Kedah: the foundations and durability of Malay kingship / Maziar Mozaffari-Falarti

In 1821, Siam launched a full-scale military invasion of Kedah that left the country in ruins. It remained devastated for two decades until the Sultan’s return in 1841. It seems extraordinary that after 20 years over 10,000 of the Malays who had fled to Penang would decide to give up everything they had built there and return to Kedah. Aside from their supposed attachment to the land, the return may also be seen as a powerful testament to the influence of the ruler. Moreover, the Sultan’s return reflected the failure of Rama III’s determined attempts to replace him. The Siamese were ultimately forced to accept this “traitor” as the legitimate ruler. These circumstances are significant because they testify to the depth and durability of the Kedah ruler’s influence. These, I argue, were not simply aspects of the Sultan, who as a man, was not seen as particularly charismatic, but rather, they were reflections of the power of the institution of Kedah’s kingship itself. The Kedah sultanate is one of the oldest unbroken independent kingship lines in the ‘Malay world’, with 1,000 years of history, and arguably one of the oldest in the Islamic world. In this study I examine key geopolitical and spiritual attributes of Malay kingship that have traditionally cemented the ruler, the peoples, and the environment. Kedah’s unique geopolitical, spiritual and environmental features do not seem to closely follow, and often seem to contradict what has been commonly been accepted as the “Malay model”. Here I argue that the earlier models put forward by J. M. Gullick (1958) and A. C. Milner (1982), fail to appreciate the maritime aspects of Malay kingship. Similarly these scholars do not draw attention to the features that serve as pointers to what the Malay peoples themselves saw as important limitations on royal power. Rather Gullick and Milner analyse the indigenous political system solely from the royalist point of view. While focussing on Malay state system I also examine issues related to religion – particularly the coming of Islam, questions of migration and Kedah's historic link to a complex network of overland routes. Indeed the discovery of two Muslim graves at Kedah, belonging to people of presumably Persian origin, dated 214 AH (826-829 CE) and 291 AH (903/904 CE), may suggest the earliest presence of Muslims in Southeast Asia. The migration issue is similarly significant since no one else has really attempted to explain historic migrations of sea peoples (indigenous orang lauts or else Bugis-Makassar, Ilanun and Siak-Minangkabau) at Kedah and into the northern Melaka Straits. I thus focus on Kedah’s role as an entrepot and communications hub linking the commercial and spiritual culture of the Indian Ocean to that of the Malay world and the South China Sea.