Interrogating ‘Malayness’: Islamic Transformations among the Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) Cohort

For over a century no institution in Malaysia has conferred elite and iconic Malay status more than the ‘school for sultans’ sons’, Malay College Kuala Kangsar. Since the 1970s many of the school’s ‘old boys’ have held crucial roles in playing out the primary objectives and principles of the ethnic Malay government: the creation of a powerful Malay capitalist and political class. Analysing old boy cohorts as ‘social generations’, this article traces changing genealogies of MCKK identity. It explores most closely a contemporary group of self-described ‘outlier’ old boys who increasingly critique NEP-era old boys. They seek to abrogate their MCKK connection, arguing that neither its production of status and ethnicity nor its economic and political rewards can be justified in Islam. In this counter-movement, new markers of piety, authenticity and belonging (as well as new networks for social, capitalist and political engagement) have emerged. This cohort seeks to demonstrate a re-fashioned moral identity which recasts business and social practices within a strictly shariah-based Islamic framework. For a small but growing number of the MCKK cohort, representing capitalist success via piety and religion—interrogating Malayness, ethnicity itself and the culture learned in the school for sultans’ sons—is becoming the principal foundation for identity.