In a broad historical perspective, the rise of the Confucian revival movement in Singapore and Malaya in late 19th and early 20th centuries was mainly a response of traditional Chinese cultural nationalists to the threat of westernisation and babaisation within the Chinese communities, and their attempt to reassert Confucian values on the communities. This chapter examines the origins, the course and the development of the movement and its problems. It also analyses and assesses the roles of the leadership and the ideology in the movement.

In 1906, the British ambassador to the Court of the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire wrote that the mufti of Java, identified as no one less than Sayyid Uthma¯n bin Yah· ya¯ himself, was collaborating with Sadik Bey, the Ottoman consul in Batavia, to spread news about the possibility of the Japanese adopting the Islamic faith.1 Such propaganda, the ambassador claimed, was meant to spur Muslims in Southeast Asia to rally behind the cause of anticolonial pan-Islamism purportedly heralded by Japan, who was already recognized as a major Asian power in the region, having won the war against the Russians the year before. Thereafter British authorities stepped up surveillance over Muslim communities in the region, especially Arabs. Unlike the Dutch, the British were uneasy about taking this step at first for fear of alienating substantial Arab investments in the Straits Settlements. Eager to retain their allies, British authorities in Southeast Asia therefore concurrently monitored and courted the Arab elite in the region as their relationship acquired a different complexion predicated on fear of Muslim revolt during the early twentieth century.