Hafiz Zakariya

Early twentieth-century Malay Peninsula witnessed the emergence of Islamic reform movements. The Malay reformists who were discontented with the socio-economic and political conditions of the Malays criticised the Malay elites and called for “reformation” of their society. The Malay reformists derived inspirations for their reformist ideology from the leading Middle Eastern reformists, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida and others, known as salafiyyah. Available data suggest that the transmission of salafiyyah ideas in particular, and Middle Eastern reformism in general, to Malay Peninsula were made possible by many factors. Of these factors, the roles of the haramayn, the centres of learning in Cairo and the invention of printing machines have been least explored. This study attempts to fill in the void in the existing literature.

Muslims from the Middle East and the Malay Archipelago was due to many factors, including the rapid development in navigation technology, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the monetization of the colonial economy, which benefited certain classes in the colony, and the greater global mobility of populations.2 Other variables that have not received sufficient scholarly attention are the roles of the haramayn and Cairo, and the impact of printed media in the transmission of ideas. This study analyses the role of these three hitherto neglected variables in the spread of the Islamic reformist ideas in the Malay Archipelago in the light of available archival data.

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