British Policy And Malay Politics During The Malayan Union Experiment 194 1948

Drawing on source material from official British archives held at the Public Records office, this three-part volume documents the course of Anglo-Malayan relations from the fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the achievement of Malayan independence in August 1957.

The Second World War set Malaya upon a new course and forced British planners to rationalize the structural anomalies that had kept Malay constitutionally disunited and racially divided. The revolutionary plan unveiled was the Malayan Union which sought to embrace the Malay states and the Straits Settlements, excluding Singapore, under a constitutional union, and to confer, for the first time, political rights on Malaya's non-Malay population through the creation of common citizenship. This provoked an impassioned constitutional controversy which threatened to undermine the very basis of British rule in Malaya and forced the British, barely three months later, to scrap their experiment. This book unravels the inside story of how the Federation of Malaya was formed in February 1948 in the face of an attempt by British planners to form a constitutional union.

Islamization is commonly seen as the work of Islamist movements who have forced their ideology on ruling regimes and other hapless social actors. There is little doubt that ruling regimes and disparate social and political actors alike are pushed in the direction of Islamic politics by Islamist forces. However, Islamist activism and its revolutionary and utopian rhetoric only partly explain this trend. Here, Nasr argues that the state itself plays a key role in embedding Islam in the politics of Muslim countries. Focusing on Malaysia and Pakistan, Nasr argues that the turn to Islam is a facet of the state's drive to establish hegemony over society and expand its powers and control.