Race, Space, and the Malayan Emergency: Expelling Malay Muslim Communism and Reconstituting Malaya's Racial State, 1945-1954

Abstract

This article analyses the physical and discursive displacement of Malay Muslim advocates of a cosmopolitan and multiracial form of Malayan citizenship from the arena of "legitimate" national politics between the Second World War and the mid-1950s. It discusses the trajectory of the Malayan Left during this period, with a special focus on the work of Abdullah C. D., a Malay Muslim leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Abdullah's work included helping to build the Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya (PKMM) under the MCP's United Front strategy from 1945, creating the MCP's Department of Malay Work in 1946, and establishing the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) in 1949. This work was essential to the MCP's outreach to Malay Muslims after Malaya's failed national revolution, which collapsed into racial conflict without achieving independence for the British colony. The Malayan Emergency was declared in 1948, and its military and social campaigns eliminated or displaced the MCP's leadership and much of the MNLA, including Abdullah and the rest of the Tenth Regiment, to Thailand by 1954. Despite his continued engagement with political movements in Malaya, Abdullah's vision for a new politics for Malay Muslims was effectively displaced into the realm of nostalgia. His ideas, outlined in MNLA pamphlets and periodicals like Tauladan (Exemplar), never made significant inroads in Malaya, whose racial state the Emergency re-established, using race to manage the threat to its interests posed by leftist politics.