The Malacca Sultanate was a Malay sultanate based in the modern-day state of Malacca, Malaysia. Conventional historical thesis marks c. 1400 as the founding year of the sultanate by King of Singapura, Parameswara, also known as Iskandar Shah, although earlier dates for its founding have been proposed. At the height of the sultanate's power in the 15th century, its capital grew into one of the most important transshipment ports of its time, with territory covering much of the Malay Peninsula, the Riau Islands and a significant portion of the northern coast of Sumatra in present-day Indonesia.
The Orang Laut are several seafaring ethnic groups and tribes living around Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian Riau Islands. The Orang Laut are commonly identified as the Orang Seletar from the Straits of Johor, but the term may also refer to any Malayic-speaking people living on coastal islands, including those of the Mergui Archipelago in Myanmar and Thailand, commonly known as Moken.
The Johor Sultanate was founded by Sultan of Malacca Mahmud Shah's son, Alauddin Riayat Shah II in 1528.
The Melayu Kingdom was a classical Buddhist kingdom located in what is now the Indonesian province of West Sumatra and Jambi.
Nuruddin ibn Ali ar-Raniri was an Islamic mystic and scholar from Rander in Surat province of Gujarat, in India, who worked for several years in the court of the sultan of Aceh in what is now Indonesia. He was the most prolific of the authors of the Acehnese court, and helped contribute to its international reputation as a center of scholarship. His work was considered the oldest Muslim scholarship of Southeast Asia.
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 Sultanate of Brunei or simply Brunei, also known as the Brunei Empire, was a Malay sultanate, centered around Brunei on the northern coast of Borneo in Southeast Asia. Brunei became a sovereign state around the 15th century, when it substantially expanded after the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese, extending throughout coastal areas of Borneo and the Philippines, before it declined in the 17th and 18th centuries. It became a British protectorate in the 19th century.
Farish A. Noor also known as Badrol Hisham Ahmad Noor is a Malaysian academician, historian, and political scientist that is currently serving as a professor at the Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya.
Malay Indonesians are ethnic Malays living throughout Indonesia. They are one of the indigenous peoples of the country. Indonesian, the national language of Indonesia, is a standardized form of Riau Malay. There were numerous kingdoms associated with the Indonesian Malays along with other ethnicities in what is now Indonesia, mainly on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. These included Srivijaya, the Melayu Kingdom, Dharmasraya, the Sultanate of Deli, the Sultanate of Siak Sri Indrapura, the Riau-Lingga Sultanate, the Sultanate of Bulungan, Pontianak Sultanate, and the Sultanate of Sambas. The 2010 census states that there are 8 million Malays in Indonesia; this number comes from the classification of Malays in East Sumatra and the coast of Kalimantan which is recognized by the Indonesian government. This classification is different from the Malaysia and Singapore census which includes all ethnic Muslims from the Indonesian archipelago as Malays.
This is a timeline of Malaysian history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Malaysia and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see History of Malaysia.
Hikayat Abdullah is a major literary work by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, a Malacca-born Munshi of Singapore, composed in the hikayat genre. It was completed in 1845 and first published in 1849, making it one of the first Malay literary texts to be published commercially. Abdullah's authorship was prominently displayed in this text and the contents were conveyed in simple, contemporary Malay. Unlike typical classical Malay literary works that contain mythical and legendary stories, Abdullah's work dealt with social realism. The book was published in Latin script in 1915 by William Shellabear.
The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) was founded in 1950 to promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge about countries, cultures and languages of the region. It is an interdisciplinary program of Cornell University that focuses on the development of graduate training and research opportunities on the languages and cultures of Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Cornell University is known for being the "Mecca of Southeast Asian studies."
Barbara Watson Andaya is an Australian historian and author who studies Indonesia and Maritime Southeast Asia. She has also done extensive research on women's history in Southeast Asia, and of late, on the localization of Christianity in the region. She teaches courses in Asian Studies as a full professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and has served as director of the university's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She was President of the American Association for Asian Studies from 2005 to 2006.
Malayisation or Malayization is a process of assimilation and acculturation, that involves acquisition or imposition of elements of Malay culture, in particular, Islam and the Malay language, as experienced by non-Malay populations of territories fully controlled or partially influenced by historical Malay sultanates and modern Malay-speaking countries. It is often described as a process of civilisational expansion, drawing a wide range of indigenous peoples into the Muslim, Malay-speaking polities of Maritime Southeast Asia. Examples of Malayisation have occurred throughout Asia including in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
The Malay world or Malay realm is a concept or an expression that has been used by different authors and groups over time to denote several different notions, derived from varied interpretations of 'Malay' either as an ethnic group, as a racial category, as a linguistic group or as a cultural group. The use of the term Malay in much of the conceptualisation is largely based on the prevalent Malay cultural influence, manifested in particular through the spread of the Malay language in Southeast Asia as observed by different colonial powers during the Age of Discovery and spread of Islam. The term remains highly controversial in Indonesia and outside the Malay-speaking areas, because it is considered politically charged and irredentist rather than purely cultural.
A good number of inscriptions written in Sanskrit language have been found in Malaysia and Indonesia. "Early inscriptions written in Indian languages and scripts abound in Southeast Asia. [...] The fact that southern Indian languages didn't travel eastwards along with the script further suggests that the main carriers of ideas from the southeast coast of India to the east - and the main users in Southeast Asia of religious texts written in Sanskrit and Pali - were Southeast Asians themselves. The spread of these north Indian sacred languages thus provides no specific evidence for any movements of South Asian individuals or groups to Southeast Asia.
Syair Siti Zubaidah Perang Cina is a 19th-century syair (poem) by an unknown author. Following a gender disguised woman who conquers China to save her husband, the syair has been argued to be based on historical events.
The Seri Rambai is a seventeenth-century Dutch cannon displayed at Fort Cornwallis in George Town, the capital city of the Malaysian state of Penang and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest bronze gun in Malaysia, a fertility symbol and the subject of legends and prophecy.
The Siege of Johor of 1587 was a military operation in which Portuguese forces successfully sieged, sacked, and razed Johor, capital of its eponymous Sultanate. The city would later be rebuilt at a different location.
