This Trengganu

Looking into my friend Shahril Talib’s book, “After Its Own Image”, I find that between 1830 and 1941 we had quite a bit of excitement in Trengganu: Tengku Long, a member of the royal family and a man ‘noted for his prowess with the kris’ was lured to Losong then ambushed and killed in in 1885, and a Hari Raya was cancelled by Tengku Muhammad, heir to the throne, in 1913 because something made him very angry. Now, how did he do that, I wonder? Did he continue fasting for another day, or did he just say to his subjects you people just go ahead, celebrate without me? What did the ulama and the people have to say about that? He was, after all, only the heir, not yet the Person Royal.

During the distinguished reign of Sultan Baginda Omar (1839-1876), a court noble Dato Kaya Biji Diraja snapped under the burden of office and went amok; Hugh Clifford’s account of this can be read in ‘The Further Side of Silence’ (Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, 1927). This must have ranked as the most famous amok in 19th century Trengganu; in the next century we had another, this time a commoner who got miffed by some turns in his domestic life, and he became known as Pök Mat Ngammök, shot and buried by some accounts, not far from the bend in the road in Tanjong Mengabang, aka Tanjong Batu Satu.

We had the great flood in Kuala Trengganu in 1926 [see The East Was Red], and the perang (battle) in the Ulu (upriver), in 1928 [see, A Journey Upstream; and Yesterday, Today]. Then as now, judges were torn between two forces, to be just or to bow to the whims of the powerful. Cases that affected the powerful adversely were delayed for as long as was possible in the hope that the petitioners would just drop out from sheer exhaustion. Many succumbed to temptations for personal gain. One judge became well known for being very wealthy and for being merciless to the poor and weak but uninhibited in his favours to the rich and powerful. The British Agent (W.L.Conlay?) wrote in his monthly journal:

“[A]nd when decisions had to be given against the rich and more powerful parties, decisions were made nugatory by not entering the orders of the court or by making a further order altering the first decision.”

As justice sometimes turns full circle, the judge found himself in prison after conviction, and worse. He had to share a cell with former victims of his injustice who proceeded to manhandle him in his incarceration that after a few months he had to make a plea to the Sultan for help. This was Muhammad Shah II, well-known for his bad disposition towards the British, and the man who cancelled Hari Raya when he was an up and coming guy.

Tengku Muhammad wasn’t at all like his father, Sultan Zain al ‘Abidin III, a wihdrawn man who immersed himself in Arabic tomes and texts, and a sincere man in his religious duties. But even under Zain al ‘Abidin the administration of justice had already been usurped by powerful royal elders who much preferred the adat law to the shariah as interpreted by the learned ulama. In 1912 W.D.Scott reported to the office of the High Commissioner that “none dared to bring to his notice misdeeds of his officials and if they did, His Highness had not the courage to put things right.”

Shahril who read a report of the State Secretary’s Office of the tawarikh dahulu zaman (history of yesteryear) summarises his findings thus:

”There were no fixed places for a hearing. Cases were dealt with in houses, boats, mosques or indeed wherever a complaint was made. In addition there was no machinery for enforcing the decisions except force employed by the favour of some chiefs.”

Looking at this broadly, Trengganu was then in a difficult state: the British were applying pressure on Zain al ‘Abidin to accept an ‘adviser’. “I hope I will not live to see a British ‘adviser’ in Trengganu,” Zain al ‘Abidin reputedly said. He died while preparations were on-going in 1918.

The following year, acting under pressure, his son Sultan Muhammad was summoned to Singapore to sign a new agreement accepting an Adviser in Trengganu. [see, Man of Oob] In those circumstances, enemies of enemies became friends and judgments became clouded by ulterior motives. When the British asked Tengku Muhammad to dismiss a corrupt judge, for instance, the Tengku took him into his pay as legal adviser. So, not surprisingly, when the plea came from inside for the Sultan (as he later became) to deal with the manhandling cell-mates, the Sultan ordered the corrupt judge released from gaol and sent on a pilgrimage to Makkah, from where presumably, to work on his repentance and pray for the Sultan to be delivered from perfidy.

It is difficult to judge Sultan Muhammad bin Sultan Zain al 'Abidin from a distance now without also bearing in mind that he was quite anathema to the British in their most power hungry days. He was variously described as ‘illiterate’, ‘haughty’ and ‘short tempered’; while one official, E.A.Dickson, said he was “presumptuous with a good conceit of himself and full, too full perhaps, of confidence in his own powers.” [My italics].

Reading through the Merdeka papers in the National Archive in Kew recently I found much the same comments made about the charismatic Dato Onn Jaafar (arrogant, quick-tempered, etc) by colonial officers in comparison to the Tunku. But this is not to demean the Tunku's contributions in the negotiations. He was a man much underrated, a skilled negotiator in his own way.

As for Sultan Muhammad, he abdicated the throne after just over a year and was exiled to Singapore on 20 May, 1920.



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Shahril Talib, 'After Its Own Image: The Trengganu Experience 1881 - 1941', Oxford University Press, 1984. ISBN 0 19 5825683.

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.