ARI Working Paper Series

The experience of Penang Malays over the past two centurie , from colonial outpost to  part of the Malaysian state, reveals a people historically receptive to commerce and inter-marriage with other Muslim immigrants to the region. Malay capacity to absorb and socialise in-married or adopted outsiders as “Malays” means that they are simultaneously local and immigrant, biologically hybrid and flexibly  multicultural, enhancing opportunities and a flows of identities between the Muslim Indian and Arab communities. In Penang the elision between Malays and Arabs in particular is highlighted, from royal and elite marriages to dual  role playing in religious and commercial organisations  and literary achievements, whose reciprocal benefits include Malay sharing Arab religious charisma and Arab indigenisation as Malays. Beyond received notions of ethnicity and hybridity, the local expression “peranakan”  best conveys a gradient of  nuanced identities, evoking complementarity between purity and dissonance. Similar logic prevailed in Penang  over  practice of Islam: contributions from Shi’ah and  Sufi sources were often seamless parts of the religious marketplace, which recent political pressure in Malaysia has purged as deviant.

With the Malaysian ethno-national state came official versions of ethnic Malayness, indigenousness, religious orthodoxy, and  new teleological histories which do little justice to the complex population history of Penang. The emergence of local heritage movements, initially to preserve material culture from urban over-development, later expanded to the living culture of traditional communities. One catalyst was a threat to Muslim religious waqf lands, which simultaneously raised issues of Muslim and Malay  rights and identity, and political pressures over representation of Malayness in heritage projects. Under many guises, heritage has engaged with civil society organisations promoting urban planning, housing, education, performing arts, community and cultural issues,  obliged to navigate the political and religious shoals of local identity expression. The award of UNESCO World Heritage status to Penang was fraught with such concerns, when  national priorities, religious constraints and Malay entitlements became entangled in local projects. Contributions proposed by heritage activists of new identities such as “Straits Malays” to Penang’s multicultural variety, may eventually become part of the history which it is one of their missions to represent. How far are heritage endeavours interpreters or agents of history-in-the making?