The University of Malaya is a public research university located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is the oldest and highest ranking Malaysian institution of higher education, and was the only university in newly independent Malaya. The university has graduated five prime ministers of Malaysia, and other political, business, and cultural figures of national prominence.
The British and Foreign Bible Society, often known in England and Wales as simply the Bible Society, is a non-denominational Christian Bible society with charity status whose purpose is to make the Bible available throughout the world.
Abdullah bin Abdul al Kadir (1796–1854) also known as Munshi Abdullah, was a Malayan writer. He was a famous Malacca-born munshi of Singapore and died in Jeddah, a part of the Ottoman Empire.
Christianity is a minority religion in Malaysia. In the 2020 census, 9.1% of the Malaysian population identified themselves as Christians. About two-thirds of Malaysia's Christian population lives in East Malaysia, in the states of Sabah and Sarawak. Adherents of Christianity represent majority (50.1%) of the population in Sarawak, which is Malaysia's largest state by land area. Christianity belief is one of four major religion other than Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism that has a freedom protected by the law in Malaysia based of diversity law especially in East Malaysia.
Ernest Tipson (1883–1958) was an English Plymouth Brethren missionary and linguist who compiled dictionaries of Cantonese and Hokkien.
The Church of the Province of South East Asia is an autonomous member of the Anglican Communion, created in 1996 with the four dioceses of Kuching, Sabah, Singapore and West Malaysia.
Samuel Dyer was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China in the Congregationalist tradition who worked among the Chinese in Malaysia. He arrived in Penang in 1827. Dyer, his wife Maria, and their family lived in Malacca and then in Singapore. He was known as a typographer for creating a steel typeface of Chinese characters for printing to replace traditional wood blocks. Dyer's type was accurate, aesthetically pleasing, durable, and practical.
Malay was first used in the first millennia known as Old Malay, a part of the Austronesian language family. Over a period of two millennia, Malay has undergone various stages of development that derived from different layers of foreign influences through international trade, religious expansion, colonisation and developments of new socio-political trends. The oldest form of Malay is descended from the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the earliest Austronesian settlers in Southeast Asia. This form would later evolve into Old Malay when Indian cultures and religions began penetrating the region, most probably using the Kawi and Rencong scripts, some linguistic researchers say. Old Malay contained some terms that exist today, but are unintelligible to modern speakers, while the modern language is already largely recognisable in written Classical Malay of 1303 CE.
Greater Indonesia was an irredentist political concept that sought to bring the so-called Malay race together, by uniting the territories of the Dutch East Indies with British Malaya and British Borneo. It was espoused by students and graduates of Sultan Idris Training College for Malay Teachers in the late 1920s, and individuals from Sumatra and Java, including Mohammad Natsir and Sukarno, on September 28, 1950. Indonesia Raya was adopted as the name of what later became the Indonesian national anthem in 1924.
Malaysian Malays are Malaysians of Malay ethnicity whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in the Malay world. According to the 2023 population estimate, with a total population of 17.6 million, Malaysian Malays form 57.9% of Malaysia's demographics, the largest ethnic group in the country. They can be broadly classified into two main categories; Anak Jati and Anak Dagang.
The Christian Brethren of Malaysia, sometimes simply called the Brethren, are an aggregate of independent and autonomous Protestant Evangelical Christian churches in Malaysia, which are networked together through a set of shared Biblical doctrines and practices. Most of these churches are associated with the faith and practices of the Plymouth Brethren movement that arose in the late 1820s.
The Presbyterian Church in Malaysia or GPM is a Christian church in Malaysia. Established as an independent synod in 1974, it currently has approximately 7,000 members in 100 congregations nationwide.
Sophia Blackmore was an Australian Christian missionary. She founded the Fairfield Methodist Schools, and also Methodist Girls' School in Singapore. She was the first woman missionary sent by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to Singapore. She also set up a boarding home for girls, supported the early Methodist Straits Chinese Christian work, published a Christian periodical in Baba Malay, and is closely associated with the founding of Kampong Kapor Methodist Church.
Hillebrandus Cornelius Klinkert was a Dutch Mennonite missionary and translator. He was born in Amsterdam and worked as an engineer in a machine factory at Rotterdam and on a Rhine barge before he contacted the DZV in 1851 with a request to be sent as a missionary. Klinkert was also known for his ability to translate the Bible into different dialects of Malay so that the Javanese people could access the Gospel, and completed his first entire translation at the end of 1878.
William Girdlestone Shellabear (1862–1947) was a "pioneer" scholar and missionary in British Malaya. He was known for both his appreciation of Muslim society and also his translation of the Bible into the Malay language.
Bible translations into the languages of Indonesia and Malaysia have a lot of common history up until the modern era. Apart from the shared Malay language which historically was the lingua franca of the Malay archipelago and forms the basis for the national languages of Indonesia and Malaysia today, portions of the Bible have been translated into a variety of indigenous languages in the region.
Bible translations into Malay include translations of the whole or parts of the Bible into any of the levels and varieties of the Malay language. Publication of early or partial translations began as early as the seventeenth century although there is evidence that the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, translated religious texts that included Bible verses into Malay as early as the sixteenth century.
The Bible Society for the Netherlands and Flanders is a non-denominational Bible society in the Netherlands and Flanders devoted to translating, publishing, and distributing the Bible at affordable costs. The NBG is based in Haarlem and was formed on 29 June 1814 on the initiative of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS).
Sophia Cooke was a British missionary and schoolmistress at what is now St. Margaret's Secondary School in Singapore. She arranged church services in Chinese and helped distribute bibles in Malay and Arabic. She founded the YWCA in Singapore.
Benjamin Peach Keasberry was a Protestant missionary, translator, publisher and educator. He established the Prinsep Street Presbyterian Church and a free Malay boarding school, and translated many works into Malay, including the New Testament, publishing them through his own printing press.
