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To be a Muslim is to be a part of a culture with distinct beliefs, ideas, institutional forms and prescriptive roles. Yet there is a complex inter-relationship between a system of knowledge and belief, such as Islam, and the immediate political, economic and social context of its adherents. This book aims to improve understanding of Muslim social and political action by examining a broad spectrum of Muslim discourse, both written and spoken, to see how meaning is formed by context. It is a broad comparative study and examines discourses produced in opposition to government as well as those pro

Considerable interest is again being expressed, in the public domain as well asin the academy, in the processes of change-ideational and pragmatic-which seem to characterize Islamic societies; societies, that is to say, of thosewho regard themselves as muslim, acceptors of the revealed law or "way" shari'a of God. This interest is not new, but it seems to present itself anew in each generation, partly perhaps because it is something that has concerned Muslims themselves for most of the fourteen centuries that have elapsed sincethe religion of islām was proclaimed afresh and finally, by the Prophet Muhammad, in 622. Muslims are of course not alone in being required to see life as ideally governed by an unchanging set of rules which must be understood and conformed to, for this much is true of many other systems of belief which rest upon transcendent authority. It is sometimes held, however, that of all such believers in transcendence, that is, in a transcendent moral law, Muslims have an especially hard time in bringing life as (and where, and under what other cultural constraints) it is led into conjunction with the enjoined ideal.

Though the Persatuan Melayu Selangor (PMS) was not the first association of its kind in the peninsular states, there are several arguments in favour of selecting it for particular attention. To begin with, it is the only Malay political (or quasi-political) organisation of the 1930s for which anything like detailed records exist — a determinant of considerable, if perhaps chance, importance. That these records do exist may well, indeed, be more than a mere accident of time, reflecting rather the relative sophistication of the PMS in organisation and administrative procedure, its fondness for getting everything down on paper, preferably in multiple copies, and its very active life.1 Apart from this, however, the PMS is particularly interesting in other ways, in terms of its leadership (somewhat more variegate than that of other associations), of its close connection with at least one Malay national newspaper, and of the leading role it played not only in bringing about the two national congresses of state Malay associations before the war, but in providing the chairman for these meetings and helping to determine their agenda. This paper will be concerned primarily with the first year of the PMS, from June 1938 to May 1939 (the period covered by the records), but some attempt will be made to set it in context and to outline its later history.