COMMENT | There is a claim about Malay history that gets repeated so often, and so confidently, that almost nobody stops to check it: that Tanah Melayu - the Malay Peninsula – has always been the ancestral homeland of the Malays.

It is treated less as an argument than as common knowledge. A closer examination of the historical record, however, reveals a rather different picture.

To be clear, nobody disputes that the peninsula became the heart of Malay civilisation. This is where the great sultanates rose, where the Malay language reached its highest prestige, where Islam took deep root, and where Malay custom matured into one of Southeast Asia’s most enduring civilisations.

None of that is in question here.

What I want to ask is a narrower question: not where Malay civilisation reached its fullest expression, but where the...