A new tittle-tattle on who are the Malays

By Mansor bin Puteh

I am somewhat baffled and a little enlightened with the ongoing ‘debate’ on what and who constitutes a Malay and why he cannot be so. This to me is nothing but a new tittle-tattle for the lonely souls. The insinuation is that the Malays must be of a certain color, shape and style.

 

And because of that I do not like it when there are some people who now choose to call some of the Malays as Arab-Muslims or Indian-Muslims, as though they are not Malays and had never been such. It is offensive and legally wrong or politically incorrect. They only aim to belittle and offend not only to the said persons but his ancestors down the line.

There are some Malays who proudly and unabashedly call themselves ‘Arab-Muslims’ because they have the Sheikh or Syed title.  But don’t they also know that there are many people in India and China who also have those titles, but they do not wish to be called Arabs but Indians or Chinese? They only know that they have Arab ancestry.

Many in Indonesia, especially, have discarded them altogether for they had lost their luster and significance over time because the titles have become a burden for those who have them are not able to exhibit qualities and values of their ancestors.

These titles could also have been picked and registered by their ancestors, like what had happened to someone I knew who was Indian-Muslim but who registered his name and those of his sons the title ‘Syed’ although all his other relatives are not.

The truth is that many Malays do not know what their ancestries are, so they accept the fact that they are Malays because they have been so all their lives.

I have just returned from a brief Hari Raya Haji trip to my hometown, Melaka, where I had taken this issue with me. And for the first time I began to see all my Malay relatives, friends and other strangers and wondered if they might also have non-Malay ancestry because all of them look different. I know my relatives all have Chinese ancestry, but that is not enough for any of us to claim to be less Malay although in my early childhood we also used to eat using chopsticks at home and ate Chinese food long before they became common staple for all Malays.

Some of my sisters-in-law ‘were Chinese’ who were given to Malay couples as kids and who didn’t care about it including my grand-aunt whose brothers and sisters came searching for her after she had already become a grandmother of her own. 

And what is more confusing is when I realize that the ‘Malay look’ is difficult to judge. Is it the one who has short nose, dark skin or round eyes?! How many Malays look like that these days?

Therefore, we cannot be wrong when we say that the Malays are a truly remarkable race, unlike any other because of that. One can look like a Native American, Alaskan, South American, Nepalese, Myanmar, Thai, Filipino, etc. as what I had experienced in many of my trips to foreign countries.

They (or we) can have Mongoloid, Caucasian and Negroid features – the three major racial groups that we have in the world from which variations are created mostly to fit into the nationalistic mold being influenced by the elements over long periods of time and by political, cultural and linguistic considerations, too.

A person can be whom he wants to be.

And the truth with the Malays is that they can appear in all forms, shapes and sizes or colors. It is unlike the other races where they can never be of other types. So one cannot be European or English or Chinese if one is Black. But one can still be Malay even if one is Black, white or in whatever shades of color there are in between the two.

There are few Indians or Chinese who had been given to Chinese or Indian parents who call themselves Chinese and vice versa even if you know that they are not and have different names.

I can also see that only those who have Indian and Arab blood seem to have been singled out like those commentators have a personal grudge against them, but not those who have Chinese or English blood.

The reason simply is because these Malays with Chinese ancestry, as in my and many of my relatives’ case, do not look any less Malay, so we are not singled out.

And for that matter the Babas and Nyonyas of old who spoke only Malay and dressed and ate Malay foods other than their own types of foods, did not call themselves Malays – simply because they were not Muslims.

Only those who had converted to Islam became Malays and in time, their Baba and Nyonya ancestry had become totally irrelevant and are only good for personal reflection.

This proves that a person’s race is not definite; it can be altered or completely changed by our own deeds and personal choices.

In fact, one can even become Caucasian if one lives in the West and one’s off-springs start to change physically until the Malay or Chinese and Indian features disappear completely.

I pity Zam and those whose names have been mentioned by other commentators one of whom calls him ‘Mr. Maidin’, the name of his father. It is plain rude. I had on many occasions explained to the Americans who replied my letters to my father, Mr. Puteh, and they quickly learnt a little about us and called me accordingly after that. Yet, they are now some Malays who are now starting to adopt their ‘surname’, so all their children and grandchildren have their father’s names.

Zam is as Malay as the others around him, and proudly so. One must look at his children and grandchildren to see how Malay they are because he had married a Malay woman who is fairer than many Chinese women.

I know many other Malays who are even darker than he is and who speak Tamil fluently but who still call themselves Malays. Because there is nothing wrong for anyone to be able to speak in another language including English which does not make him or her English or any less Malay.

They definitely do not want to call themselves Tamils or Indians for anything in the world. And this has got nothing to do with getting the so-called ‘bumiputera’ benefits as they seem to be happy living on their own.

But how come no one complained about a small group of Malays who are so western that they just refuse to speak in Malay and are proud to tell everybody how they do not speak the language at all?

Is it because they have become the initial group of Malaysians whom many would consider to be part of the new Bangsa Melayu – race, whatever that means!

And surprisingly, too, no one seems to be greatly bothered how could such a new race – Bangsa Malaysia – be created?

How could those proponents of this new Bangsa Malaysia admit that this peculiar race could be created if we were just to accept cultural and social qualities from all the races and – bam! – we have a new race, the world has not seen before!

I find this to be too laborious to even ponder on its logic and merits.

It must be admitted that the Malay race is unique unlike the others. And this should not be a cause for envy. If there is some, then the energy should be best utilized by conducting a serious anthropological study and not embark on a charade, with the main aim of belittling those who want to be Malays.

One cannot compare us with the other races, because as we all can see the Malays have all looks and are of all types, shapes and even – colors. There are those who are African, Caucasian and Mongoloids.

And with each passing generation more and more types of Malays will appear who will look unlike the ancestors did.

Just take a good look at those who are the television and film personalities and one can notice how they do not even look Malay, with all the make-up and clothes they wear. It is even true when one looks at their names which are mostly shortened Anglicized Malay names.

To me the Malays are those who practice Malay culture and believe that they are Malays including professing the Islamic faith.

There were a few Malays in Singapore who had converted to other religions but they are called Eurasian by their own admission.

Even though they may be originally Malays, but they had never tried to look or behave like them, and with their conversion they have cut themselves out of the race altogether.

Yes, to some extent a race can be created by political expediency.

In the Philippines, the majority of the original people there were Malays. The founder of their republic, Jose Rizal was described as a Malay and the Philippines as the ‘first Malay republic’ by them and no other.

However, with mass conversion to Catholicism by the Spanish invaders they have just become Filipinos, while the Malays who were not affected by the conversion and remain Muslims, are not call Malays anymore but Moros.

Moro is the Spanish word for Muslims. And in Spain and Portugal they are called Moors when they were originally Arabs.

And the Palestinians were not a race of people. They were and are still Arabs who speak Arabic and who are much like their brethren who live around them. But the Middle East crisis and the expulsion of many of them by the Zionist had created a new ‘Palestinian race’. Israel, by law allows anyone to join the Jewish race, i.e. once a person converts to Judaism, one not only becomes Jewish but one can get automatic Israeli citizenship.

In fact the Chinese as we all know have slowly become not a race but a nationality. Just go to Hong Kong and Taiwan and one can find out how this is so.

The Hong Kong friends of mind consider the Chinese to be those who are citizens of China and they often remarked about ‘the Chinese’ as though they are also not Chinese anymore.

And the Taiwanese are just that and not Chinese.

One cannot discount the fact that in the fast evolving world that we live in today, we will bound to see multiracial marriages happening and what do we call the off-springs then? We can never call them Sino-Malay or Sino-Malay-English and so on because it will be nonsensical and laborious. The best is to follow the instincts and choice of the parents, especially the father; so if he is Malay, then his children are also Malay regardless of who the mother is and what color their skin is.

Lastly, someone described a Malay scribe called Munshi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir as ‘Tamil’. This is not true. His great-grandfather was an Arab from Yaman. He went to India and married a local Indian woman and four of his sons were sent to different countries in Southeast Asia with Abdul Kadir being sent to Malaya. There he married a Malay woman with Indian blood and had Munshi Abdullah.

However, Abdullah, like his ancestors, did not practice Indian culture or were Hindus, but Malay; so they became Malay by choice.

As for those who said the Malays as those people who were originally from Riau; well, this is ancient history! All the Malay groups that we have in Malaysia seem to have merged to form the Malay Race. Indonesia is slowly following in the trend; so in time, we won’t see the younger Indonesians calling themselves Jawa, Bugis, Bawean and so on, but Malays, as can be seen when their intellectuals and artists meet in linguistic and cultural or artistic seminars that are occasionally held in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei or Singapore.

And the Arabs are also people who appear in many colors, including with Africans features.

The underlying truth of the matter is that the Malays do not have an ancient caste system or commercial guilds like the Indians and Chinese to cluster each group from the other. So the Malays do not have issues with each other concerning the real ethnicities and the issue of who is a lesser Malay and who isn’t, has never cropped up by the Malays in a very long time.

In the 1950s there were some smart intellectuals who tried to classify the Malays into few unnecessary groupings – the DKK and DKA – which means, the ‘Darah Keturunan Keling’ (Malays with Indian ancestry), ‘Darah Keturunan Arab’ (Malays with Arab ancestry), but there is no DKC for ‘Darah Keturunan Cina’ or ‘Malays with Chinese ancestry’ or DKI for ‘Darah Keturunan Inggeris’ or ‘Malays with English ancestry’.

The issue, however, became irrelevant as the Malay race started to embrace universal values and more races came into contact with the Malays that new generations of Malays in all shapes, forms and colors started to appear.

Anyone can be Malay, if one wants to, or leave the race, i.e. by following the above suggestions. It is therefore, the right of the Malays alone to determine who is Malay and who is not and not the people of other races.