Malay manners and etiquette
Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad’s “Malay Manners and Etiquette,” published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1950 (received October 1948), is a systematic ethnographic survey of the unwritten social conventions governing Malay interpersonal conduct in the immediate post-war period. Writing as a Malay scholar for a mixed colonial and indigenous readership, Ahmad argues that these conventions—rooted in Islamic precepts, animistic survivals, and hierarchical social structure—had never been properly documented in either English or Malay, and he sets out to fill that gap with a comprehensive catalogue of norms covering everything from head coverings to sexual segregation.
Summary
The article is organised thematically rather than chronologically, moving through twenty sections that collectively map the architecture of Malay adab (propriety). Ahmad treats manners not as mere politeness but as a moral and social system in which the body itself is a text: the head is the noblest part and must be covered, the feet the lowest, the right hand the clean and the left the unclean. Each physical gesture—hand-joining, bowed walking, the bersila squat for men and bertimpoh for women—encodes a relationship of respect, deference, or equality. The linguistic dimension is equally central: Ahmad devotes an entire section to the pronoun system (saya, aku, hamba, patek, beta), showing how the choice of first- and second-person terms precisely calibrates the social distance between speaker and addressee, from the patek used before a Sultan down to the aku-engkau reserved for intimate childhood friends or family seniors addressing juniors.
A recurring tension runs through the text between tradition and Western encroachment. Ahmad notes that the selamat-form greetings (Selamat Pagi, Selamat Datang, etc.) are recent coinings of less than twenty to thirty years’ standing, borrowed from colloquial Indonesian Malay which itself imitated European and Egyptian-Arabic models (p. 46). Greeting cards and invitation cards are identified as products of Western influence within the preceding fifty years, still unknown to uneducated kampong Malays who prefer personal verbal communication (pp. 52–53). The author is careful to distinguish between what is genuinely Malay and what is borrowed, and he is equally careful to note regional variation—Johore’s abolition of the court obeisance, the Minangkabau-influenced greater freedom between sexes in Malacca and Negri Sembilan, the Kelantanese use of hamba in place of saya (pp. 54, 58, 70).
The article draws on no single archival collection but rather on the author’s own long observation of Malay society supplemented by references to the Sejarah Melayu and to Islamic legal tradition. Its method is descriptive and prescriptive simultaneously: Ahmad records what is done and what ought to be done, often collapsing the distinction, which gives the text the character of a normative code as much as an ethnographic report.
Key Findings
- The selamat-form greetings (e.g., Selamat Pagi, Selamat Hari Raya) are estimated by the author to be less than 20–30 years old at the time of writing, having been coined in colloquial Indonesian Malay in imitation of European and Egyptian-Arabic phrases, with Selamat Hari Raya identified as the oldest and the model for the rest (p. 46).
- The court obeisance (palms together, fingers stretched, raised to the forehead) is observed in all Malay States except Johore, which has abolished it; in Perak the three principal rajas below the Sultan receive the gesture at progressively lower hand positions—below the forehead, above the nose, below the nose (p. 58).
- The Sejarah Melayu records an incident in 1509 in which the captain of the first Portuguese flotilla to Malacca attempted to place a gold neck chain over the head of the Bendahara, an act of gross disrespect that enraged the Minister’s attendants until the Bendahara himself intervened with the words “Never mind! He knows not our manners” (Biarkan; dia ta’ tahu bahasa) (pp. 72–73).
- The ritual washing sertu, required after contact with the wet touch of a dog or pig, consists of six washings with water kneaded with clean earth followed by a seventh with plain pure water (p. 68).
- The mourning custom for a Sultan’s death required the head to be left uncovered for 40 days, a practice that by 1950 had been replaced by tying a white ribbon around the cap (p. 44).
- The formal sitting positions at meals are bersila (legs folded and crossed in front) for men and bertimpoh (legs folded backwards, inclined to the right) for women, though elderly women frequently adopt the bersila style (p. 52).
Conclusion
Ahmad’s definitive takeaway is that Malay manners constitute a coherent, internally consistent moral system in which self-depreciation, modesty, and deference to hierarchy are the cardinal virtues, and that the well-bred Malay is recognisable by his reserved, unboastful deportment. He closes by acknowledging that the older view—that only good birth and family upbringing can produce true adab—no longer holds in the changing social conditions of 1950s Malaya, where many of lowly origin conduct themselves faultlessly while some of high birth do not, thereby implicitly endorsing a more meritocratic and modern understanding of social refinement.
Context
- The author, Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad, was a Malay scholar and member of MBRAS writing in the immediate post-war period (the article was received in October 1948, during the early phase of the Malayan Emergency). His position as an insider documenting his own culture for a mixed readership gives the text both ethnographic authority and a subtle apologetic function, presenting Malay adab as a civilised and sophisticated system comparable to European codes of conduct.
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in being the first systematic English-language codification of Malay social etiquette, predating later academic treatments of Malay adab and providing a baseline against which subsequent scholars have measured the erosion or transformation of these norms under modernisation.