Random notes on current Malay beliefs
Haji Abdul Majid’s “Random Notes on Current Malay Beliefs” (JMBRAS Vol. 5, No. 2, 1927, pp. 360–361) is a brief miscellany of observations on Malay folk beliefs and their non-Islamic or foreign origins.
Summary
The note surveys four distinct beliefs. First, the popular Malay story that football originated at Karbala, where unbelievers allegedly kicked the severed heads of Hassan and Hussein, and the counter-argument that Allah invisibly substituted the heads of the unbelievers (p. 360). Second, the author traces the supernatural embellishments of Amir Hamzah in the Hikayat Amir Hamzah to the court of Akbar the Great, where a Muslim minister commissioned the work to counter the influence of the Hindu epic of Sri Rama on the illiterate young king (p. 360). Third, he describes the Menurun batu ceremony — the hundredth-day feast and washing of tombstones in tepong tawar — as a decidedly non-Islamic relic of the Hindu cult, and links the “bathing” of graves on festival days to Chinese practice (p. 361). Finally, he records the large wooden-and-bamboo bird figure kept in a pavilion at Kota Bharu, Kelantan, paraded on state occasions, which he speculates may represent a bird of paradise brought by Lanun pirates (p. 361).