
ABIM
Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia or Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement. Founded in 1972. Major objectives include establishment and propagation of Islamic tenets and principles enshrined in the Quran and ...

Adat
Traditional, often unwritten, law, the customary part of legal regulation in Muslim countries, which often comes from pre-Islamic times, and has therefore to be integrated (so far as it can be) with ...

Anwar Ibrahim
(b. 1947)Malaysian political and religious activist. Formed an alliance with Mahathir Mohamed in 1969, advocating Malay educational and economic rights. Established Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement ...

bangsawan
Popular Malaysian and Indonesian commercial urban theatre. Parsi theatre troupes touring from Bombay in the 1880s are believed to have provided the model. Bangsawan was Malaysia's (and later ...

Brunei
A small country on the north-west coast of Borneo, comprising two enclaves surrounded by Sarawak Malaysia.Physical.A narrow coastal plain of alluvium and peat changes inland to rugged hill country of ...

Burma
Burma has suffered years of repression in the grip of a military regime that renamed it MyanmarBurma consists largely of the central fertile valley of the Irrawaddy River, encircled by a ...

Cambodia
Decades of war and political upheaval tore Cambodia apart. Democracy has been established but is fragileThree-quarters of Cambodia consists of a large central plain, through which passes the Mekong ...

dabus
A ritual-based traditional martial arts trance-dance found in parts of Sumatra in Indonesia and in the states of Selangor and Perak in peninsular Malaysia. Thought to have originated either from ...

Dar ul Arqam
Dar ul Arqam was a messianic neo-Ṣūfī grassroots movement founded in 1968 in Malaysia by Shaykh Ashaari Muhammad al-Tamimi (1938–), known as Ustaz Ashaari or Abuya (“our father”). Ustaz Ashaari ...

decolonization
This term, while not one of art in international law, is frequently employed in U.N. practice to connote the process whereby territories evolve from colonial status to full sovereign statehood. ...

Indochina
The peninsula of southeast Asia containing Burna (Myanamar), Thailand, Malaya, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; especially, the part of this area consisting of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which was a ...

Indonesia
Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country and one of the largest democracies, is making steady progressIndonesia is one of the world's largest and geographically most dispersed countries, ...

Konfrontasi
Diplomatic and military confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia (1963–66). It centred on the formation of the Federation of Malaysia (1963), which President Sukarno saw as a Western-inspired ...

Lee Kuan Yew
(b. 16 Sept. 1923).Prime Minister of Singapore 1959–90 Born into a wealthy Singaporean Chinese family, he studied at Cambridge and qualified as a lawyer, being called to the English Bar in 1950. On ...

London International Festival of Theatre
(LIFT),biennial three-week summer festival started in 1981, presenting a programme of theatre, dance, workshops, and open-air events. Companies from many countries perform in a variety of forms and ...

mak yong
Ancient Malay dance-drama from the Malay-speaking regions in southern Thailand and the state of Kelantan in Malaysia, associated with the myth of Semar, the ancient Javanese deity, his sons, or ...

Malacca
City and port in Malaysia. Strategically situated on the east coast of the Straits of Malacca, 147 km southeast of Kuala Lumpur and 245 km north of Singapore, Malacca was ...

Malay Peninsula
Promontory of se Asia, stretching for c.1,100km (700mi) between the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea. The n part of the Peninsula is now s Thailand and the ...

Malaya
A former country in south-east Asia, consisting of the southern part of the Malay peninsula and some adjacent islands (originally including Singapore), now forming the western part of the Federation ...

Mayong
A dance-drama genre of Kelantan and Kedah, northern provinces of Malaysia, mayong (also spelled ma'yong or makyong) was first noted in Patani (now part of Thailand). It appeared as court ...