettlement. The New Villages, details the life patterns of these people after the first shock of resettlement. The New Villages of Malaya were first organized in 1950. In 1965, New Villages were again formed in Sarawak. In 1971, the fences were going up again around particular New Villages in Malaya. This is discussed by Shirle Gordon in Intisari, VI, i. New Villages, a phenomenon of our times of armed struggle, must be studies of we are to know the life implications of strategic acts. Ray Nyce took his B.A. in Sociology at Muhlenberg College and both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Hartford Seminary. He has lived and worked amongst the Chinese community in Malaya since 1957. He commands both the Hakka dialect of Chinese and Malay. Kernial Singh Sandhu is a geographer. Msri is a people’s research institute committed to the right of the people to control their environment and, as a pre-condition, to research into their own problems without reference to, or control or direction from, any external agency. Should you the reader subscribe to these views, we would welcome your active engagement in MSRI and in its struggle for the continuance of this people’s research organization.
The Propagation of Islam in the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2001) Gordon, Alijah (Ed.)
Islamization of the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago was deliberately stymied by the colonial powers of the 16th century, violently by the Spanish in what became the Philippines, and ‘administratively’ by the Dutch, beginning with Maluku, the ‘Spice Islands’. Where the Dutch claimed the ‘right of conquest’, they claimed ‘the right to implant churches’. But wherever they gained a foothold, Islamization was prohibited while Christianization was allowed. Their policy divided the islands, which is violently manifested today, five centuries later. For the Portuguese and the Spanish, the expulsion of the Muslim Moors from Granada in 1492 was to be emulated when Muslims were again encountered in Asia. Being few in numbers led to calculated cruelty to overawe their enemies. In what is now the Philippines, the islands of the Spanish King Philip II, the indigenous Muslims were termed Moors - Moros - to emphasize the continuity in the Spanish Catholic crusade against Islam. Cover photograph: Masjid Tanjong Kling, Melaka, with pagoda-like architecture, symptomatic of the historical role of Muslims from many lands in the propagation of Islam. It is bitter irony that had the Ming Empire not withdraw into itself in 1433, European colonialism could not have breached Asian ramparts. China had ruled the world’s oceans, but not for the purpose of colonization. Fleets of more than 300, under Muslim Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) made seven epic voyages, reaching Africa. Supportive relationships were established with a multiplicity of states, with Melaka, for instance, which kept Siamese Buddhist land aggrandizement in check. In 1419 in response to complaints by Melaka’s Sultan Iskandar Shah, the Emperor of China admonished Ayudyha: “I have learned that without reason you have intended to send troops against him… those who are fond of employing troops do not have virtuous hearts. If he has committed an offense, you should report details to the court. You must not rashly send troops on this account. And then China turned inward, lost its technological edge over Europe, and Asia was left without comparable defence when the marauding Europeans arrived.
In the Time of the Mishmish
(Alijah Gordon, 2002) Gordon, Alijah
Alijah Gordon’s haunting narrative, In the Time of the Mishmish, is set in Egypt during the tumuktuous period when the star of the legendary Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was on the rise. It tells the story of a complex nation desperately longing for answers and looking to the future. But the Egypt of the Mishmish was also surrounded by enemies within and without. Her people turned to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the ‘brown faced ruler with Egyptian integrity re-established in his blood’, who plied their hearths with pledges only to be broken. Three years after the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, the people were still waiting for freedom and the Parliament they were promised. Alijah Gordon’s narrative recounts her own personal impressions of the land and its people: from the persecuted Islamic Brotherhood whose longing was to return to the asylum of a fabled past; to the bureaucrats and pen-pushers who could only carry out their paid-for directions; from the nameless peasants whose subaltern voices went unrecorded; to the great leader Nasser himself, who believed that he and he alone was the one who revolutionized his country. In this work, the entire country comes to life leaving the reader with a vivid impression of the mood of the times. It is also a story of phenomenal successes and disastrous failures, of betrayals and compromises. While the Egyptian people were asking for a meaningful ideology that was their own, their lives and fate were being sold short by politicians and foreign powers conspiring to retain their stranglehold on a country that was not theirs, and on a culture they could never hope to understand. It is a story of a nation in waiting, of a people longing for the time of the mishmash, the time of the apricots that may yet come, ‘for a new world that but hesitantly filters through the slats.’
Bosnia: Testament to War Crimes as Told by Survivors
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1993) Gordon, Alijah (Ed.)
These are testimonies of survivors whose sufferings wrench our souls. The tribulations of those who died under the barbarities of the Serbs they have carried to the grave, to the heavens beyond where surely they now dwell. May God give respite to the victims – sung and unsung – and to their families who have shared their pain. The Serbs who would now rape, torture, murder, plunder and burn alive their fellow humans until yesterday were neighbours. Faced with this human deformation, we can only join in saying: “I have met the enemy, and it is me.” Let our tribute to the brave Bosnian people be cacommitment by each one of us to rid ourselves of our human capacity to commit atrocious sadistic violence against our fellow men. Long live the brave Bosnian people!
On Becoming Alijah
(Alijah Gordon, 2003) Gordon, Alijah
‘U Ba Swe then ‘logically’ asked “what a blonde-haired girl has to do with this problem”. It was a question that would haunt me through all my life: Why? It is not your bangsa – not your race – not your problem. The time of insan, the truly human being, is not upon us.’ Thus reads Alijah Gordon’s account of her meeting with the Burmese leader U Ba Swe in India in 1956, during the Asian Socialist Conference that was held in Bombay. In this, the first part of her autobiography, the scholar, historian, activist and writer Alijah Gordon traces her footsteps across several continents – from North America to the Arab World, to South Asia and finally Southeast Asia – as she sought to ‘crack (her) head on the reality of the people rather than intellectualize on Socialism and revolution. With only a hundred dollars in her pocket the idealistic (though never quiet) American student from Columbia University embarked on a journey that would eventually consume her entire life and work, bringing her into contact with some of the greatest figures of the post-war and post-colonial era. In Alijah’s narrative we encounter the luminaries of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, India and Burma: men and women like the Egyptian historian Mohamed Shafik Ghorbal, Wing Commander ‘Ali Sabri – personal advisor to none other than Gamal Abdel Nasser himself – the Zimbabwean nationalist M. Sipalo, the Kenyan leader Joseph Murumbi, the Burmese leaders U Nu and U Ba Swe, the memorable U Thant who ‘lives on’ in her memory, as well as a host of characters ranging from the intellectual-activists of the Algerian resistance movement, Ba’ath party of Syria and the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) of Egypt down to the ordinary Palestinian peasant who braved the barbed wire and snipers of the Israeli army to serve a cup of coffee to a passer-by, for ‘without their culture, their adab, their politeness, where would they be? Beautifully written, and backed up with a plethora of footnotes and historical references, it is an example of living history captured in narrative form which is increasingly rare these days. A work that would resonate with other like-minded insans who think of the world as their home and the lot of humanity as their own. Dr. Farish A. Noor, Center for Modern Orient Studies, Berlin, Germany
Islamic Law in Malaya
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1975) Ibrahim, Ahmad; Gordon, Shirle (Ed.)
Much has been written on Islamic Law, as law per se, and as it is varied and applied in particular countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia, but nothing has been written on Islamic Law in Malaya. Yet, one could not assume that the Malay would exclusively apply Shafi‘i Islamic doctrine when, organic to his life reality, a totality of Customary Law or ‘Adat had evolved. The essence of this folk-law does not always concur with Islamic Law, be it matrilineal ‘Adat Perpateh areas or in the domain of the patrilineal ‘Adat Temenggong. There are living, applied, ‘Adat concepts at variance with Islamic law yet not-antagonistically coexistent. For instance, the ‘Adat would contend that joint work creates joint ownership (harta sapencharian). Thus the wife who plants the padi creates through her work a right of ownership in the land equal to that of her husband’s. It is only after the Malay’s sense of justice is fulfilled in this way that. As a Muslim, he would apply the patrilineally weighted Islamic Law of inheritance. This work is a major contribution, not only to our knowledge of the Malays as Muslims but to our knowledge of how a society can contain and assimilate apparently contradictory systems. Lawyers will welcome this publication as a guide through the maze of contrary rulings pronounced by one or another colonial judge attempting a “just decision” according to their partial or more full understanding of an alien conceptual world.
Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PAS (1951-2003) Vol. 1
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2004) Noor, Farish A.
“Farish Noor’s quick with and a sharp pen are known to most observers of the Malaysian scene through his regular commentaries on current affairs. In this work of longer breath, he shows himself skillful at sustained historical and social analysis of the country;s major opposition party PAS. Farish’s richly documented historical chapters relate the shifts in PAS’s counter-hegemonic discourse and practice – passing through leftists and Malay communalist phases to various styles of Islamism – to the wider political context, both national and international. This is without a doubt the best study of PAS that has appeared to date, and at the same time a social political history of independent Malaysia seen from the margins. ISLAM EMBEDDED is essential reading not only for those who wish to understand Malaysian politics, but also for students of contemporary Islamic movements. PAS is one of the most important religio-political movements in the MUsllim World today, comparable to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistyan’s Jama’at-e-Islami and Turkey’s succession of Isalmist parties but with a history and a character of its own. This book deserves a place beside the best studies of those better known movements.” Prod. Martin van Bruinessen, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Utrecht University, Netherlands
Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PAS (1951-2003) Vol. 2
(Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2004) Noor, Farish A.
Farish Noor’s quick with and a sharp pen are known to most observers of the Malaysian scene through his regular commentaries on current affairs. In this work of longer breath, he shows himself skillful at sustained historical and social analysis of the country;s major opposition party PAS. Farish’s richly documented historical chapters relate the shifts in PAS’s counter-hegemonic discourse and practice – passing through leftists and Malay communalist phases to various styles of Islamism – to the wider political context, both national and international. This is without a doubt the best study of PAS that has appeared to date, and at the same time a social political history of independent Malaysia seen from the margins. ISLAM EMBEDDED is essential reading not only for those who wish to understand Malaysian politics, but also for students of contemporary Islamic movements. PAS is one of the most important religio-political movements in the MUsllim World today, comparable to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistyan’s Jama’at-e-Islami and Turkey’s succession of Isalmist parties but with a history and a character of its own. This book deserves a place beside the best studies of those better known movements.” Prod. Martin van Bruinessen, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Utrecht University, Netherlands

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