"We hope to raise the Bendera Stambul": British forward movement and the Caliphate on the Malay Peninsula

Abstract

In the decades between the 1870s and the 1920s, groups of Malay Muslims circulated symbols of the Ottoman Caliphate in gestures of defiance against British colonial intervention on the Malay peninsula. This was the period of ‘forward movement’, in which Britain progressively colonised successive Malay States, and it roughly coincided with the European confrontations which produced the First World War, Ottoman collapse, and the abolition of the Caliphate. At peninsular and global scales, these developments advanced the geo-body as the only legitimate means by which to organise territory. As a result, the Muslim world located around the Indian Ocean was decisively divided into a series of discrete, contiguous states, fragmenting the ummah, its latent political community. Malayan invocations of the Caliphate were local responses to this global reorganisation, of which peninsular colonisation formed an important and disruptive part.