As 2026 dawns, I don’t have any predictions or resolutions to offer, but I do have a New Year’s wish to make. And that is for other, more troubled parts of the globe to be more like the region that I first visited and then came to call home for the past 25 years. I define that as what is sometimes referred to as “the Malay world” – the area of South-East Asia that includes Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia, and arguably also the southernmost portions of Thailand and the Philippines.
This historically sea-facing and trading archipelago contains numerous ethnicities and most of the world’s major religions. Yet, it is similar enough for two people speaking the “bahasa” (languages) of Malaysia and Indonesia to understand each other easily, and for arguments to crop up regularly about which country can truly claim ownership of popular dishes such as the coconut and lemongrass-infused local curry, rendang, sugar-drenched satay or the fruit and vegetable salad, rojak.
On a geopolitical level, the Malay world was considered to be real enough for Indonesia’s President Sukarno to call for the creation of a Greater Indonesia (which would have included Malaysia and Singapore) in the 1950s and 60s, and for Filipino president Diosdado Macapagal to propose in 1963 that Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines should together form “Maphilindo” – a “confederation of nations of Malay origin”.
So why do I think this area of around 350 million people provides an example for others? For starters, while Europe and the US are roiled in bitter, super-charged arguments about multiculturalism, diversity is so baked into “the Malay world” that it features in Indonesia’s national motto, “Unity in diversity”. You can be Javanese, Sumatran, Sundanese or Bugis (from the island of Sulawesi), and not consider yourself “Malay” as such at all (the term is used very specifically in Indonesia). And yet, you are still part of this world. Conversely, many who absolutely insist they are Malay in Malaysia have recent forebears who came from those self-same parts of Indonesia.
It is a capacious term. Under the Malaysian constitution, anyone with a parental connection to Malaysia or Singapore who is Muslim, regularly speaks the Malay language and upholds Malay customs, can be legally Malay. On the other hand, as Professor Anthony Milner wrote in his acclaimed 2011 study The Malays, “In some areas in eastern Indonesia the phrase ‘masuk Melayu’ (or ‘enter Malaydom’) can actually mean to become Christian.”
Significant Indian and Chinese minorities in this world do not think of themselves as Malay. Yet they are integral to it, with the Peranakan Chinese – known in Bahasa as “orang Cina bukan Cina” ("a not-Chinese Chinese person") – having arrived in the archipelago hundreds of years ago and developing their unique mix of ancient Chinese and local culture.
This is not to say that there have never been any racial tensions – local laws to nip such troubles firmly in the bud testify to past problems – but the variety of races and religions is part of normal life. Lee Chong Wei, the former world No 1 badminton player, is a national hero in Malaysia. The ethnicity implied by his name is simply not an issue. That wasn’t quite true for Indonesia’s Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who was jailed later on a controversial blasphemy charge, but it didn’t stop him becoming the first ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta in 2014. The first chief minister of Singapore, David Marshall, was the son of Iraqi Orthodox Jewish immigrants, and was later his country’s inaugural ambassador to a number of countries.
I see this in my sons’ football teams, where ethnic Malays, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Europeans all strive together, and cup their hands, whether Muslim or not, when the coach says a prayer before a match. I think of one friend whose grandfather was the animist headman of a Borneo longhouse, later converting to Christianity after a Catholic-run hospital cured his wife of a serious disease, but whose grandson is now a Muslim. These might seem extraordinary scenes or events in other parts – but not in “the Malay world”.
I experience first-hand the harmony that the region’s governments emphasise in the friendliness of the once-strangers going about their business that I see on my daily cycles around Kuala Lumpur. Yesterday I exchanged greetings with five of these before writing this column, including the keeper of a Hindu temple, a man who seems to be permanently out jogging, two people who walk down the road to parliament when I ride up it, and a street cleaner who sweeps up leaves near Independence Square. When I returned from a recent two-week business trip, he clasped my hand firmly and exclaimed, “Alhamdulillah, you are back!”
And I admire the courtesy that is customary, such as the way children are taught to “salam”, to bow in greeting and press their foreheads to the right hand of their parents’ friends (who are all referred to as “uncles” and “aunties”). Not just children; adults do it to their elders as well, as I have done when meeting parents of our friends or past prime ministers.
This is followed by placing the right hand on the heart to denote sincerity. Small gestures that cost so little, and yet convey so much: I don’t think it is too fanciful to suggest that they are key to Malay world cultures that are religious and conservative, but simultaneously gentle. Public confrontation is frowned upon. Both parties lose face: some kind of diplomatic accommodation behind the scenes is preferred, which is why disputes are often described as “wayang kulit” or shadow puppetry.
Neither do I believe this is unconnected to a fact which shouldn’t be remarkable, but apparently is in today’s heavily polarised environment. And that is that the states of the Malay world have no enemies. That isn’t just a slogan, although the former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono did use it as that, in the form of “a million friends and zero enemies”. And it isn’t a state of affairs that has been arrived at by accident, as the “confrontation” when Indonesia’s Mr Sukarno wanted to destroy the nascent state of Malaysia in the mid-1960s shows.
Generation after generation of farsighted leaders have decided to avoid war, and promote a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (as they did in a 1971 declaration) instead. Why does any other country have to be an enemy? This above all is what I wish for other regions to learn from the Malay world that I love. It may not be perfect, but I believe it has got much more right than even its own peoples sometimes acknowledge.
