On 21 April 1969, 2,000 multinational delegates gathered for the Kuala Lumpur International Islamic Conference. The Yang di-Pertuan Agong officiated at the event as the Malaysian head of state. Appearing in glittering regalia, he implored delegates to embrace Islam as a solution to poverty.Footnote 1 He and his eight brother rulers from the constitutive states of Malaysia were the highest Islamic authorities in the land, serving as constitutional monarchs under a Westminster-style government. Following Malaya’s independence from Britain in 1957 and its transformation into Malaysia in 1963, the regime under Tunku Abdul Rahman (‘the Tunku’) maintained political dominance. But decolonization was not over – clinching national sovereignty was only one dimension of the Tunku’s grander aims to remake the post-war world.
Contending with underdevelopment, inequalities, and fractures in the Global South, he believed an organization of Muslim-dominated countries, or what he called a ‘Muslim Commonwealth’, was necessary for a just and peaceful world. This gathering in Kuala Lumpur represented the pinnacle of his attempts to establish the proposed organization. Two interrelated cross-border developments – decolonization and the Cold War – influenced the Muslim Commonwealth’s trajectory. By looking to the British-led Commonwealth of Nations to model this pan-Islamic project, the Tunku, who was both Malaysia’s prime minister and minister for external affairs, offered a platform to unite divided countries of the ‘Muslim World’. In doing so, he hoped to foster cooperation, subvert racial inequalities, and fulfil the developmental promise of decolonization.
The Tunku, however, found his pan-Islamic strides limited precisely because of the problems he had hoped to transcend. Extant rivalries between Muslim countries hampered the precipitation of an intergovernmental institution during the Kuala Lumpur gathering. Yet, five months later, Muslim officials convened in the Moroccan capital of Rabat for an emergency summit following an arson attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. This meeting provided a mandate for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an international organization of Muslim-majority states. Despite ambivalent achievements over subsequent decades, the OIC – later renamed the ‘Organization of Islamic Cooperation’ – has endured to this day.Footnote 2 In retrospect, the Kuala Lumpur International Islamic Conference facilitated the collaborative matrix which led to the OIC’s formation. But at home, the Tunku’s inability to solve colonial-era inequalities led to deadly interracial riots on 13 May 1969, catalysing his retirement as premier and forcing him to take on a more-or-less dignified political exit as the OIC’s inaugural secretary-general.Footnote 3
The Malaysian-led initiative to pursue a Muslim Commonwealth was but one of many pan-Islamic projects in the twentieth century. While these attempts may be folded into the eventual creation of the OIC since they share invocations of a global ‘Muslim brotherhood’, they each had ‘its own implicit or explicit vision of world order and decolonization’.Footnote 4 Scholars have accordingly examined these pan-Islamic schemes on specific terms, but the Tunku’s proposed Muslim Commonwealth has received merely passing mentions.Footnote 5
Specialized work on Malaysian foreign policy has fared no better. Abdullah Ahmad has postulated that Indonesian aggression against Malaysia (‘Konfrontasi’) from 1963 pressured Kuala Lumpur to improve ties with other Muslim-majority states to isolate its larger Muslim neighbour, casting the OIC as destiny fulfilled for the Tunku’s pan-Islamism.Footnote 6 But Abdullah sidesteps the question of why Muslim world leaders were circumspect about the Muslim Commonwealth. The Tunku’s temerity in seizing pan-Islamic leadership further challenges the dominant scholarly understanding that Malaysia’s engagement with the Global South properly began under Abdul Razak Hussein, the country’s second prime minister.Footnote 7 As I will show, the Tunku made sustained attempts to build alliances across the decolonizing world but was met with mixed responses, casting Malaysian relations with the West as relatively more amicable.Footnote 8
This article intervenes in the historiography by responding to three questions: why was the Muslim Commonwealth significant, why did the pan-Islamic venture fail, and what can it reveal about Global South relations in the 1960s? Deploying archival material from Britain, Malaysia, and Singapore, this article probes the project’s genealogy, objectives, and reception. I argue that the Muslim Commonwealth drew on different political languages to present a broad appeal, but this pan-Islamic effort faltered because of the competitive terrain of Global South politics and the tenuous nature of the Malaysian post-colonial state.
The first section traces the entangled intellectual threads of the project’s ‘Muslim’ and ‘Commonwealth’ components. Although this proposed organization was built on long-standing notions of global religious solidarity, the Tunku’s endeavour to achieve a breakthrough in the pan-Islamic cause was significant because it represented the agency of a state actor from beyond the ‘Islamic heartlands’ of the Middle East and South Asia. The story of this Malaysian programme provincializes both regions by inserting a Southeast Asian player back into discussions on the forms of globality generated by pan-Islamism, complementing ongoing scholarly efforts to challenge ‘diffusionism’ – the belief that ‘ideas, movements, and practices of Southeast Asian Muslims, are, by and large, derivatives of … other parts of the Muslim world’.Footnote 9
The Tunku displayed creativity in synthesizing multiple political languages during decolonization to underpin the Muslim Commonwealth’s claim to Islamic universality. I suggest that this hybridity in the Tunku’s pan-Islamism was a type of ‘Third Worldism’ which played to the Bandung moment.Footnote 10 Unlike other variants which drew on anti-Western rhetoric, the Tunku’s Third Worldism was an approach to the international that was not predicated on a hostile ‘Other’. It instead pivoted on humanitarian ideals, shared spiritual identity, and desire for development. After sketching the post-war global context in the second section, I foreground in the third section his ingenuity in adapting the Commonwealth model to conceptualize his pan-Islamism, and like Anglophone pan-Islamists before him, the Tunku ‘pluralized the heritage of ideas and concepts … critical to modern politics’.Footnote 11
The Malaysian prime minister responded to the need of the hour by appropriating the Commonwealth model to broker a platform palatable to Muslim leaders who had divergent interests, reckoning with rival projects along the way. The two sections preceding the epilogue recover mixed responses to this Malaysian-led initiative to support two critical observations on Global South relations in the 1960s. First, there remained deep divisions and inequalities beneath the clamouring of South–South solidarities. Second, there has never been a single language of decolonization but, instead, a heterogeneity of idioms within a dynamic, global circuit. The Muslim Commonwealth demonstrates how one overlooked state actor moulded these idioms to claim for a small nation like Malaysia a serious voice in remaking the post-war world.
Eva-Maria Muschik has asserted that international organizations – in this case a stunted one – ‘reveal the importance of agency and coordination, but also fundamental disagreements with regard to decolonization among the broad swath of countries that are often lumped together as the Global South’. Moreover, ‘multiple projects’ to undo global hierarchies unfolded within international organizations.Footnote 12 The Tunku’s resolve to navigate competing pan-Islamic efforts resonates with Muschik’s observations. The Muslim Commonwealth story is furthermore a window into the process of entrenchment of the nation-state system by the mid-1960s. In defining success in terms of uniting Muslim leaders of sovereign nation-states, the Tunku delegitimized preceding forms of pan-Islamic fora like transnational Muslim congresses that did not fit ‘state-centric sovereignty’.Footnote 13
On state-centric sovereignty, the Muslim Commonwealth is a fascinating laboratory to examine the interplay of national factors in international institution-building, a dynamic that is increasingly passed over amid the rise of a ‘post-Westphalian’ discourse in international relations.Footnote 14 Global South actors engaged in conjoined struggles of ‘world-making’ and ‘nation-building’.Footnote 15 State actors like the Tunku, however, had a different latitude for action as compared to non-state actors – the former could mobilize significant state resources to make international connections productive on a cross-territorial institutional register. The Tunku’s failure to manage the post-colonial condition, therefore, became the crux – the Muslim Commonwealth’s fate was bound to colonial legacies in the Malaysian nation-state, namely multi-ethnic tensions and inequalities in the political economy.
Dreams of a global Muslim fraternity
The Tunku’s aspirations for the Muslim Commonwealth tapped into deeper intellectual genealogies. Islam acknowledges a sense of brotherhood among believers, although ‘pan-Islamism’, an ideology preaching unity among Muslims, is a recent construction.Footnote 16 By the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the Islamic faithful were living as subjects of European empires. In reaction to the discourse of racial and civilizational difference attendant to ‘New Imperialism’, both Muslims and non-Muslims appropriated a reductionist idea of a monolith Islamic civilization to serve their political needs, whether it was to consolidate or subvert regimes of power.Footnote 17
Muslim intellectuals perpetuated the narrative of Muslim decline in the face of an ascendent non-Muslim, Western ‘Other’; they posited that divisions among the global community of Muslims (ummah) was the cause and joining with their co-religionists was a panacea. Earlier notions of pan-Islamism coalesced around a universal caliphate, the singular figure of Islamic leadership post-Muhammad. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottomans had begun to promote utopian solutions of Muslim unity under the sultan’s caliphal leadership to salvage their disintegrating empire.Footnote 18 Pan-Islamism also rode the wave of ‘new internationalism’.Footnote 19 Facilitated by improved technologies of travel and communication, there was a percolation of middle-class enchantment towards cross-territorial identities around the globe.
As with other strands of internationalism, the rise of the territorial nation-state challenged pan-Islamism. Ideologues had to adjust the political tenor of their exhortations to reconcile global Muslim unity with national loyalties.Footnote 20 Later, Ottoman defeat in the First World War and the caliphate’s abolishment engendered new nation-states in the Middle East. Ambitious emirs sought a ‘Society of Arab Commonwealth’ to reassemble Arab lands of the Ottoman empire while shoring up Arab claims to the caliphate. But the lack of British support brought their imaginative pan-Arab schemas back to earth, resulting in the creation of kingdom-based states in the region.Footnote 21
As the Arabs stayed divided, international conferences blossomed, reinventing the cause for global Muslim unity. These gatherings mirrored modern European congresses and gathered Muslim representatives worldwide. Enthusiasm for ‘institutional internationalism’ generated by the formation of the League of Nations motivated pan-Islamists to conceive of a similar association for Muslim countries.Footnote 22 Still, besides a shared sense of subjugation under European rule, representatives of diverse Muslim populations lacked a singular purpose and failed to unite under one organization – this ‘broken pattern of congresses’ remained a pale surrogate for a post-caliphal supranational framework.Footnote 23
While pan-Islamic fora peaked during the interwar period, there were talks in England about an ‘Islamic commonwealth’. The metropole was a node for Muslim intellectual networks given that a majority of Muslims then lived in dependent territories of Britain. Scholars like Hosain Kidwai tried to harmonize ‘modern’ political concepts like democracy with Islam.Footnote 24 They began employing the Anglophone term ‘commonwealth’ to enrich their expressions of global Muslim unity. This term has had shifting meanings. Initially encapsulating the notion of a polity built on the principle of ‘common good’, it came to be associated with republicanism following the rise and fall of the Commonwealth of England, representing the idea of equals setting aside differences and cooperating to enhance their overall liberties.Footnote 25
Policy thinkers in interwar London also began to conceptualize the empire as a ‘commonwealth’, representing a ‘free association’ of autonomous communities which were equal in status to Britain. Liberal democratic institutions, shared loyalty to the Crown, and a common Britannic heritage served as denominators for this fraternity of nations.Footnote 26 Political discourse on the Commonwealth was productive of what Richard Drayton has defined as ‘counter-imperialism’, a ‘phenomenon of a subordinate group in an imperial system imagining or organising a similar national/international project’.Footnote 27 It provided Muslim intellectuals with an accessible language to articulate their ideas of a global Muslim union. For instance, Syed Ameer Ali, a supporter of the Khilafat movement which aimed to restore the caliphate, romanticized the Islamic polity during the early days of Islam as a ‘self-governing commonwealth of equal rights, bookended by oligarchic rule’.Footnote 28
In a different corner of the empire, pan-Islamism was already circulating in British Malaya. Religious reformism had travelled via trans-imperial and trade networks, targeting indigenous Malays, most of whom were Muslims. Under colonial capitalism, many Malays suffered from socio-economic marginalization. Muslim reformists called for modernization through education, economic advancement, and the forsaking of ‘outdated’ practices of the pre-colonial order – all while relaying calls for unity of the ummah.Footnote 29 The language of pan-Islamism also cropped up to express anti-colonial sentiments during sporadic incidents. The 1915 Singapore Mutiny remains a prominent example of how global Muslim solidarity intersected with existing grievances towards the British.Footnote 30
Malayan Muslims negotiated with imperial authorities to secure their rights to practice religion, while different social milieus conditioned their political subjectivities. As Michael Laffan puts it, ‘loyalty need not even be singular but concentric’, enabling simultaneous loyalties to the British Crown, the ummah, and the Malay rulers.Footnote 31 The colonial order ring-fenced Islam in the Malay sultanates as an exclusive domain of the rulers who remained nominally sovereign. To further reinforce their centrality over individual states, Malay royalty tapped into a ‘global repertoire’, deriving legal inspiration from other empires.Footnote 32 The caliphate’s demise, therefore, did not instigate a groundswell of support for its restoration among Malays who remained largely loyal to their rulers.Footnote 33 Yet, Muslims in the neighbouring Dutch East Indies capitalized on this post-caliphal moment to formulate a novel strand of anti-colonial nationalism and Afro-Asianism based on trans-border Muslim unity.Footnote 34 Their ideas permeated Malayan territories known as the ‘Straits Settlements’ which had come under direct Crown rule since 1867. In these cosmopolitan cities, Anglophone Muslims were more well-disposed to religious reform because of the absence of religious orthodoxy under Malay kingship.Footnote 35 Malaya was thus deeply embedded in this earlier moment of pan-Islamic world-making within the Indian Ocean trans-imperial zone.
Just months after the caliphate’s abolishment, Bashir Ahmad, an Indian Muslim leader in the Straits Settlement of Singapore, called for a ‘Commonwealth of Islam’ in a local paper.Footnote 36 Influenced by the post-caliphal shockwave, he opposed the Khilafat movement and invited all Muslims in ‘independent and semi-independent states’ to enter into a communion, calling this superstate a ‘Muslim League of Nations’ and asserting that all Muslim nations ‘should join the League and the League only’. Bashir’s plan is further evidence of the League of Nation’s generative impact on internationalism, including its pan-Islamic variant. Malayan Muslims continued to clamour for solidarity with their co-religionists elsewhere throughout the interwar period, utilizing ‘commonwealth’ to signify an imagined global Muslim union. During crises like the 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia, they faulted fissures in the ‘Muslim Commonwealth’ as the reason for European oppression of Muslims.Footnote 37
Malaya and decolonization
Ideas of a global Muslim union similarly carried inflections of geopolitical changes following the Second World War, and perhaps the most significant post-war development was the normalization of nation-states. Transcending the League’s failures to universalize self-determination, sovereign equality and non-domination became the principles of a liberal international order based on the United Nations (UN) Charter.Footnote 38 In line with these arrangements, there was a global push for the decolonization of colonial territories, even though inequalities in distribution of power and capital between states persisted. A systemic rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union also came to pass in the form of the Cold War which later extended to the pursuit of influence over client states.
Meanwhile, the British struggled to preserve their imperial domain and tried to reinvent the cross-territorial structure of empire.Footnote 39 Having denied non-white colonies self-determination before the war, they granted India, Pakistan, and Ceylon independence before the new decade.Footnote 40 British officials viewed the inclusion of South Asian ex-colonies in the Commonwealth as a welcome step in guiding ‘less civilized’ peoples towards ‘responsible’ government. Shaving off liberal pretentions, the Commonwealth mattered most because it allowed war-battered Britain to maintain imperial ties of investment, trade, and defence.Footnote 41 This trend of turning colonies into Commonwealth members continued with the inclusion of two non-white states in 1957: Ghana and Malaya.Footnote 42 Liberal enthusiasm based on multiracialism and equality now became cornerstones of the post-war Commonwealth, affirming parity between members.Footnote 43 Despite renewed imperial linkages, ex-colonies maximized their newfound Commonwealth status to act independently of Britain, turning the association into a terrain for ‘post-colonial globalization’.Footnote 44
Britain, however, could not cope with guarding her influence in the Middle East. The establishment of Israel, the Palestinian refugee crisis, as well as Arab failure to reverse these developments, emboldened regional powers to assert their autonomy in regional affairs.Footnote 45 Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt launched separate initiatives to unite Muslim-led countries. One abortive project was a Jordanian plan to set up a ‘Commonwealth of Muslim nations’. King Abdullah I was probably the first state leader to derive inspiration from the British-based Commonwealth for pan-Islamic objectives. But the Hashemite ruler construed this project as a regional instrument to feed his pan-Arab ambitions, and it died together with him in 1951.Footnote 46 Algerian philosopher Malek Bennabi theorized a similar ‘Commonwealth of Islamic States’ later in 1958. According to his template, the collective needed to be a ‘closed vessel’ free from ‘external influences’ – it ought to be a centre for a new civilization to reverse Muslim decline, not something political or strategic.Footnote 47
Other pan-Islamic projects in the 1950s followed the familiar pattern of international conferencing. These gatherings, however, were now better organized due to patronage from sovereign states, with ‘semi-official’ organizations like the Pakistani-sponsored World Muslim Congress (WMC) beginning to mushroom. These international programmes were consonant with bolder international assertion of Global South countries. The 1947 Asian Relations Conference, the UN’s Arab-Asian group, and the 1954 Colombo Conference were manifestations of a rising Global South initiative to forge an anti-racist and anti-imperialist global order, peaking during the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung.Footnote 48 Fortuitously the largest gathering of representatives from Muslim-majority states, the Bandung Conference generated seductive possibilities of a pan-Islamic alliance, building on the earlier interwar moment of post-caliphal world-making.Footnote 49 The Global South initiative in international relations persisted in the following decade with the formation of cross-border projects like the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. These organizations were world-making attempts that sought to undo disparities in power and capital in the international system between former imperial powers and Global South states by upholding the right of each country over their internal affairs through ‘reinforcing and dispersing sovereignty’.Footnote 50
Within this tapestry of world-making attempts, Anglophile Malay prince Tunku Abdul Rahman rose to become the pre-eminent nationalist in Malaya. The Cambridge-trained lawyer was not particularly pious.Footnote 51 Similar to the likes of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Tunku embodied the secular Muslim nationalist archetype who, while personally irreligious, invoked religion when politically expedient.Footnote 52 Islam was only incidental to the race-based politics of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), which the Tunku had led since 1951. The party was established to address long-term Malay anxieties towards large-scale settlement of Chinese and Indian immigrants to support the colonial economy. During the interregnum after the Second World War, interracial violence became the impetus for returning British authorities to introduce equal citizenship to non-Malays under a ‘Malayan Union’ in 1946. Abolishing the rulers’ sovereignty in favour of a centralized state, this scheme was a strategy to encourage a post-colonial arrangement between different racial groups. UMNO, under the leadership of Malay aristocratic leaders, coordinated anti-Malayan Union protests and successfully pressured the British to abolish the scheme in favour of a federation between the Malay sultanates, perpetuating Malay dominance in post-colonial state-making.
In 1948, the British launched a counter-insurgency campaign against the Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Perceiving themselves as leading ‘a new brotherhood of men’ against anti-colonial communism, the British deployed military personnel from all over the empire-Commonwealth.Footnote 53 One lasting consequence of this conflict was the colonial state’s suppression of class-based nationalisms, confining nationalist politics to the racial frame. The rise of the Alliance, a multiracial coalition between UMNO and two non-Malay parties, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC), manifested a ‘bargain’ between elites from different racial groups. In exchange for citizenship rights for non-Malays which included freedom of religion, UMNO upheld Malay political supremacy as non-negotiable in the post-colonial state.Footnote 54 This ‘bargain’ became entrenched following the 1955 elections when the Alliance won all but one elected seat in the federal legislature.
Using statecraft, UMNO safeguarded Islam as one ethnic marker attached to the Malay racial category. The religion’s constitutional status as ‘religion of the Federation’ was therefore not an outcome of Islamist-orientated politics but a placeholder for Malay political dominance.Footnote 55 Another element at play was Malay kingship. Not least because of the aristocratic complexion of the party leadership, UMNO strengthened the monarchy as a receptacle for Malay privileges, and like in the colonial state, kept religion to the rulers’ domain.Footnote 56 After independence, the Tunku founded Islamic welfare organizations but was careful not to allow religion to venture too close to Alliance-led national politics.Footnote 57 He started the Quran Reading Competition in 1958, which despite growing from a national contest into an international one, remained a cultural event under royal patronage. The Tunku was aware he was not only a Malay leader but also prime minister of a multi-ethnic nation, assuring Malayans that he would eschew Islam as a basis for politics.Footnote 58
The Tunku’s Muslim Commonwealth
Why did the Tunku suddenly position himself as the unifying figure of global Islam? Seeing that religion was ancillary to his politics, the Tunku’s push for a Muslim Commonwealth can only make sense in terms of his calculations of power relations within and beyond Malaya. In 1959, UMNO lost significant electoral ground to the Pan-Malayan Islamic Party (PAS) during the first post-independence elections.Footnote 59 The latter threatened UMNO’s claim as the representative voice of Malay Muslims and advocated for an alternative approach to government under an Islamic state.Footnote 60 It was amid PAS’s mounting challenge that the Tunku’s called for the Muslim Commonwealth.
In March 1961, during an Eid event held at the Shah Jehan Mosque in England, the Tunku announced his desire to establish this pan-Islamic fraternity. He shared that since the Commonwealth organization could unify people from all corners of the world, there was no reason for Muslim-led countries to not ‘join together in a common bond of friendship and thus making a contribution to global harmony’.Footnote 61 Portraying himself as a pan-Islamist committed to the fellowship of Muslims across all divides, the Tunku declared:
We believe that Muslims, wherever they are, are brothers, so there is every reason for the Muslim countries to discuss their problems. I have a vision for the future. It is a time when we can meet together not with the intention of forming one bloc to fight off another bloc but to discuss things for the common good of all.Footnote 62
He urged the 4,000 multinational attendees to encourage their home governments to support his cause. To persuade his audience, he employed not only pan-Islamist vocabulary, but also notions of a liberal ‘commonwealth’.
The Tunku had always been faithful to the British-led Commonwealth. Despite the slaughtering of anti-colonial fighters at home by Commonwealth troops, he defended Malayan membership of the association as part of defence and trading imperatives, even though it facilitated many unequal colonial-era arrangements, particularly in the ownership of the economy.Footnote 63 For the Tunku, Commonwealth membership was an important standard of Malaya’s sovereignty as a nation-state, signifying parity with the United Kingdom and other British ex-colonies.Footnote 64 His understanding of sovereignty as a transformative relationship between colony and metropole rather than a rupture was atypical within ‘the anticolonial transnational’.Footnote 65 He was closer to conservative liberals like Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, who, while desiring national independence, maintained favourable attitudes in their dealings with the metropole.Footnote 66
The Tunku’s friendliness to the British piled on his anti-communism, aligning Malaya closer to the American-led ‘free world’ and seemingly contradicting the neutralism of many Global South states amidst the Cold War. Critics from UMNO’s extremist quarters, opposition parties, and the international theatre branded the Tunku’s regime as ‘pro-West’, attacking his credentials as an independent post-colonial leader.Footnote 67 Despite his detractors, the Tunku, like Jordan’s King Abdullah I, viewed the Commonwealth as an inspirational model to further Muslim unity. Moreover, under the charge of a Southeast Asian leader like himself, this prospective Muslim Commonwealth would presumably trim Arab excesses to achieve a truly global all-Muslim organization.
It was also no accident that the Tunku revealed his plan in the immediate aftermath of the 1961 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference which resulted in South Africa’s exit from the organization. The Tunku had been a vocal opponent of apartheid, a legacy of the racist imperial order. With South Africa gone, he proclaimed the Commonwealth as a ‘living force’ that could finally ‘mean something and play its part as a result of this stand for the peace and good of mankind’.Footnote 68 Although Commonwealth premiers were haphazard in forming a concerted front against apartheid, the visceral effect of South Africa’s exit was transformative, enabling the Commonwealth to renew itself as an ethical force against the racism of imperial legacies.Footnote 69
The Tunku harnessed this anti-racist, liberal atmosphere to maximum effect. Declaring ‘man has to live as man, not divided by his colour, race or creed’, he put across the proposed Muslim Commonwealth – an association in which Arab and non-Arab Muslim states could come together for ‘the common good’ – as part of a larger triumphant wave to forever exorcize imperialism and racial inequalities from the world.Footnote 70 For the Tunku, since Commonwealth ideals seemed to address long-standing notions of white superiority over non-whites, a variation of this Commonwealth multiracialism could perhaps rectify racial inequalities among Muslims – whereby Arabs, by virtue of the Prophet’s ancestry and their custodian role over Mecca and Medina – were seen as having natural leadership over the ‘Muslim World’.
When pressed for schematics, the Tunku placed confidence in the loose Commonwealth model as a remedy for schisms within a pan-Islamic grouping. After all, coming together for the ‘common good’ in spite of differences was what a ‘commonwealth’ was all about, and for Muslims across the world, a shared faith was the uniting premise. This model, at least for the Tunku, would mediate divisions, foster goodwill, and affirm national sovereignty. At this point in time, the Commonwealth operated on consensus between prime ministers of member states. The establishment of its London-based secretariat only happened in 1965, and its main instrument was confined to communiqués expressing shared interests. In short, this post-imperial fraternity sought to project liberal notions of humanity and respect for national sovereignty, as a ‘beneficent force for good’, blind to colour or creed.Footnote 71
But the Tunku tweaked this international framework to better adhere to the principle of sovereign equality. While the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Meetings were at this time still held at the metropole, he imagined a peripatetic Muslim Commonwealth that was a genuine embodiment of ‘free association’, unfettered by imperial burdens of its forebear. Summits of Muslim leaders, according to the Tunku, should follow a rotating chairmanship to honour equality among members. Depicting himself as a unifier, he even shared his readiness to step aside and leave the charge to more influential powers like Pakistan, then the most populous Muslim-majority country.Footnote 72
The Tunku was the inheritor of the legacies of both pan-Islamism that permeated the Indian Ocean world and Commonwealth liberalism. Threading language from both intellectual lineages to offer a unifying blueprint, he departed from many pan-Islamists before him and appeared to understand pan-Islamism not as an anti-Western ideology to rescue Muslims from humiliation but a humanitarian discourse to solve deficiencies in the post-war international system. He refrained from presenting the Muslim Commonwealth as a response to a hostile ‘Other’, avoiding the use of pan-Islamic grammar to condemn Western or communist powers, even if he wore his anti-communist badge on other national and international platforms. Muslim unity instead became a discursive device to strengthen global decolonization, exemplifying a non-racist liberal international order that protected national sovereignty and non-domination between states.
The Tunku’s pan-Islamism was therefore his particular expression of a Bandung-based ‘Third Worldism’, an approach to international politics that sought an independent path from Western imperialism and Soviet communism.Footnote 73 Malaya was a late entrant to the field of ex-colonial states, having gained independence following the post-Bandung moment. This isolated the country from grand gestures of Afro-Asian internationalism in the 1950s, depriving the Tunku of a ‘decolonizing aesthetic’ enjoyed by other nationalists of his generation.Footnote 74 By seeking to brush shoulders with Muslim leaders from the Global South, this British-friendly leader attempted to moderate his ‘pro-West’ personage – the bane of his political legitimacy at home and abroad.
The Tunku was also responding to increasing disillusionment to the existing global order. Collapse of the post-colonial government in the Congo a year earlier turned the fledgling African state into a major theatre of the Cold War. In January 1961, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev vowed to support ‘wars of national liberation’ throughout the world just as President Kennedy entered office promising to take a more ‘hands on’ approach to the Vietnam War.Footnote 75 While Malaya sent soldiers as part of the UN peacekeeping force in the Congo, the assassination of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba exposed a major Global South split in the UN along Soviet and American lines.Footnote 76 The Tunku thus appealed to growing anti-bloc sentiments among Global South states which would later lead to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in September.Footnote 77 The Muslim Commonwealth was therefore conceived as an alloy of multiple political languages circulating during decolonization: pan-Islamism, Commonwealth multiracialism, Afro-Asian anti-colonialism, and non-alignment.Footnote 78
Struggling to correct defects in the existing global order became political currency for the Tunku and other post-colonial leaders during the age of decolonization. In doing so, these ‘world-makers’ sought to preserve the sovereignty of their newly independent states and remediate underdevelopment arising from global inequalities.Footnote 79 Malaya had already demonstrated bolder self-assertion internationally. In 1960, the Tunku tried to cement his legitimacy among Afro-Asian states by ending the war with the MCP and boycotting trade with apartheid South Africa. He presented Malaya as an inspirational model for Global South countries. Enjoying peace and stability, the country’s commodity-exporting economy was the best-performing amongst decolonized states.Footnote 80
Two months after launching his Muslim Commonwealth proposal, the Tunku publicly expressed his willingness to incorporate the British dependent states of Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo, and Brunei into Malaya under the ‘Malaysia Plan’. Uniting these territories would make the Tunku the man who extinguished British colonialism in Southeast Asia. Reminding compatriots to count their lucky stars, he described himself as the ‘happiest prime minister in the world’ because things looked so good for Malaya.Footnote 81 That same year, the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA), another pet project of his, came to fruition to promote cooperation between Southeast Asian nations.Footnote 82 These ambitious strides, while criticized for accommodating Anglo-American interests and Malayan expansionism, pointed to the Tunku’s confidence in shaping affairs beyond national borders, presenting himself as a rising internationalist from the Global South.
The Tunku also took advantage of a moment when initiative for an intergovernmental pan-Islamic institution appeared to have been lost. In the 1950s, there was a peak in pan-Islamic rivalry between Muslim state actors, each establishing transnational organizations to outdo one another. For instance, Pakistan – which, like Malaya, is a non-Arab, Commonwealth player – had attempted to use pan-Islamism to counter Indian hegemony in South Asia and the Afro-Asian movement.Footnote 83 It patronized the semi-official WMC to this end but failed to galvanize enough support from other Muslim-led governments. Egypt and Saudi Arabia even restrained Pakistani (read: non-Arab) manoeuvres by diluting its influence through the 1954 Islamic Congress, another project that did not amount to much.Footnote 84 Dispirited Pakistani leaders deprioritized a pan-Islamic foreign policy by the late 1950s in favour of alignment with the Americans. When the Tunku declared his intention to establish an intergovernmental Muslim organization, he presented himself as the long-awaited saviour who would succeed where his pan-Islamic predecessors had failed.
To achieve what his pan-Islamic predecessors could not, the Tunku affirmed that the Muslim Commonwealth would focus on religious issues to promote development, particularly in newly independent ex-colonies. Since there was no global Islamic authority, he insisted on a representative body to make rulings on doctrinal matters like the permissibility of insurance and investment so that religion would not hinder Muslim participation in the modern economy. The emphasis on policy to modernize the lives of Muslim citizenries again invoked a distinct feature of Afro-Asian internationalism involving the developmentalist urge to ‘catch up’ with the West.Footnote 85 This echoed a type of post-Bandung ethos which focused on the ‘international system as a source of strength and support for state-directed programme for national development’.Footnote 86 The Muslim Commonwealth therefore represented the developmental promise of decolonization.
What was glaring, however, was the Tunku’s silence on the Palestinian cause – a major theme of other post-war pan-Islamic projects.Footnote 87 This underscores his attempt to extricate the Muslim Commonwealth from conflicts in the Middle East, further disavowing any Arab tints in the proposed organization. Still, the Tunku’s promise of non-politicization cannot be taken too seriously. Earlier pan-Islamic incarnations also hinged on the ambiguity between political and religious functions.Footnote 88 In sketching the Muslim Commonwealth, the Tunku selectively mustered notions of Global South solidarity to manifest Islamic universality.
South–South responses
Despite his ‘non-political’ pitch, reactions back home ranged from hesitance to hostility. By turning the Muslim Commonwealth into a policy matter, he avoided infringing the rulers’ domain, but this subjected the issue to the scrutiny of party politics. The Tunku’s cabinet colleagues registered their reservations privately, claiming that the Muslim Commonwealth might threaten the ‘bargain’ because it was too communal in flavour.Footnote 89 Opposition lawmakers from multiracial parties accused the Tunku of acting in bad faith by mixing politics and religion. PAS turned mute.Footnote 90 Defending himself, the Tunku insisted that the Muslim Commonwealth would foster collaboration to solve common developmental issues confronting Muslim-majority nations, implying that non-Muslims would benefit from its establishment.Footnote 91
With feeble domestic support, Indonesia, Malaya’s Muslim-majority neighbour, was in a position to give countenance. Even if pan-Islamism was not reason enough to support the Malayan-led project, British diplomats predicted President Sukarno would not be able to resist stealing the Tunku’s thunder.Footnote 92 After all, the Indonesian leader was eager to fashion himself as champion of Afro-Asia. There was also rivalry between the two nations for influence in Southeast Asia; Malayans were determined to hold their weight against the Indonesians because the latter often acted as if their country was the regional hegemon.Footnote 93 Any measure of backing from Indonesia was however in short supply. British officials tried to explain Sukarno’s aloofness, citing his part-Hindu heritage and the ‘half-hearted’ nature of Indonesian Islam.Footnote 94 During decolonization, colonial-era parlance still pervade the understanding of international relations.
With barely any support closer to home, the Tunku’s proposal found encouragement in Pakistan. Although Karachi had de-emphasized the pan-Islamic line in foreign policy, Islam remained a principal feature in the country’s politics in large part because of Pakistan’s national existence as the Muslim ‘Other’ to India. Pakistan was furthermore the homebase of the WMC, an unfailing advocate for an intergovernmental pan-Islamic institution.Footnote 95 Ayub Khan, the Pakistani president, welcomed the Tunku’s plea for the Muslim Commonwealth, claiming that Pakistan, through its participation in the Baghdad Pact, had never wavered from the pan-Islamic cause. A host of Pakistani journalists, academics, and activists also came forward to support the Tunku.Footnote 96
The most outspoken among the Malayan premier’s Pakistani allies was Attorney-General Chaudri Nazir Khan. He even claimed credit for having conceived the idea back in 1948.Footnote 97 In June 1961, Khan outlined a structure for the Muslim Commonwealth: a ‘loose association, adjustable and reacting’ based on equality between members.Footnote 98 Unlike the Tunku who wanted to transcend Cold War politics, the attorney-general longed for a Muslim bloc to mitigate superpower influence. Khan was however a fringe figure – other leaders within the Pakistani establishment conjured the spectre of a Muslim bloc to capitalize on anti-American sentiments which were at an all-time high due to the U-2 spy plane incident. This event exposed American use of Pakistani military bases for espionage missions in the Soviet Union, causing public alarm about American infringement of Pakistan’s sovereignty.Footnote 99 While ready to exploit pan-Islamism to distance themselves from the United States, Pakistani leaders remained sceptical about the viability of an intergovernmental Muslim collective.
Another supporter came in the form of the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello. As regional premier of Muslim-dominated Northern Nigeria, he was influential in national affairs in the Nigerian federation, which gained independence from Britain in 1960 as a Commonwealth member. Bello toured the Middle East in the summer of 1961. When he visited Karachi, he basked in flattering press coverage, enjoining leaders of Muslim-led states to convene in Mecca the following year to discuss a ‘Muslim union’. He shared the Tunku’s concerns – any intergovernmental pan-Islamic association must be apolitical. The Sardauna, however, contradicted the Malayan prime minister by stating it was ‘premature’ to talk of a Muslim Commonwealth and favoured a ‘broad and pragmatic approach rather than anything more specific’, hoping that the proposed meeting in Mecca would evolve into an international association built on ‘political and secular terms’.Footnote 100
While Bello appropriated pan-Islamic idiom to build relationships between newly independent Nigeria and Muslim-majority countries, his trip to Pakistan distilled the uneven power relations between state actors. Pakistani officials were surprised by the Saudarna’s civility because they had thought the traditional clothes of their Nigerian counterparts symbolized a certain resistance to modernity. The Pakistanis were also stunned to discover that their African Muslim brothers were Oxbridge alumni just like them, allowing both delegations to bond over their shared identities both as Muslims and Anglophile colonial elites.Footnote 101
Like his fellow Anglophiles, the Tunku was not free from similar prejudices. Indeed, he mainly thought of the Muslim Commonwealth as an Asian-Arab association and could not fathom sub-Saharan Africa as its nexus.Footnote 102 His public silence towards Bello’s overtures reflected the colonial-era civilizational world view towards Black Africans which remained endemic within the Malayan establishment. For instance, the Tunku ridiculed the name of Congolese coup leader Colonel Mobutu in parliament at the height of the Congo Crisis because his name sounded like the Malay term for the male private part, sustaining impressions of Africans as less ‘civilized’ than Malayans.Footnote 103 Furthermore, Malaya was late to establish a diplomatic mission in sub-Saharan Africa, although this was a consequence of both uninterest and lack of funds.Footnote 104 The hierarchical relationship between Malays and East African ‘Zanggis’ also has a long sociocultural history.Footnote 105 Racial snobbery may explain why Malayan leaders did not associate themselves with Bello’s pan-Islamic proffers.
Affirming his Asian-Arab bias, the Tunku canvassed support by writing to Middle Eastern leaders to sell his Muslim Commonwealth idea but received no responses.Footnote 106 In November 1961, a dejected Tunku openly faulted the Arabs for their failure to engage.Footnote 107 He did receive a warm letter from King Hussein of Jordan later that month, however. Peeling away the niceties, the Jordanian monarch patronized the Tunku, lecturing the latter not to stoke Arab insecurities about global Muslim leadership.Footnote 108 Hussein and King Saud of Saudi Arabia later conveyed their intentions to organize international conferences following Bello’s Middle East tour.Footnote 109 In the clearest indication yet of fractures among Muslim-led states, there were four international Islamic summits in 1962 under the auspices of four different organizations, respectively taking place in Jerusalem, Mecca, Baghdad, and Cairo.Footnote 110
Because these summits failed to engage with the Tunku’s plans, Kuala Lumpur, apprehensive towards the intentions of other Muslim leaders, deliberately sent low-ranking delegations.Footnote 111 During the meeting in Mecca, the Saudis overshadowed other participants including Bello, who a year earlier had done the spadework to promote the gathering. The summit resulted in the creation of the Muslim World League (MWL), a quango which was to become the lynchpin of a Saudi-led missionary export of a more dogmatist Islam.Footnote 112 This latest pan-Islamic organization signalled Saudi Arabia’s proactive approach under the reign of its new ruler, Prince Faisal, in building international links with other Muslim-led states.Footnote 113 The Malayan delegates, who went in their personal capacities, relayed that other delegations remained suspicious of the MWL’s political character, depriving the Saudis of carte blanche to seize global Muslim leadership.Footnote 114 Muslim-led countries, while singing the chorus of solidarity, were hierarchical, divided, and rivalrous.
The struggle for pan-Islamic leadership
Arab inattention to his Muslim Commonwealth plan propelled the Tunku to gravitate closer to Pakistan, seeking to make the most out of receptive quarters. In October 1962, he called on Pakistan’s leaders as part of a larger tour to South Asia. As this was his first official visit as Malayan prime minister to India and Pakistan, two senior Commonwealth partners, he did not waste the opportunity to flaunt his grand visions for the world. Furthermore, amid ongoing discussions with London on the Malaysia Plan, he persuaded Indian and Pakistani leaders to lend their support for the enlarged federation. His hosts gave their blessings – how could the leading lights of Asian anti-colonialism do otherwise when he sold the Malaysia Plan as a grand measure to decolonize Southeast Asia?
However, his plan for a Muslim Commonwealth was met with ambivalence. For weeks, there had been robust debate in the Pakistani press about its viability. These discussions primed the country for the Tunku’s exuberant reception upon landing in Pakistan. His cordial interactions with Pakistani leaders even led the British high commissioner in Karachi to laud the formation of an alternative Muslim axis of Commonwealth nations to dilute anti-West, Nasserite influence among Muslim-led states. The visit nevertheless betrayed Pakistani reservations about the Muslim Commonwealth. President Khan resisted an unequivocal endorsement but compromised on a conservatively worded communique:
The President and Prime Minister were in full agreement that there is a closer need to promote closer ties among Muslim countries and peoples and the two leaders will give their attention to this end.Footnote 115
The subtext was clear: the Pakistani leadership continued to deem any intergovernmental structure based on Islamic ties as having little dividends.
On the second leg of his trip, the Tunku did not broach the subject of the Muslim Commonwealth, although India could be an interested party since it was home to a substantial Muslim population. The Malayan premier instead chose to parade his anti-communist credentials. It was also an opportune moment because his visit coincided with the outbreak of the 1962 border war between India and Communist China. To the delight of Indian leaders, the Tunku extolled Malayan victory against the MCP, which was seen as a proxy of Beijing, allowing him to claim prestige for being an international anti-communist hero.Footnote 116 His grandstanding, however, risked embarrassing his previous host considering Pakistan’s recent reproachment with China to keep Indian regional influence in check.Footnote 117
As Cold War divisions complicated the Tunku’s pan-Islamism, there is no evidence to show that the Tunku discussed the Muslim Commonwealth with Jawaharlal Nehru. On the one hand, it might have been tempting to exploit the Indian prime minister’s clout in the Global South to legitimize the project.Footnote 118 The Tunku, on the other hand, might have pushed Nehru into a tight spot by asking him to back a religiously inflected international construction because the national body of secular multi-ethnic India was precarious enough as it was. The Malayan prime minister also knew Nehru’s support could be offensive to other Muslim powers, particularly India’s arch-nemesis, Pakistan. There was nevertheless a curious development: the Indians awarded the Tunku an honorary doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University. The institution was not only an eminent centre for Islamic instruction, but also an epicentre for South Asian-Muslim separatism which gave birth to Pakistan. It ironically sat on the Indian side of the post-partition border. Just a year before the Tunku’s visit, India conferred the same honour to another prominent pan-Islamist, Egypt’s President Nasser. The decision to grant the Tunku the doctorate could be interpreted as the Indian government’s strategy of one-upmanship in pan-Islamic diplomacy against Pakistan. This symbolic ordainment helped legitimize the Tunku’s pan-Islamic credentials for a global audience.
Despite his best efforts to realize the Muslim Commonwealth, the Tunku could neither maintain domestic nor international momentum. Other preoccupations scuppered the pan-Islamic project. When the Malayan leadership was in the thick of negotiations for Malaysia, Lim Chin Siong, leader of the Barisan Sosialis in Singapore, denigrated the Muslim Commonwealth by calling it a ‘fantastic idea’. Having his own agenda to oppose Singapore’s merger with Malaya, Lim interpreted the Tunku’s pan-Islamism as indicative of the latter’s insincerity about the Malaysia Plan since the prime minister was distracted with global religious projects while appearing indifferent about the rights of non-Muslim minorities in the enlarged federation.Footnote 119 Fearing a Malay-dominated agenda under Kuala Lumpur’s dominance, the Malaysia Plan continued to be contested by multiple parties.Footnote 120
President Sukarno, in the meantime, aggressively opposed Malaysia, claiming it was a ‘neo-colonial’ ploy by the Western powers. In February 1963, Sukarno-friendly Indonesian communists burnt an effigy of the Tunku. This inadvertently strengthened the Malayan premier’s position. UMNO’s youth wing, known to be pro-Indonesia and critical of the Tunku’s commitment to the Commonwealth, threw their undivided support behind their party chief. They blamed Jakarta for bilateral tensions by refusing to back the Tunku’s pan-Islamic initiatives.Footnote 121 After Malaysia’s successful formation in September 1963, Sukarno launched Konfrontasi, pushing Kuala Lumpur to turn to Afro-Asian partners to ostracize Indonesia.Footnote 122
Contentions over Malaysia’s international legitimacy also took place through pan-Islamic channels. Since 1962, the Malaysian capital had been home to the regional office of Pakistani-sponsored WMC.Footnote 123 In February 1964, Kuala Lumpur hosted the organization’s regional conference. To no one’s surprise, Sukarno boycotted the event. Delegates passed a resolution pleading for ‘Muslim brothers’ Indonesia and Malaysia to resolve their differences. There was also ‘unanimous support’ for the Tunku’s appeal for a Muslim Commonwealth.Footnote 124 To further bolster his influence in the Muslim World, the Tunku intensified his pan-Islamic diplomacy by expanding the Quran Reading Competition which in 1965 included fourteen countries, including newcomers Iran and Turkey.Footnote 125
Malaysia’s increasing prominence in pan-Islamic circles eventually got to Sukarno. He convened the Afro-Asian Islamic Conference in Bandung during the lead up to the ten-year anniversary of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference to exploit symbolic capital. During the meeting, a Ceylonese delegate was alleged to have remarked that Malaysia was ‘an illegitimate child’ – the Tunku was its father and neo-colonialism was its mother. Although the delegate denied the offensive allegation, the false report was widely publicized.Footnote 126 In the end, the Indonesians failed to pass a resolution to condemn Malaysia, with influential Muslim powers like Saudi Arabia choosing not to attend, suspicious of Sukarno’s surreptitious intentions.Footnote 127 The Tunku, however, suffered a momentary setback when Pakistan severed ties with Malaysia during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, accusing Kuala Lumpur of being partial to India. But with the intervention of the Shah of Iran, relations were restored not long after.Footnote 128 In 1966, Suharto, the new Indonesian president, ended Konfrontasi.
A year later, the Six-Day War marked a turn of the tide. Malaysian leaders supported Arab countries against Israel and pledged aid for Palestinian and Jordanian refugees.Footnote 129 But the Tunku resented the Arabs for their snub of the Muslim Commonwealth. Confiding in the American ambassador to Malaysia, the prime minister remarked, ‘those bastards, they started running before the price of rubber had time to go up!’, in light of subsequent market shocks which threatened Malaysia’s position as the world’s top rubber exporter.Footnote 130 Another reason for Malaysia’s intensified pan-Islamic efforts was Britain’s pivot away from the Commonwealth towards the European Economic Community (EEC), pressuring the Tunku and other Commonwealth leaders to seek markets and capital beyond their fraternal links.Footnote 131
With Malaysia’s improving relations with the Global South, the Tunku clung onto hopes for a Muslim Commonwealth under his leadership. Tan Chee Koon, the Malaysian opposition leader, blamed the Tunku’s devotion to the Muslim Commonwealth for aggravating tensions in the Middle East following the Six-Day War. Tan’s allegation was politically mischievous. It came when intercommunal cleavages were deepening in the country due to the national language controversy which arose from strident attempts by Malaysian Chinese leaders to get Mandarin recognized as an official language in the Malay-dominated state.Footnote 132 The Tunku was under mounting pressure from UMNO ethno-extremists who were impatient with his compromising attitudes towards non-Malays and his failure to improve the Malay socio-economic position. Shunning politicization of Islam, the Tunku admitted that while the Muslim Commonwealth proposal appeared as if it had ‘fallen through because of lack of interest’, he only had harmonious intentions. He professed, ‘the Muslim religion is a religion of peace, and I am a peaceful man’.Footnote 133
The catastrophic defeat of the Arab coalition under Nasser’s leadership drastically shifted the geopolitical mood. A Malaysian delegate in the Saudi-backed MWL appealed to Kuala Lumpur to take the initiative to unite the ‘Muslim World’.Footnote 134 Sensing the wind of change, the Tunku deployed Abdul Rahman Ya’akub, one of his ministerial protégés, to solicit support for an all-Muslim intergovernmental meeting in Malaysia. Even before Minister Abdul Rahman’s expedition to Muslim-led countries in the summer of 1968, Pakistani officials approved the renewed pan-Islamic drive but arrested any grand ambitions on the Tunku’s part. They counselled him about the political connotations of a ‘Commonwealth of Muslim States’ and cautioned him to avoid offending the Arabs who were sensitive about ‘leadership of the Muslim World’.Footnote 135
Discounting Pakistani warnings, the Malaysians maintained that the Kuala Lumpur meeting would be a mere ‘conference’. Learning from his earlier advances, the Tunku cast his net wide and cajoled sub-Saharan countries to support the proposed pan-Islamic gathering. But national woes began to gnaw on his ambitions, with the Malaysian Treasury flagging budgetary concerns due to the opulence of Minister Abdul Rahman’s multination tour to Muslim lands. The Malaysian delegation eventually prioritized visiting ‘important’ Arab states, indicating yet again the presence of a hierarchy of Muslim-majority countries.Footnote 136
As the Tunku tested international waters, the Iranian ambassador to Thailand informed his Malaysian counterpart that Tehran – while agreeable to the idea of a Muslim Commonwealth – abhorred fraternizing with the Arabs. Tensions were high in the Persian Gulf because Arab states had refused to recognize the Shah’s sovereign claim over Bahrain, which was anticipating its independence from Britain. Faisal, now king of Saudi Arabia, even inked a defence pact with Bahrain, prompting the Iranian ambassador to accuse the Arabs of ganging up against Iran. Trying to stir some sort of non-Arab Muslim solidarity with Malaysia, he branded the Arabs ‘Bedouin savages’ and ‘uncivilized’.Footnote 137 Inequalities, mutual suspicions, and prejudices between Muslim-majority states festered. Undeterred by these odious sentiments, the Malaysians pressed on to secure backing from Iran and seven other countries for a ‘non-political’ Muslim conference.Footnote 138
Threatening to upstage the Tunku’s schemes, the Saudis, while relaying support for the Tunku’s pan-Islamic zeal, hosted another international pan-Islamic meeting later in October 1968 just three months after Minister Abdul Rahman’s visit to Saudi Arabia. With Nasser discredited following the Six-Day War, Faisal, like the Tunku, could not resist capitalizing on this geopolitical shift, denying other players from filling the vacuum in global Muslim leadership. The Meccan summit was the most impressive one yet as it brought together four pan-Islamic organizations to not only condemn Israeli aggression but also discuss theological reform.Footnote 139
While the Saudis threatened to undercut his pan-Islamic game, the Tunku persevered with plans to host an all-Muslim meeting in the Malaysian capital, now christened as the ‘Kuala Lumpur International Islamic Conference’, initially planned for December 1968. To persuade Muslim world leaders to support this event, the Tunku notified them in November that the Malaysian-led Conference, unlike the one in Mecca, would only accept representatives ‘at the governmental level’. Rebuffing Faisal, he stressed that the Conference would discuss ‘religious matters’ and would not be used as a platform ‘for political propaganda of any one country, and there should be no condemnation of any country, ideology or creed’.Footnote 140 The message was clear – if you were a sovereign government, you would send representatives, and there should be no fears of being exploited by a larger Muslim power. Every country in the Conference would be respected based on sovereign equality.
Malaysian civil servants, however, warned him government coffers could not afford such a pompous gathering due to poor performance in the economy, but the Tunku overruled them.Footnote 141 To paper over the red in budgetary calculations, the Malaysian government postponed the Conference to April 1969 to defer expenses to a new financial year. British observers recognized the Tunku’s ambitions, reporting that ‘if they (Malaysians) could make a success of it, they would only be too pleased to institutionalize the arrangements in some way to keep themselves in the limelight’.Footnote 142 The Tunku instructed Minister Abdul Rahman to supervise preparations since the latter had undertaken publicity work during his multination tour a year earlier. When pressured by lawmakers for details, Minister Abdul Rahman remained coy on whether the Kuala Lumpur Conference would lead to a Muslim Commonwealth.Footnote 143
The Conference’s planning committee consciously avoided frightening delegations with politics since many Muslim-led countries were at each other’s throats back home. The theme of the gathering thus had to be unassuming: ‘executing the teachings of Islam conducive to the changing times’.Footnote 144 Still, to convey how the Malaysian project was more ‘exceptional’, committee members adopted familiar pan-Islamic vocabulary about the ‘Muslim World’ being in decline. In their meetings, they spotlighted the Six-Day War as evidence of Arab failure to lead the ummah.Footnote 145 A freshly baptized international drive under a non-Arab country – a country like Malaysia for instance – would presumably offer a new lease of life to the pan-Islamic cause.
The Conference’s discussion topics were then set out: first, Islamic teachings; second, social issues; and third, the economy. Working papers focused on a range of issues, from the permissibility of contraception to investment in high-technology capital. The committee insisted Muslim governments should aim to overcome underdevelopment left behind by the colonial order, seeing it as a shared objective ‘to encourage brotherhood among Muslim countries’.Footnote 146 The logic was clear – common ground was based on similar developmental challenges. While the planners were unsure about including Palestine on the main agenda fearing it could trigger a political debate, they decided that ‘the issue is not of political ideology but of immediate concern of the Muslims’ and therefore it could be discussed if necessary.Footnote 147 Since the Palestinian cause was potentially explosive as Arab leaders jealously guarded the role of Palestinian champion from one another, the Malaysians were careful to pitch politically sensitive topics as only secondary to developmental imperatives.
Despite ambiguous intentions, the Conference proceeded as planned. With the Tunku insisting on only welcoming official delegations representing Muslim-led sovereign governments, the intergovernmental platform was the first of its kind to reach a new register of legitimacy within the nation-states system.Footnote 148 Another important development was the last-minute participation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) – at this time still a militia occupying Jordanian territory – after its commandos gate-crashed the event. To improve his stature amongst the Arabs, the Malaysian premier made the seemingly magnanimous decision to not only grant their entry into the Conference, but also allow them to set up a mission in Kuala Lumpur.Footnote 149 These moves elevated the PLO’s status to a stately entity and tied Malaysia closer to the Palestinian cause, signalling the Tunku’s departure from previous disassociation with Arab-based conflicts and his growing desire to cast the Palestinian cause as a concern for Arab and non-Arab Muslims alike.
Despite the host’s desire to downplay the Palestinian issue, Israel featured prominently during the pan-Islamic forum. A Jordanian minister, Abdullah Gushah, appealed to Muslim leaders for material and military aid, remonstrating about Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which were previously under Jordanian control.Footnote 150 Delegates from all nineteen nations later responded to his call to ‘free Jerusalem’ by passing a resolution to condemn Israel, entreating Muslim nations to support victims of Zionist aggression.Footnote 151 Citing the UN Charter which forbade acquisition of land by force, delegates branded Israeli actions as ‘imperialist expansion’, of course, to invoke the spectre of colonial humiliation among Muslim nations, many of which were ex-colonies. Hoping to retain prominence, Malaysian delegates volunteered to host another conference to discuss the matter.Footnote 152
Closing the Conference on 27 April, the Tunku abstained from any direct condemnation of Israel but instead cautioned against any escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict into a global religious war. He refocused the narrative on celebrating the Conference as an unprecedented achievement in Muslim-led development, highlighting consensus on issues like family planning and higher education and heralding the genesis of a ‘Muslim renaissance’. The Tunku claimed, ‘the seed has now been sown and for the tree to grow and blossom forth into fruition’.Footnote 153 He, like countless doomsaying pan-Islamists before him, warned of the ‘slow process of decay’ in Muslim societies should governments fail to solve underdevelopment as a result of colonial legacies. Yet, with no concrete resolution to support an intergovernmental framework, he lamented, ‘no organisation emerged had the stimulus, vitality, or the magnetism to attract or hold the attention of all Muslims’.Footnote 154 The coming months resulted in the end of the Tunku’s attempts to shepherd world leaders towards a Malaysian-led Muslim Commonwealth.
Epilogue
By adapting the British-led Commonwealth of Nations to conceptualize his pan-Islamism, the Tunku devised his own brand of ‘Third Worldism’. His proposed Muslim Commonwealth aimed to foster cooperation between Muslim-led governments, subvert racism, and meet the developmental promise of decolonization amid increasing global instability due to the Cold War and its expansion into nationalist struggles. But divisions between Muslim leaders and tenuous post-colonial politics in Malaysia limited his pan-Islamic dream. This abortive project was nevertheless significant because of its eclectic character – it was a specific translation of Islamic universalism during the age of decolonization. The Tunku pluralized the intellectual heritage of pan-Islamism and the British-based Commonwealth and took on evolving positions when engaging with potential allies. While he made strides in lifting Malaysia from the fringes to the forefront of global pan-Islamism, the Tunku failed to establish the association as he had envisioned and sustain his leadership of the initiative.
Although careful not to let his pan-Islamic manoeuvrings aggravate intercommunal tensions, violence along racial divides broke out on 13 May 1969 in Kuala Lumpur following the Alliance’s worst electoral showing. The Tunku transferred executive power under emergency laws to the National Operations Council (NOC), tasking Razak, his long-term deputy, to restore order. Although he remained prime minister, the Tunku was sidelined from the political stage as the locus of government moved to the NOC. His political opponents from within UMNO blamed his ‘un-Islamic’ indulgences like alcohol drinking and gambling for his incompetence in resolving colonial-era wealth disparities between Malays and non-Malays.Footnote 155 Still, the Tunku refused to relinquish power despite calls for his resignation. A shell of his old political self, he published an apologia soon after and used his advocacy for the Muslim Commonwealth to portray himself as protector of Malay Muslim interests.Footnote 156 This desperate attempt to make pan-Islamism serviceable for power failed to save his premiership. The Tunku’s struggle exemplifies the crucible of a ‘world-maker’ in the age of decolonization who – on top of striving for a more equal international system – also had to juggle governance of a precarious post-colonial state.
In September, the Muslim summit in Rabat provided scaffolding for the OIC. Malaysia was given the honour as chair of the future Islamic Secretariat headquartered in Jeddah, resulting in the Tunku’s subsequent appointment as its secretary-general at the invitation of King Faisal. It was a bittersweet ending for his pan-Islamic mission. While this chain of events was not premeditated, it provided the Tunku a ‘face-saving’ exit after the riots to focus on his duties in the new post.Footnote 157 He retired from the Malaysian political scene in September 1970, allowing Razak to succeed him as prime minister. While celebrated as a moderate and liberal leader today, the Tunku left an enduring precedent – religion has persisted as a matter for policy in multi-ethnic Malaysia. Successive administrations have capitalized on religious revivalism from the 1970s to preserve political dominance, resulting in the Islamization of the nation-state.Footnote 158
The OIC was a different creature from the Muslim Commonwealth because the latter was based on a loftier vision, imagined as an expression of free association of peaceful-loving Muslim countries with a shared humanitarian desire to develop in unison. The OIC, however, arose from exigencies to project strength against Israel.Footnote 159 It is ‘a child of the “Arab cold war”’, a continuation of decades-long intra-Arab rivalry and responses to Zionism.Footnote 160 The Tunku wore a different hat in this new pan-Islamic institution, not as a powerful Muslim state leader as he had hoped, but as an over-glorified administrator.Footnote 161 As the adage goes, how the mighty have fallen.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Iza Hussin, Joey Long, Sher Banu Khan, Liew Zhen Hao, as well as the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Global History for providing feedback on this article. He would also like to thank convenors and participants of the ‘Making and Breaking Global Order in the Twentieth Century’ Conference at Leiden University held on 14–15 October 2022 for giving him the opportunity to workshop this article. The author is also grateful to his former colleagues and advisors from the National University of Singapore, the University of Cambridge, and ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute for their advice and guidance along the course of research.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Muhammad Suhail Mohamed Yazid is a Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center. He specializes in international history, focusing on decolonization, the Malay World, and the Global South. He received his PhD in History from Trinity College, Cambridge, and is a former Research Associate at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute). Suhail is also the author of He Who Is Made Lord: Empire, Class, and Race in Postwar Singapore (ISEAS Publishing and University of Hawai’i Press, 2023).
Open access
