• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4513 0

For several months there had been Sino-Malay clashes in Perak and in parts of Johore during which hundreds had been killed. The MPAJA blamed gangsters and the machinations of the Japanese. Both of these elements were certainly present, and in many areas unlicensed bands extorted and killed in the MPAJA’s name. But Malay village headmen and policemen were often targeted by MPAJA guerrillas. The killings were concentrated in certain locales, on the plain of the Perak river and the coastal area of western Johore. Both these areas had seen recent settlement from Indonesia, especially of Banjarese with a reputation for the tenacious defence of their honour. In many ways the conflict went against the grain of inter-ethnic relations in the Malayan countryside, which were governed by complex links of interdependence and carefully observed forms of trust. Whatever its longer-term causes, a common theme of first-hand accounts was that violence was provoked not by a general breakdown of day-to-day dealings but by the sudden transgressions of armed outsiders: an arrogant demand for food, taxes or labour; abductions and insults to women. The spark was often an incident in or near a mosque – a demand to move the time of Friday prayers, for example – or involving pork, which is unclean to Muslims. Not only the killings, but their method – the mutilation of corpses, say – inflamed Malay sensitivities. And, of course, rumour abounded, often sparking more violence. For the Malays, the occupation was a time of religious uncertainty. The Japanese had played propaganda games with the mosques, and had tried clumsily to liken their war effort to a jihad. It was under the banner of Islam that Malay resistance to the MPAJA began to mobilize.63

When the times were so out of joint, leadership within Malay rural society could slip away from the established elite. In the Batu Pahat area of Johore, where violence had begun in the middle of the year, the cult leadership of a village headman, Kyai Salleh bin Abdul Karim, came to the fore. A kyai is a local leader of an order of sufis, the mystic brethren of Islam, and sufism was strong in Malaya. This was a tradition of religious leadership that lay outside the established Islamic hierarchy, and had been influential in propagating Islam in the Malay world. As a local religious scholar, Syed Naguib al-Attas, wrote a few years later: ‘Never has the Malay mind soared to [such] heights of sublimity in the realm of abstract thought as when it was steeped in sufism.’ Kyai Salleh, he noted, ‘sports a goatee and has small beady eyes that can at times glow with boyish mischief, or glare with a fury that has been known to strike terror into the hearts of his enemies’. Kyai Salleh’s reputation extended across Malaya, and carried with it the claim that he possessed supernatural powers, such as invulnerability to bullets and weapons. Deputations from Indonesia came to seek his help and sanction. His famous parang panjang, or long sword, was said to have severed 172 heads. He claimed that the medieval founder of the Qadiriyyah sufi order appeared to him in a dream, dressed in black, to warn him of an attack by Chinese ‘bandits’.64 Kyai Salleh’s powers derived from the disciplines of prayer, fasting and recitation of the Quran, particularly the Yasin, the chapter that is read to the dying. An initiate could use these powers only in times of danger and by following an upright path. If the powers left him, it was a reflection on his faith and piety, and his appointed time for death had come. The ‘invulnerable’ wore a cloth of red at their neck and armed themselves with parang panjang, bamboo spears, and the kris – a Malay dagger potent with symbolism. Calling his movement Sabilillah – or the Path of God – Kyai Salleh and his Malay fighters began raids on Chinese villages, and in August and September he spearheaded resistance to the MPAJA.65

The fighting threatened to engulf large areas of the Malayan countryside. There was a connected incident much further to the north, in Sungai Manik in the Perak river basin, where