Man of Oob

On a coconut tree, along the coastal road of Batu Buruk in Kuala Trengganu were three letters arranged vertically to read “OOB”. For a long time I wondered, as I cycled past it to and from school, what OOB meant vis-a-vis a coconut tree, until someone pointed out that it marked the boundary for golfers swishing it out by the Kelab Cosmo.

"Out of Bounds" makes an appropriate motto for the man who comes to my mind every time someone mentions golfing in Trengganu. He started life humbly as Che Ngah Muhammad, Clerk to the Sultan Zain al Abidin III but later rose to the rank of Dato’ Seri Amar Diraja, the Chief Minister, a Trengganu patriot, a devout man and a skilled negotiator who kept both the British and the Sultans, first Zain al Abidin, then Muhammad, then Sulaiman constantly in check.

As chief minister he sat with another Malay judge (with the British Adviser presiding) in the court of appeal where, as the historian Heussler noted with a Westerner’s unconcealed irritation, “he could be depended on to shave the fine points of Islamic law yet finer by the hour and to find reasons for opposing things the BA wanted to do.”

But it was on the golf course that the Dato’ Amar made his lasting impression on the then British Adviser Jarrett when the latter was out on the green with Sultan Sulaiman. They got distracted in the course of the game and completely forgot whose turn it was to putt. So the man they went to for wise counsel was Dato’ Amar, and for this he finds a permanent place in my non-golfing heart for having given the golfers a long story about Solomon’s [Nabi Sulaiman’s] judgment when two women went to him claiming rights over the same child. Dato' Amar, said historian Heussler, concluded “after a seemingly interminable wait that there was as much to be said on the one side as there was on the other.”

Trengganu was fortunate for being seen as too inaccessible and too economically insignificant to be worth bothering about by the two intervening powers Siam and Britain. In the charming words of Heusserel, Trengganu was “the never-never land of Malaya”. But even then Trengganu rulers and court officials were astute enough to have sensed British intentions from the outset . Governor of the Straits Settlements Frank Swettenham made no secrets of his intention to take Trengganu over directly through negotiations with the Sultan (with the Foreign Office already having one W.A.Evans waiting in the wings as Adviser designate), but when he called on the Raja of Kelantan and the Sultan of Trengganu to get their agreements, the former accepted while the latter declined. Again, in Heussler’s words:

[C]ausing some embarrassment to Sir Frank , who was not accustomed to resistance from Malay royals, and to London , which had already found a man to serve as adviser.”

The British agent in Trengganu met with determined resistance from Sultan Zain al Abidin who refused to accept the 1902 British treaty with Siam.

Che Ngah (Dato’ Amar as he then was) looked at the Johor state Constitution and drew one up for Trengganu in 1911 to keep the British at bay. But this was power against guile, with their resources and experience in divide and rule, the British Agent finally brought in the excuse of maladministration, based allegedly on complaints by disgruntled Malay factions and some European miners, reason enough for them to bring in a Commission of Enquiry into Trengganu.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sultan Zain al Abidin who once said that he did not want to live to see Trengganu fall into British hands had his prayer answered. He died shortly after the Commission finished its work. His successor the young Sultan Muhammad ibn Sultan Zain al Abidin III resisted attempts to bring him to Singapore to sign the handing over treaty. He couldn’t resist for long, but when he did go, on 16 May 1919, he took with him four Menteris (ministers) including our Dato’ Amar and seven council members, all opposed to the idea of British intervention in Trengganu. There the Sultan's attempts to strike a favourable bargain with the British failed; the treaty was signed, and, unable to suffer the humiliation, he abdicated just over a year later on 20 May, 1920 to live in Singapore as an exile.

Muhammad was succeeded by his brother Sulaiman who took the title of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Shah. Dato’ Amar held on to his post as Chief Minister, trying his best to outmanouevre his old foe the British whenever he could from within. He frowned upon Brits who walked about in shorts, but complaints to the BA only brought the response that it was outside his (the BA’s) remit. He was the alim (man learned in religion) who saw himself as the upholder of religion. In this role Heussler said that he was “bent on stamping out animism out of the people’s souls with the white heat of cleansing Islam.”

In 1928 Dato’ Amar had to travel to the Ulu during the peasants’ rebellion to make initial negotiations on behalf of the Sultan. He refused British offers of help and brought with him a force of Malay police officers. It was the beginning of a complicated and sad incident in the history of Trengganu that caused Dato’ Amar, the defender of Islamic religion in the face of colonial onslaught, to cross paths with another religious stalwart, a rebel and a saint, Haji Abdul Rahman Limbong (See "Time Then and Now").

And as history is full of delicious ironies, the two alims, though now on opposite sides, had a thing in common: a distaste for the Brits and their colonial ways.

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Robert Heussler, British Rule in Malaya, The Malayan Civil Service and Its Predecessors, 1867-1942"; Clio Press, Oxford, England; 1981.