COMMENT | There is a growing tendency in contemporary discourse to speak of the Malays as though they were merely another ethnic category in a population census.

Malays are placed alongside Chinese, Indians, Ibans, Kadazans, and the many other communities that make up Malaysia.

For the purposes of modern administration, such classifications may be useful. Historically, however, they are inadequate. They do not fully explain what it has meant, over centuries, to be “Malay”.

Malay identity has never been simply a matter of ancestry or DNA. It is also a civilisational identity, shaped over a long historical process by language, Islam, adat, the Malay sultanates, legal traditions and, crucially, a people’s relationship with the land in which that civilisation developed.

Anthony Milner, in “The Malays”, demonstrates...