Talk about ‘Malay journalism’ – we get a cynical silence. Those whom I encountered over the decades would avoid discussing on ‘Malay journalism.’  In recent times, I came across questions like “What Malay journalism?”; and “Does Malay journalism exist?” These are questions coming from disillusioned souls, who are unfortunately members of the profession,  ignorant of their very own vocation. Now they place importance on ‘digitisation,’ the ‘economics’ of news, the commodification of information. Who wants to see journalism as culture? – this is what they have implied.  Their message – why talk about a ‘dying practice,’ why ‘ethnicise’ the profession. “Move forward” they would self-righteously proclaim, with a large of dose of arrogance.

The same goes for journalism academics in the universities. There is no useful purpose in teaching on values, culture and history. Journalism history; more so Malaysian journalism history, or the history of Malay journalism, has never been taught as a subject in any university in Malaysia.  Fragments of it would have been included in mass communication, or some journalism subjects, more as icing on the cake. And definitely far removed from their minds in introducing programs specializing on Malay media and journalism. There is no practical value; not even of intellectual or cultural significance!

To most of us, journalism is practice and skills, and these days, to be accompanied by technology and economics. We deny the corpus. Journalism schools are equally guilty of ‘killing’ journalism. And they do not even realize it.  I dread to think of this. We have a national, cultural and an intellectual tragedy.

I bear no apologies. Journalism practitioners and journalism academics are not interested in the past of an institution and a profession. It is the continuation of Malay cultural and intellectual history.  Anything ‘Malay’ nowadays is a bad word. There is a world of condescension. This is part of Malay bashing by Malays themselves.  And no party is interested in the past of Malay journalism, or curating for its future.

My emphasis on Malay journalism does not deny the existence and history of journalism and periodicals in other languages, financed, managed and editorially led by others, meaning the British, the Tamil and the various Chinese communities in the nation’s history.  Just go through stories in Bintang Timor (March – July 1895), Singapura-based Chinese Peranakan owned, and the first Malay-language  newspaper in Malaysian/Singapura. 

Why not speak about Malaysian journalism? Sure, one can develop a syllabus on Malaysian journalism and/or its history and development over the last 217 years since 1806, and the subsequent presence of what we label as (the colonial perspective) vernacular journalism, including Malay journalism. But the leitmotif of writing and periodical journalism in Malaysia is Malay journalism; the institution that has shaped the history and direction of this nation is Malay and Malay-language journalism and newspapers.  

But it is Chinese press, newspapers and media that is being studied in some non-public universities. There is even a university dedicated to the study of media and communication from the Chinese and Nanyang contexts. The health and vibrancy of the profession is not independent of language and culture.  But in Malay (dominated)public universities, the subject is taboo.

And when I refer to ‘Malay journalism’ or to its history, I do not mean only the newspapers in Singapura, or in Malaya before 1957. I would mean the practice of writing, and the culture of producing, managing and reading newspapers in the Malay Archipelago, especially in Sumatra, and Java. Let us not be veiled by the euphoria of digitization.

This is cultural history. This informs us on society, the significance of news, opinion and commentary for a vibrant, intelligent society. Not a society and profession numbed by the social media. Malaysian journalists, as captured by a recent news agency story, have naively allowed themselves to be captives of ‘citizen journalism.’ Why this is happening is because journalists, and Malay journalists in particular have an immature, distorted, misleading notion of journalism itself as knowledge and practice.

And worst, some Malay academics, and professors have a jaundiced view of Malay press,  believing that Malay (and journalism as a whole) journalism and newspapers are biased, shallow and untrustworthy. They accused Malay journalism and newspapers as political. They do not read these ‘Malay produced’ newspapers. It is the Malay academics and professors themselves who have negated the Malay journalistic enterprise, instead of contributing to its developing and enriching it with the wealth of knowledge and experience. Academics and professors have contradicted their own rationality. It is like conceiving the courts as bias, and therefore the legal system must be delegitimized. And there is the Malay saying “Marah nyamuk, bakar kelambu.”  Time that the Malay university community be educated on the press.

They only have to cross the Straits of Melaka to know the critical role of newspapers in Medan, or in Padang, or in Batavia or Surabaya in making the nation, then and now and the future (now it is Indonesia); or a bit further in the Philippines. We cannot even appropriate the luminaries in Malay journalism over the last two centuries. We do not even know that they existed. We cannot even place such figures as  Pak Sako, Za’ba, Syed Shaikh al-Hadi, and Abdullah Munshi as journalists.

There is more than one A. Samad Ismail and A. Rahim Kajai. and we still do not know the enigma in both as journalist and political activist. My attempts to establish a Chair of Malay Journalism in a public university in 2005 named after Syed Syaikh al-Hadi, writer, reformer, educator and journalist and who has come to define periodical journalism in Pulau Pinang before the Second World War was ignored. On a lighter noted, I was even asked if by a professor if al-Hadi was a terrorist!

In recent years, I have convened on Journalism and the Malay press. One was Journalism Futures, under the auspices of the Futures Office of the Rector of the International Islamic University in 2020. This was focused on the operations of the newsroom, and the introduction/ and or exposure to the domain of Futures Studies in Malaysian journalism schools. Others were under the Malaysian Journalism Teachers Society where several talks and lectures on the future of Malay journalism, newspapers and radio, and the Malay media industry as a whole, as well as reviewing the current curricula with the purpose of including  subjects and components on Malay newspapers, Malay journalism, or Malay/Malaysian journalism history.

How could journalism be developed anywhere if its students, the intellectual community and the journalistic fraternity do not know and want to know journalism’s past. It is just like refusing to be educated on the nation’s history. These are intertwined.  One scholar who has greatly enriched our knowledge of journalism, newspapers and related periodicals in Malay society is historian William R. Roff (More of him and his work in future essays). His Guide to Malay Periodicals (1961), and Bibliography of Malay and Arabic Periodicals Published in the  Straits Settlements and Peninsular Malay States 1876 – 1941 (1972) are gems waiting to be re-studied. Not that Roff’s works are not known, but they are nowhere in sight in the journalism school.

Malaya and the rest of the Malay Archipelago are not intellectual deserts before the coming of the West. Journalism and periodicals are signposts to the vibrancy of a society. Between 1876 and 1941, some 162 periodicals were known to have been published in the Malaya, Singapura and Pulau Pinang, including one in Sarawak with a further eight published in English by or for Malays or devoted to Malay concerns, and three published partly in Malay and partly in English (one of the latter, partly also in Tamil). In addition, there were 15 periodicals published in Arabic, by the Hadramis and and Arab Peranakan – all in the 1930s in Singapura, and nine published in the Malay language by Christian missions for missionary purposes (all in Singapura).

What should strike any student of Malay journalism is the existence of the printing press, especially in Singapura and Pulau Pinang, a community of intellectuals and intelligentsias, and a reading public.  Before the Second World War, Singapura was of periodical journalism and the hub of Malay press activities.  The major newspapers from Jawi Peranakkan (1876 – 1896) to Al-Imam (1906-1908) had correspondents throughout the Tanah Air. It was also reported to have distribution networks globally. 

There was also the fortnightly Alamat Langkapuri, the first Malay newspaper in world, published in Colombo, Sarandib, or Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in June 1869.  Ceylon was once known as Sarandib, from the word ‘serendipity’, meaning good fortune entirely obtained by accident. Again, having no sense of these among students, Malay intellectuals and the journalism fraternity, is regressively unfortunate.  Alamat Langkapuri, integral to the study of Malay writing in Sri Lanka, renders a rich heritage of Sri Lankan Malay society, symbolizing cultural fortunes, opening a jendela (window) in the collective memory of the sarandib of exile.