An Exploration of Malay Names

The first time I saw a Malay teacher's name on the timetable, my immediate reaction was to skip over it. The string of characters was simply too complicated for me: four or five words, sometimes as many as seven, all in capitals. For a long time, I therefore neither memorized Malay names nor investigated them. It always seemed troublesome and not particularly important.

At the beginning of the new semester, students and new teachers introduced themselves. A teacher said Chinese names were very hard to remember, and they did not even know how to pronounce them. For example, when a student surnamed Xu introduced themselves, the teacher stared at "Xu" in silence. The Malay spelling system has no X, and even when encountering it, their first instinct is to use the English pronunciation, the sound "Z." They could rack their brains without understanding why X in Chinese pinyin should make the English "s (sh)" sound.

Then a Bangladeshi classmate introduced his name. The teacher asked which part was his father's name, and he replied that it contained no father's name, only a "family name." At that moment, I realized Malay names might not be so complicated after all. Back home I looked into it and discovered that Malays customarily place their father's name after their own and titles before it, making the whole name look long. Their own names are actually just one or two words and easy to remember.

Take one of our teachers: MUHD FAUZI BIN ABD RAHMAN, rendered in lowercase as Muhd Fauzi Bin Abd Rahman. In this name:

Muhd abbreviates Muhammad and is placed at the beginning to show respect for the Prophet Muhammad.

Fauzi is his own name, derived from Arabic and meaning "success" or "victory."

Bin means "son" in Arabic.

Abd abbreviates Abdul, meaning servant.

Rahman is one of Allah's ninety-nine names, meaning the Most Merciful God.

This name has five words, but only the second, Fauzi, is his actual name. The first, Muhd, is a prefix; the third, Bin, is purely a connecting word; and the fourth and fifth, Abd Rahman, "servant of the Merciful God," form his father's name. To address him, therefore, we really need to remember only the one word Fauzi.

Now let us analyze DR NOR FAIRUZ SYAZANA BINTI NOR FAUZI, in lowercase Dr Nor Fairuz Syazana Binti Nor Fauzi. Here:

Dr means doctor and is a title;

Nor means radiance or light and functions as a prefix;

Fairuz means turquoise or elegance;

Syazana means intelligent;

Binti means daughter;

Nor is as described above;

Fauzi means victory or success.

From the name, we know that this woman has a doctorate, her father is Nor Fauzi, and her own name is Nor Fairuz Syazana, though she can generally be called simply Fairuz or Syazana. Although her full name has seven words, then, we still need to remember only one or two.

Knowing this, we can quickly analyze a Malay name. For example, the current Malaysian prime minister Anwar's full legal name is Dato’Seri Anwar Bin Ibrahim. Here:

Dato’Seri is an honorific conferred by the government;

Anwar is his own name;

Ibrahim is his father's name.

His name is quite simple. His daughter is named Nurul Izzah binti Anwar, immediately identifying her as Anwar's daughter. By analogy, if Wang Sicong and his family were Malay, he would not even need to say, "My father is Wang Jianlin!" Under Malay tradition, his full name would simply be "Sicong, son of Jianlin."

In short, Malay names are not difficult at all. They look long because they include titles, religious prefixes, personal names, and fathers' names. Of course, there are many kinds of prefixes and titles, and the names carry many traces of Islamic and Arabic culture. But that is not important: when you encounter a new one, just look up what it means. What you actually need to remember is the person's own one- or two-word name.