Why Preaching Christianity to the Malays in Kuching Didn’t Work
The first Anglican missionaries set foot in Sarawak on 29 June 1848. At the time, Sarawak was a war-ridden and impoverished Raj. Why would the Borneo Mission send their clergy to Sarawak?
James Brooke, the first white Rajah, appealed to the London Missionary Society to send missionaries to Sarawak to establish a mission. James saw himself as weaning the population away from Brunei Control. Reverend David Brereton was dazzled by James’s efforts to turn the people from “tyranny, extortion and gross darkness” to a government of law and order. He encouraged the establishment of the mission by raising funds and writing pamphlets.
El Dorado was the missionaries’ dream of converting the Malays of Sarawak. They imagined it as a promised land where they could Christianize the Malays through education. European missionaries in Sarawak believed that because Muslim powers had fallen globally, Islam was “finished.” They thought Christianity, with European education, could “save” Malays by offering a higher civilization.
There were two aspects of Malay society: One was their cultural disposition, and the second was their disposition towards Islam.
Regarding their cultural disposition, their manners are very pleasing, and though naturally reserved and slow in giving their confidence. Francis Thomas McDougall, the prelate, sent by the Borneo Missionary Society to Kuching, viewed the Malays as having a moral readiness for Christianity. He assumed that certain Malay characteristics — like respect for religious teachers, ritual discipline, and communal loyalty — could be redirected toward Christian teachings if guided by missionary education.
The first step in changing the Malays to Christianity was learning the Malay language. Preachers were taught the vernacular before being sent into the kampongs to preach. They could then communicate Christian values in the local language.
The second step in the conversion was the use of the Bible. Reverend Benjamin Keasberry (1811–1875) in Singapore had translated the Bible into Malay. Although McDougall had reservations about the translation, he used it extensively in his conversion efforts.
The third step was Malay education. The first school, known as the “adult school”, was opened less than a month after their arrival. The school was located on the ground floor of the courthouse. The head-teacher was reverend William Wright. Wright, who taught the first cohort of six Malay and Dayak adults writing and reading in Romanised alphabets. There was also an adult school for women under the tutorship of Mrs. Wright. It offered reading, writing, and home skills like sewing.
Wright abruptly resigned from his teaching when McDougall refused to give him an increase in salary. Henry Steele replaced Wright, and James Brooke agreed to pay for half his salary. He left after what was described as “stint of failure.”
For a Malay education to succeed, McDougall was counting on the appeal of learning Romanised Malay, basic English, and a practical “industrial class” taught by his Gean employee, T. Stahl. The industrial classes taught building skills for the church and mission house, and these skills could be applied to later endeavours. These three things together were supposed to convert the Malays to Christianity, according to MacDougall.
In addition to the adult school, there was also a “home school” concept. It required children aged two to ten to live as boarders for a period of up to 10 years to isolate them from “native influence”. In this way, the pupils could receive total immersion in religious instruction and Christian values.
The first of the “home school” was reported in September 1848, with their first group of Malay and Dayak orphans. In 1863, it was reported that over 40 boys and nine girls were in the home school.
James was reported to be supportive of the concept and had contributed 50 dollars a month, albeit on an irregular basis: “The rajah quite agreed with the opinion I expressed of having a certain number of children to be brought up entirely apart from Malay influence by taking them entirely from their parents and feeding, clothing, and educating them ourselves”. The practice of adopting little children ceased in 1863 due to the successive resignations of the school’s housekeepers who cared for the little ones.
Most of the early converts to the mission were involuntary. They were orphans and war captives of military expeditions. (Dido (1843), Patusan (1844), Beting marau (1849), and Rainbow (1862) sent to the mission by the order of the Rajah James for care and upbringing. The earliest of them were children of his deceased European officers from their liaisons with Malay and Dayak mistresses.
There were two significant developments after 1850. The first related to the exodus of some five thousand Chinese from Pemangkat into Kuching town in the month of August 1850 as a result of the civil war between the rival Chinese guilds over the mining rights to goldfields in Sambas. Pemangkat was a coastal town located along the northwest coast of Borneo facing the South China Sea. This influx of Chinese into Kuching caused McDougall to concentrate his resources on the Chinese and to ignore the hopelessly attached to Islamic Malays.
Another development related to what he perceived as a threat of Islamic conversions in Dayak areas. His visit to the peace-making ceremony between Kanowit and Skrang tribes in 1850 reinforced his suspicion: Malays in Kuching, the Dayak tribes that he encountered from his reconnaissance in Lundu (1849), Kanowit, Quop, and Merdang (1850), all appeared eager to have a “teacher” place in their communities. He was very fearful of Islamic and Roman Catholic teachings supplanting his Anglican roots.
It wasn’t surprising that the bishop couldn’t make sense of how to convert Muslims when he also saw them as hopelessly attached to Islam. The bishop assumed Islam was backward and Christianity was modern. He thought Malays were lazy and Muslim because they were not eager to learn in his way.
From:
Sharifah S. Ahmad The Irrationality of Malay Proselytisation: The Failure of Education as a Tool for ‘Civilising’ Native”in KEMANUSIAAN – The Asian Journal of Humanities, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2022)
Many thanks to Veronica Chang Schmid.
Compiled by Tom McLaughlin for BorneoHistory.net