What Melaka knew about unity in diversity

In calling on Malaysians to reject the politics of hatred based on race and religion on Oct 25, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said some people were attempting to “distort history by claiming that this country can only be saved through the victory of a single race”.

“If our ancestors succeeded in building the Melaka Malay Sultanate into a great empire, we can do the same through peace, unity among all quarters, and sound development strategies,” he said.

I couldn’t agree more. And history proves him right.

In recent decades the tension over whose country this is has taken on a life of its own, with those arguing for ketuanan Melayu or calling non-Malays pendatang gaining in strength. So much so that it has put many non-Malay citizens on the defensive.

It is as if Malay political strength and cosmopolitan composition are rivals for the same space.

They need not be, as Melaka’s history shows.

For roughly a century, the most important port in the Malay world was simultaneously the most thoroughly Malay polity in the region and one of the most diverse places on earth. Both facts were true at once. Neither diluted the other.

The Sultanate of Melaka was unambiguously Malay and Islamic. The court spoke Malay, kept Malay adat, drew its ceremonial rituals from Hindu-derived concepts filtered through centuries of courtly tradition, and derived legitimacy from control of the Strait of Melaka.

And yet the city’s population was staggering in its variety. Tomé Pires, writing within living memory of the sultanate’s fall, described traders from around the world who spoke somewhere around eighty-four languages in the port.

Gujarati Muslim traders and Tamil merchants from India traded here; Hokkien and Cantonese-speaking Chinese merchants ran warehouses; and Javanese, Siamese, Cham, Ryukyuan, Arab, Persian and Filipino traders also maintained quarters here.

There were resident communities with temples, mosques, shrines and headmen of their own.

This diversity was not incidental to Melakan power. It was Melakan power. The sultanate’s wealth came from being the place where the South China Sea met the Indian Ocean.

And that could only work if an Indian Muslim or Tamil merchant, a junk owner from Quanzhou and a pepper shipper from Java could all find or agree on the same weights, the same credit practices and the same language of contract.

Cosmopolitanism was not a value Melaka upheld. It was the economic base.

Melaka’s answer to governing this population was administrative rather than ideological. The state appointed a Shahbandar — the chief port master — to oversee all traders and revenue. The Shahbandar managed distinct trading quarters, registered merchants, collected taxes, settled internal disputes, and liaised with the government.

In practice this gave each community customary autonomy over its own affairs (marriage, inheritance, temple and mosque management), while the Bendahara handled internal Malay affairs. All commercial, criminal and appellate jurisdiction, however, rested with the sultanate.

The arrangement deserves attention precisely because it looks superficially like what colonial administrators later built and what Malaysian coalition politics later imitated — separate channels for separate communities. But the difference is structural, and it matters for how we think about unity today.

Under colonial rule, communal separation was the point. British policy froze categories through census classification, partitioned schooling by language, segregated employment by race, and treated intermixture as a management problem. Communities coexisted economically while remaining socially sealed, held together from above by an administration that belonged to none of them.

Melaka’s system separated for the purpose of incorporation. The Shahbandar registered you so you could trade, marry, inherit and litigate inside Melaka’s order. The Undang-Undang Melaka and the maritime code recognised community customs while reserving commercial, criminal and appellate jurisdiction to the state.

Malay was the lingua franca of the market and the court, and participation in that common life was the price and the reward of belonging.

Movement across lines was expected and routine. Chinese traders married locally and produced Baba-Nyonya culture. Indian Muslims settled into quarters that became permanent neighbourhoods, as did the Tamil merchants. And Arab Syed families entered Malay genealogies.

Conversion to Islam opened the fullest paths into the elite, and did so without erasing the commercial networks converts had brought with them.

Unity here meant a shared sovereign frame, a shared commercial language and a shared legal horizon — not shared blood, shared schooling or shared culture. Diversity was not accommodated at the margin. It was administered at the centre.

Against this record, the claim that non-Malay presence in the peninsula is a colonial residue awaiting digestion does not survive contact with the evidence. The ancestors of today’s Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indian communities were not confined to nineteenth-century steamships.

Long before Penang, Singapore and Melaka passed to Britain, there were resident Chinese, Tamil, Indian Muslim, Gujarati and Arab populations under Malay sovereignty here. They were registered, taxed, and adjudicated; and they even intermarried.

They were not guests awaiting permanent permission and the Shahbandar was not a manager of ethnicities.

That historical fact dismantles the foundational premise of ethnic exclusivism — that Malayness and non-Malay residence are, in principle, incompatible claims on the same land.

Five hundred years of Malay statecraft say otherwise, in Jawi script, in the records of a Malay court.

Honesty, however, requires stating the limits. Melaka was a transit entrepôt with a small population, perhaps tens of thousands, many of them sojourners, governed as subjects rather than citizens, and ranked by status and religion in ways no modern Malaysian would want restored.

So Melaka is not a blueprint. Nobody should propose reviving the Shahbandar offices. But it is something more useful than a blueprint: it is a refutation. It removes the alibi. If exclusion is defended on the grounds that Malay civilisation has always been exclusive, the fifteenth-century record contradicts the defence.

If assimilation is defended on the grounds that diversity requires uniformity to be governable, the fifteenth-century record contradicts that too.

What survives the comparison is a definition. Melaka shows that this region produced a working model of unity in diversity in which unity meant shared sovereignty, shared law and shared language, while diversity meant real autonomy of custom, belief and association.

The unity did not require the diversity to dissolve. The diversity did not threaten the unity.

This is an opportune time to remember this historical fact, as voters prepare to go to the polls in Melaka next month.

Some politicians will surely tell voters that they must choose between affirming Malay identity and embracing the country’s plural character; that they must unite to save their race or religion. Others may say voters need to come together to defend their rights.

The city’s own history says the choice being thrown at them was invented by colonial administrators who preferred divided subjects to a mixed populace. Before the colonialists came, the most successful Malay state in history proved the two were never opposites.

It would be asking a great deal of a banner-waving election season to engage with that. But the evidence sits there, in plain sight, in the very state being fought over — and it is worth saying out loud, in Melaka, before the voting: this country’s diversity is not a problem Malay civilisation inherited from outsiders. It is an achievement Malay civilisation once mastered.

The writer can be contacted at: [email protected].

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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