While his travels were intended to publicise both himself and the name of his kingdom, Sultan Abu Bakar realised that no amount of recognition could help him as long as his state was seen in the same light as the ill-fated Malay kingdoms that had succumbed to British intervention.

The Sultan was painfully aware of the enormous differences between the socio-political conditions of the Malay Sultanates and the British Straits Settlements. Having been brought up in Singapore under the British flag, he had seen how great the differences between the British colonies and the Malay Sultanates were.

He had also seen how this advantage was used by the British in order to gain an upper hand in British-Malay relations. Keeping the royal house in order was thus not merely an exercise in keeping up appearances: it was the only way to keep the kingdom intact and to protect it from the British colonial authorities who were more than capable of using the charge of 'native misrule' as a justification for intervening in Johor's domestic affairs.

Cognizant of the impending threat to his kingdom that came in the form of an increasingly wide disparity in terms of economic, administrative and military organisation, the Sultan embarked on a series of domestic administrative reforms that were designed to modernise his kingdom while retaining some of its traditional feudal Malay-Islamic character.

He began to acquire that vital ingredient which Munshi Abdullah had deemed as the prerequisite of modernity and progress and which the British colonial authorities had regarded as being beyond the grasp of the Malay race: knowledge and technical expertise. (Though what he did with that knowledge and expertise was in many ways a far cry from Abdullah's original plans for the reformation and reconstruction of Malay-Islamic society.)

Autocratic style

Sultan Abu Bakar's domestic projects had managed to secure him the loyalty of his subjects as well as the respect of his neighbouring brother-rulers. He tried to build upon these achievements by attempting reforms and innovations beyond his territory as well. Sultan Abu Bakar was also more successful in courting and using the Chinese and other migrant communities in his kingdom than his brother rulers.

Unlike the Sultans of Selangor and Perak who were forced to turn to the British to help them quell the rise of inter-fractional feuding amongst the Chinese secret societies, Sultan Abu Bakar managed to employ them to his advantage instead. He incorporated leading Chinese figures into his bureaucracy and even allowed the Ghee Hin secret society to function openly, in defiance of British warnings not to do so.

From 1866, with the help of European advisors, the Kingdom of Johor began to create administrative and institutional bodies such as those found in Singapore. A State Secretariat, Ministry of Finance, Treasury, Auditor's Office, High Court, State Printing House, Departments for Public Works, Police, Statistics, Land Regulations and Education were all introduced one by one.

But the feudal and autocratic style of the Sultan himself was the one thing that was not reformed as part of this process of transformation, and true to the ways of the Kerajaan it was he who exercised total control over the shape and form of the reform of Johorian politics and society.

Being very much at the centre of Johor's political affairs and management, it was inevitable that the development of the kingdom would be coloured by his values and lifestyle as well. Due to his anglophilic inclinations and eurocentric lifestyle, Sultan Abu Bakar's reforms were not merely directed towards modernisation, but they were in fact directed towards Westernisation as well (1).

Envious gaze

Sultan Abu Bakar's own 'liberal' approach to Islam was undoubtedly conditioned by his awareness and sensitivity to how the European colonial powers had come to perceive Islam as being a possible threat and challenge to their growing hegemony in the world. In North Africa, West Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, Islam had already thrown up insurmountable obstacles to Western expansionism.

In the Sultan's own corner of the Malay world, Islam had also served as a discourse of deligitimisation and resistance not only to the corrupt rule of wayward Malay rulers, but also to Western imperialism.

Under the rule of Sultan Ibrahim, the neighbouring Sultanate of Aceh in North Sumatra had long been cultivating a close relationship with the Ottoman Empire in its effort to win support from the Caliphate in the fight against the Western infidel forces (2). Not to be left out, Sultan Abu Bakar also played his part in co-operating with his Muslim brother-rulers.

In 1864 (while still bearing the title of Maharaja), Abu Bakar sent to Aceh a prominent emissary from Hadramaut, Sayyid Abd-ar Rahman, who would later play many a crucial strategic and diplomatic role during the devastating Aceh-Dutch war of 1873-1912.

But within the confines of his own kingdom, forever under the envious gaze of the neighbouring British colonial authorities, the Sultan was careful to keep the visible forces and influence of Islam at an arm's length away.

While he took part in mediating between the Acehnese, British and Dutch powers during the Aceh war , he made it obvious to all concerned that his own kingdom would not come to the aid of the beleaguered neighbouring Malay-Muslim Sultanate.

While guerrilla warfare and blockades became the daily tribulations experienced by the Acehnese, the travails of the Sultan of Johor were of a more congenial nature: ballroom dances and trips abroad.

Victorian prejudices

So Westernised had the Kingdom of Johor become that by the time the fervent expansionist Sir Frederick Weld arrived to man the helm of the colonies, the kingdom of Johor was almost as westernised as the British colony of Singapore. Indeed, Adil (1971) notes that it was impossible for Weld to accuse Johor of being 'badly run' like the rest of the Malay states simply because in its administration, organisation and even its architecture it had become so very 'Western'.

It is understandable that the Sultan had chosen to modernise his kingdom by emulating the styles of the West and the British in particular. As Barbara and Leonard Andaya put it, 'to many Malay princes it would have seemed that the cultivation of Western acquaintances and the adoption of a European style of living would make the difference between political success and relegation to the backwaters of power'.

This was not only the dominant perception in Malaya, but also in neighbouring Southeast Asian states. King Chulalongkorn of Siam and King Mindon of Burma were similarly hard-pressed to modernise their economies and armies under the pressure of Western intervention and competition. And the Meiji reforms of Japan had suggested that such reforms were indeed possible and beneficial if accomplished successfully.

However it must be noted that the adoption of Western attitudes and platitudes alone did not save every single Malay ruler: Despite his open and co-operative relations with the British, Sultan Idris Shah of Perak was nonetheless stripped of all true power and reduced to a political instrument by the colonial authorities.

(And even his attempts to take on the air of a 'Westernised' Malay ruler were met with condescension and disapproval by the likes of Isabella Bird, who preferred her native rulers to remain 'native' enough for her Victorian prejudices ). In the end the same fate lay in store for Sultan Abu Bakar.

Violent hierarchy

Although he tried his best to anticipate the moves that were being made against him and his kingdom, (going as far as embarking upon a series of modernising and secularising reforms that even the colonial authorities would never have dared to attempt in the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States), Sultan Abu Bakar could not affect a radical change in the dominant imperialist metanarrative which configured him as a disabled native Other, albeit a sovereign one.

In the end the Sultan's downfall did not come in the form of a political or military defeat; he was never deposed and sent into exile.

Instead, the failure of Sultan Abu Bakar was due to the fact that working as he did from within the margins of a colonial order of knowledge and power which configured Anglo-Malay relations, he could not hope to reverse the violent hierarchy which configured him as well as his race and culture as weak and disabled.

[Part 5 will appear on Saturday]

Endnotes:

1) In the field of education the Sultan's reforms were so eurocentric and Westernised that they seemed more akin to the secularising reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the twentieth century than to anything else that could be found in the Malay-Muslim world at the time.

While the court of Trengganu under Sultan Baginda Omar (r. 1839-1876) and Sultan Zainal Abidin III (r. 1881-1918) was trying to further entrench and enforce the standing of Islam in the kingdom's political, economic and social life, Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor seemed to be going in the other direction altogether.

In 1865 the Sultan opened a school with a curriculum that was based on an English model and it abandoned the use of Jawi (Arabic) script altogether. To the governor of Singapore he had given his assurance (in 1863) that he had revised the Islamic code in Johor by making it 'more comfortable to European ideas'.

2) In 1850, the Ottoman Porte took the Malay kingdom under its wing as one of its protected vassal states, and Aceh in turn supported the Ottomans at their time of need during the Crimean war.