The Sejarah Melayu (Malay Chronicles) tells us of how Islam came to the Malay archipelago. One night, the Raja of Malacca, Raja Tengah, had a dream. In his dream, the Raja encountered an Arab gentleman by the name of Muhammad. Muhammad, it turns out, also happened to be a Prophet of God and he had come to visit the Raja in his dream in order to tell him about the religion of Islam.

The Prophet told Raja Tengah that he and his people would convert to Islam and that their kingdom would one day become a mighty trading empire known all over the world. (The Prophet did not mention that the fame of Malacca would also lead to its downfall, when the Portuguese and other Europeans would come to conquer it.)

After converting Raja Tengah, the Prophet told him to wait for the signs that would come the following day. A ship would arrive from Jeddah, bringing with it an Imam who would serve the ruler and help him convert his people.

When Raja Tengah awoke, he found that he was miraculously circumcised. (We take this at face value since nobody dared to check if it was true.) The Raja also began reciting phrases in Arabic and his courtiers thought that their ruler had gone mad.

Finally the Bendahara gathered the courage to ask his ruler if he was all right. Raja Tengah told the Bendahara about his dream and the miracle of his (yet unverified) painless circumcision. The Bendahara, resolute in his loyalty to his ruler and his belief in common sense, counselled the Raja to wait until the rest of the prophesy was fulfilled, lest he had been duped by the devil.

Come midday, a ship did indeed arrive from Jeddah bringing with it an Imam . The Imam was brought before the Raja, who was then promptly re-named Sultan Muhammad Shah I. As Sultan, the ruler made sure that the rest of his courtiers were circumcised properly and his people converted. That is how Malacca became a Muslim power. Or so we are told.

For when one reads a courtly text like the Sejarah Melayu one thing that has to be borne in mind is the fact that such texts were written exclusively by and for a royal audience, and that much "creative writing" had gone into them. In such courtly hikayats , miracles do indeed happen, even if they have to be post-rationalised in Islamic terms.

But being courtly texts, these hikayats also served other crucial functions. They helped to legitimise what were often unstable political systems that were centralised around the figure of an often unpopular (and certainly undemocratic) leader.

By grafting onto traditional feudal notions of power and rule other Islamic notions of moral obligations and duties, the ruling Malay-Muslim elite were crafting for themselves an ideology and discourse of authoritarian rule that was being divinely sanctioned for decidedly less than divine ends.

So in the Sejarah Melayu we also come across the "social contract" between the Malay ruler and the Malay subject, where the Malay subject swears his loyalty and obedience to the ruler on the condition that he is never abused or humiliated by the ruler.

Many Malaysian political theorists, historians and political sociologists have cited this as an example of one of the earliest social contracts between rulers and subjects in world history, pointing to the fact that a form of protean democracy was already in existence in the Malay world then.

However, few have cared to point out the fact that there is a particularly unpleasant catch to the deal: While the Malay subject does not have the right to rebel against the ruler (Indeed Sejarah Melayu does not provide any form of justification for social rebellion or resistance of any form), it does allow the Ruler a great deal of room to manoeuvre.

And if and when the ruler does go beyond the bounds of acceptance and normality (like when he steals the wives and daughters of other subjects to add to his own domestic collection), it is not the masses who will take their revenge on him, but God himself.

The Sejarah Melayu makes it clear that it is God and God alone who can intervene in cases where the ruler has gone against the contract between ruler and subject. In the text there are numerous accounts of how God comes to intervene in the lives of wayward monarchs who go out of control. (They get headaches, constipation, or awful skin problems).

God also comes to the rescue of the Sultan if and when the unwashed masses outside the palace walls start to plot against him and cause trouble. The Sejarah gives a lengthy account of how God has destroyed numerous kingdoms all over the world because the people there have not behaved themselves and had turned against their rulers.

Predictably, the masses are given worse punishments by God - their crops wither, their villages are swallowed by earthquakes or tidal waves, they are wiped out by foreign conquerors, etc.

In the final analysis, the conclusion is quite simple and straightforward. From the Raja-centric perspective of the Sejarah Melayu , it is the King who rules and the subjects who are ruled. The masses owe their loyalty and obedience to the ruler, who in turn answers to God above.

The chain of command is a linear and hierarchical one, and must under no circumstances be reversed. Woe to those peasant upstarts who think that they can do God's work by attempting any kind of "reformasi" of the palace. As far as social contracts go, the pact between the traditional rulers and the ordinary Malay masses was a pretty lousy one.

Apart from that the combination of traditional feudal values and Islam was a deadly one as far as civil liberties and individual rights are concerned. Those who claim that Islam is an egalitarian religion (which it is) must never overlook the fact that it is also a creed that puts great emphasis on order and stability which more often than not happens to be the same language spoken by authoritarian leaders and regimes the world over.

Hardly a surprise then if the history of Islamic civilisation has been dotted with countless feudal and traditionalist regimes and despots who have ruled with divine sanction close at hand.

In the centuries that followed Islam's arrival to the Malay world, there arose a new generation of Malay-Muslim reformers and purists who sought to break this crippling and potentially destructive link between conservative traditionalism and religion, cognisant of the fact that the combination of the two elements could spell doom for the people as a whole.

The first reformers were men like Imam Buchara al-Jauhari who wrote his "Taj-Us Salatin" in Aceh in 1603. Centuries later the reformist ranks were filled with men like Syed Sheikh al-Hadi, Ustaz Abu Bakar al-Bakir, Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy.

When we look at the scenes of denim-clad students protesting in the streets of KL in 1998, we should not overlook the fact that their protests against authoritarian rule goes all the way back to the earliest phases of Malay-Muslim history.

Centuries after Sultan Muhammad Shah's dream in his palace, the war of words between the Rajas and the Rakyat continues, still. And both sides continue to claim that God is on their side.