Category: General

In Malaysia, there are at least four different naming conventions.  Then there is Indonesia, which has a whole different system.  Needless to say, this can get confusing when it comes time to do things like bibliographies.  Furthermore, I use a couple of different software packages (BibTex, Endnote, etc.) to keep track of my references, and neither of them has any idea how to handle Malay names.

To start out with, there is the regular English type.  This type of naming convention is normally followed by either Eurasians or Indian Christians.  So, you get people like the Malaysian political scientist Edmund Terence Gomez.  No problem here.

Then you get the Chinese style.  It’s not really that hard, just different.  Last names come first, then first name, then "middle" name.  So you get someone like Wong Cheng Ming, whom I interviewed today.  I won’t be citing him, but if I were to cite him, he would go under Wong.  This is made a bit more confusing because many Chinese Malaysians have an Anglicized first name.  So he would really go in my bibliography as Wong Cheng Ming, Steven.

The next hardest is Indians who do not follow English conventions.  Some people follow the Indian convention of taking the father’s first name as the first initial, and then having their given name as their last name.  For example, the head of the Secretariat of the National Economic Action Council is K. Govindan.  By convention, his name goes under Govindan.  Sometimes, though, you can get someone like the leader of the Malaysian Indian Congress, S. Samy Vellu.  Is his last name Samy Vellu or just Vellu?  Not sure.  Still others use a half-Indian half-Malay system, where you are something like Linggapan a/l Cheralathan or
Poomaalai a/p Cheralathan.  The father’s name is Cherathan, and a/p here stands for anak perempuan, or daughter, while a/l stands for anak lelaki, or son.  These go, like the other Indian names, under the first name.  When it comes to Sikhs, of which there are many, you go by the name before Singh (for men) and Kaur (for women) when addressing them, but by Singh or Kaur in a bibliography.

Finally we get to Malays.  In theory, this isn’t a problem.  The first name is your name, the second name is your father’s name, and that’s that.  In most cases, people alphabetize in bibliographies by the individual’s first name, but not all the time.  For example, I have seen Mahani Zainal Abidin alphabetized under both Mahani and Zainal.  When it comes to legal documents here, like for American visas, you are supposed to use your father’s name as your "last name", which is contradictory to bibliographic procedures.  That continues to confuse me.

But the real issues are the optional parts.  Some people add in a bin, for "son of", or binte, for "daughter of", in formal settings.  Some people who have been on the hajj like to use haji or hajjah in their names in formal settings.  Note that your name technically changes when you’ve been on the hajj, so Mohammad Yusoff, after the hajj, is Haji Mohammad Yusof.  But you would leave off the Haji for bibliographic purposes, unless it’s your father who went to Mecca.  My most confusing case is a professor name Zakaria Ahmad.  When Zakaria wrote his dissertation at MIT, that was his name.  Then when he came back to Malaysia, he started to use the name Zakaria bin Ahmad for his publications.  Of course, then his father went to Mecca, so he then changed his name to Zakaria bin Haji Ahmad.  Lately he’s been going by Zakaria Haji Ahmad.

When addressing people, it is important to remember that sometimes the names Abdul and Mohammad (or Mohd) don’t really count for first name.  You would address Abdul Rahman Embong as Abdul Rahman, not Abdul or Rahman.

Of course, none of this beats Indonesia.  Indonesians sometimes change their names as their lives go on.  Other Indonesians have only one name, like Soeharto, although even Soeharto decided in 1990 that his name was going to be Muhammad Soeharto.  (The dictator gets to do that.)  Chinese Indonesians often have both a Chinese name and an Indonesian name, like Liem Sioe Liong a.k.a. Sudono Salim or Ciputra a.k.a. Tjie Tjin Hoan.  But really, you just have to know.  Abdurrahman Wahid gets filed under Abdurrahman but is referred to as Wahid (or "Gus Dur"); Amien Rais is always referred to as Amien Rais, the whole name; Munir Said Thalib went by Munir; and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono goes by SBY, or Susilo, but Yudhoyono to the foreign media.

I (TP) today got a chance to meet with an author, Karim Raslan, who writes a column that you can find a lot of places here in Southeast Asia.  Just in Malaysia he writes for the Star, Berita Harian, and Sin Chew Jit Poh, and he has contracts to write for various dailies in Singapore, Indonesia, and a couple other places in the region.  (In case you are looking for his current writings, he’s taking a sabbatical.  He’ll be back soon, he says.)

The contrast between the status of journalism here in Indonesia and those in Malaysia is particularly interesting.  In Indonesia, these days, anything goes.  There are dozens of national newspapers and weekly news magazines, and hundreds of regional ones.  As far as freedom of the press goes, Indonesia far outstrips Malaysia these days.  While the situation was different under Soeharto, in Indonesia today, so long as you avoid outright slander and libel, most anything can be legally printed.  You still have to be careful about strongly criticizing the government–a Balinese student was jailed the other day for burning a picture of President Susilo–but you can get away with most anything.

Things here are not the same.  The Malaysian government retains tight control over the press in at least two ways. The first is through the use of the Printing Presses and Publications Act, which requires that print publications apply for a license every year.  The government can withhold a license for any publication without having to provide any reason.  You can imagine how this encourages self-censorship.  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the government maintains tight control over the press through ownership.  All of the main media outlets, including all of the major newspapers, are owned by conglomerates close to the regime.  The newspapers have an uncanny way of painting the government’s actions in the most favorable light, while being openly critical of the opposition.  In a telling example, one of the things that Mahathir Mohammad did before sacking Anwar Ibrahim in September of 1998 was to manoeuvre editors who were close to Anwar out of their positions near the top of newspapers like Berita Harian, replacing them with his own choices.  Other fun facts are that members of the ruling coalition regularly print ads in the newspapers around election time, but opposition parties always have their advertisements rejected.

Small wonder Karim these days spends more time in Indonesia than in Malaysia.