Why Jawi?

In recent times, the Muslim societies in Southeast Asia have been garnering increasing attention. This attention seems to come from two directions: (1) the field of Islamic studies, which has been focusing on the Middle East and its surrounding regions and has come to include Southeast Asia within its research ambit, and (2) the field of Southeast Asian studies, which is searching for an alternative paradigm to the conventional paradigm of ‘state-and-nation based narratives’.

Nevertheless, there are some obstacles to considering the Muslim societies of Malaysia and Indonesia as a collective whole, although there are certain features that are conducive to this approach—such as the similarities of the languages used in the two countries and their shared history in the pre-colonial period. During and after the colonial rule, Malaysia and Indonesia developed their political, economic and social system differently; a fact that caused researchers to conduct separate researches on Malaysian and Indonesian societies. Therefore, we need to find ways of integrating both Malaysian and Indonesian studies, and I personally feel that combining the research materials of these studies can serve as a good starting point for the said purpose.

However, the above task is not without difficulty. Due to the nationalist base shared by both Malaysia and Indonesia, most documents—both official and public—in these countries are inevitably influenced by the said ideology and thus, in the case of Malaysia, the literature commonly states that there has been little activity or movement within the local Malaysian Muslim community towards reviving the value of religion after the 1950s until the commencement of the ‘dakwah’ movement in the 1970s.

Another obstacle is the script used in the documents. The Malay language was originally written both in the Jawi (local script modeled on Arabic) and Latin (Romanized) scripts. Indonesian periodicals started to use the Latin script earlier, followed by Malaysian periodicals, which changed their script from Jawi to Latin around the 1940s–1960s. Therefore, we need to peruse both Jawi and Latin documents in order to understand the Muslim societies prevailing in Malaysia in the 1950s and 1960s.