Measuring Malayization : kuda kepang and Javanese Muslim Singaporeans in post-independence Singapore (1965-1990)

• Main Author: Sri Amalinah Suhairi
• Other Authors: Zhou Taomo
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::History::Asia::Singapore
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/76642
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Being a Javanese-descent Muslim in post-independence Singapore (1965-1990) is not as straightforward as one thinks. After being subsumed as Malays of Singapore in 1965, much agency and negotiation are involved when a Javanese Muslim Singaporean preserves and upholds their ethnic, ritualistic cultural heritage of kuda kepang in Singapore. While the state-driven Malayization were thought to be immutable, this paper illuminates how this process has in turn created an imagined boundary for the Malay-Muslim community vis-à-vis outsiders who consciously resisted Malayization. As such, a reconstruction of social identity is at play as a means to tackle one’s belonging in Singapore. Henceforth, by 1990, coupled with one’s status as a Javanese Muslim minority in a secular state, multi-religious society and a globalized world, kuda kepang continues to promote an arena of contestation between practicing individuals and the state, as well as the contestation between syncretic Islam and the religion of Islam in post-independence Singapore—which relates to our broader understandings of both the local and global Islamic solidarities as well.