Map of Alam Melayu (Malay Reich), where the Red Circle was the Cradle of Malay Civilisation.
Resource: QUORA.COM
Malays, which comprise around 60% of the Malaysian population today, are mostly ‘constitutional Malays’.
According to Article 160, ‘A Malay is a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, conforms to Malay custom and (a) was before Merdeka Day born in the Federation or in Singapore or born of parents one of whom was born in the Federation or in Singapore, or is on that day domiciled in the Federation or in Singapore; or (b) is the issue of such a person;
Orang Asli, on the other hand, is officially comprised of 18 sub-ethnics that come from these 3 main ethnics:
- Semang or Negrito (sub-ethnics: Kensiu, Kintak, Lanoh, Jahai, Mendriq, Bateq)
- Senoi (Sub-ethnics: Temiar, Semai, Semoq, Beri, Jahut, Mahmeri, Che Wong)
- Proto-Malay (Sub-ethnics: Orang Kuala, Orang Kanaq, Orang Seletar, Jakun, Semelai, Temuan)
Some of them are Muslims; others are Animists, Christians, Hindus or Buddhists. (Non-Muslims are automatically disqualified as Malays by law.)
They communicate using their own language, which is either Austro-asiatic or Austronesian.
Sometimes, they like to whistle and make sounds using their lips to communicate with each other.
(Man, they sure are amazing whistlers.)
Both Malays and Orang Asli are deemed Bumiputras by the constitution.
To answer one of the posters’ questions, yes, Orang Aslis and those ethnics in Sabah/Sarawak are actually more ‘native’ than the Malays (which are mostly Malays because the book says so), and they are the ones who should be getting more of the perks (going by the ‘who came here first’ basis).
The oldest archaeological evidence of Ancient Malay Civilisation was found in Kedah, specifically the Lembah Bujang archaeological site on the bank of Sungai Merbok. The site was dated all the way back to 535 BC. This means that Malay civilisation is 2500 to 3000 years old. There is evidence that concludes that earlier Malay City States also existed. The cradle of Tamadun Melayu was the Northern Malay Peninsula, which is mostly modern-day Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, Terengganu and the Pattani Region of Thailand. It was once thought that Malay Civilisation was an offshoot of Vedic (Indian) Civilisation; however, the earliest evidence of Indians in the Nusantara Region only appeared in the 6th century AD. Pre-Hindu-Buddhist Malay civilisation consists of sovereign city-states (kinda like the Greeks), and as Indian influence spreads, the small states slowly grow and gobble up each other, and slowly Malay civilisation spreads southwards, replacing the Austronesian Proto-Malays and inland replacing the Austro-Asiatic-speaking Australoid Aslian tribes, and since Malays, like other Austronesians, are inherently seafarers, they expand into Eastern Sumatra and the coast of Kalimantan (Borneo).
Source:
[1] Malays (ethnic group) - Wikipedia
[2] Bujang Valley - Wikipedia
(Putera Iskandar Zainuddin > B.A. in Bachelor of Science in Physics with Honours & Philosophy, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR)
The most popular pre-Islamic Malay Kingdom is probably Srivijaya, but it’s actually among the last Malay Kingdoms before Malays embraced Islam. Srivijaya rose quite late in the 7th century.
There were many older Malay kingdoms in the region, and they usually arose in the peninsula. Kadaram/Kataha could be found as early as 1 AD. Langkasuka was found in 2 AD, and other kingdoms/polities such as Chih Tu, Kolathana, Gangganegara and so on were older than Srivijaya.
- No, genetically speaking, the people that will be known as the Melayu have long settled the Peninsular for 2 to 3 thousand years. They were the product of interbreeding between the Austronesian Proto Sumatrans (they were a Batak-like people) and the Native Orang Asli. Back then, those people, although they have the same genetic makeup as the Melayu (aside from later Indian, Arab and Chinese influences), did not call themselves Melayu and are similar to the Proto-Malay Orang Asli people in the southern parts of Tanah Melayu, the Orang Laut and native tribes of Sabah and Sarawak.
- Yes, culturally and linguistically speaking. The ancestor of the Malay language split off from the ancestor of the Ibanic language. The speakers then began to colonise the Coast of Kalimantan before moving out to colonise Eastern Sumatra and finally spreading to the Peninsular, where they unified most of the Proto-Malay tribes (and even assimilated various Orang Asli tribes) of the Peninsular. The reason why Ancient Malay spread is probably because of trade since Austronesian expansion throughout SE Asia was mostly because of trade, where Bahasa Melayu Kuno became a lingua franca. Some of these tribes (especially in the North) benefited a lot from trade and started to urbanise, and they found kingdoms like Langkasuka and Kedah. The Indians then came between 1500 and 2000 years ago, and the Malay civilisation spread to Sumatra, where a kingdom was founded on the banks of a river called Sungai Melayu, which was Old Javanese, meaning “to accelerate”. When Malacca came to power, the people who speak this set of closely related languages called themselves Orang Melayu.
- Yes (AGAIN !), remember the Kingdom that was founded on the Banks of the Melayu river ? There is a theory that the Kingdom was a centre of the ancient Malay Kingdom of Sri Vijaya. When the kingdom fell to the Majapahit, the last prince of the Kingdom, Parameswara escaped to establish Melaka and “Melayu” was what the Malaccans called the now forgotten Kingdom of Sri Vijaya until it was rediscovered by a French Archeologist named George Cœdès in the 1920s where he named the kingdom Sri Vijaya. Anyways, the theory goes that the Malaccans saw themselves as the heir of Sri Vijaya and decided to call themselves Melayu and the name stuck as Sri Vijaya fades away from the Malay Collective Memory.
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