The Fatwa that shook British Malaya By Sabri Zain's Malayan Chronicles

On 29 October 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Just over two weeks later, on 14 November, the Empire's supreme religious authority, Shaykh al-Islam Ürgüplü Mustafa Hayri Efendi, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, on behalf of Sultan-Caliph Mehmed V.

It proclaimed a jihad, or holy war, against Britain and its allies, declaring it the religious duty of Muslims living under their rule to wage war against the enemies of the Caliphate. The aim was clear: to ignite unrest among the millions of Muslims living under British and French colonial rule. 

Within months, it seemed that this call to arms was echoing half a world away in British Malaya. On 29 April 1915, a local religious leader, Haji Mohd Hassan bin Munas, better known as Tok Janggut, led hundreds of villagers in Pasir Puteh, Kelantan, in an armed rebellion against British colonial rule. When the colonial government introduced a new land tax, Tok Janggut and his followers refused to pay. 

An attempt to arrest him ended with the death of a police sergeant, and soon hundreds of villagers had risen in open revolt. The rebels briefly seized the district and established their own administration before British troops crushed the uprising, killing Tok Janggut in battle. The rebellion has traditionally been portrayed as a local dispute over taxation. 

Yet there may have been more to it. Tok Janggut had spent several years studying under Islamic scholars in the holy city of Mecca and his uprising formed part of a broader wave of Muslim unrest inspired by the Ottoman call to jihad. Just two months earlier, on 15 February 1915, British fears of a wider Muslim uprising appeared to become reality. 

Around half the men of the 5th Light Infantry stationed in Singapore, a regiment composed largely of Indian Muslim soldiers, mutinied after rumours spread that they were about to be sent to fight against the Ottoman Empire, whose Sultan was also the Caliph of Islam. The mutineers shot their British officers, released captured German prisoners of war, and rampaged across Singapore, killing dozens of soldiers and civilians. 

For days, one of Britain's most important naval bases in Asia descended into chaos. It took British, French, Russian and Japanese marines, as well as the Sultan's Johore Military Force, to quell the rebellion and restore order. By the evening of 17th February, 432 mutineers had been captured. The aftermath was brutal. More than 200 of the mutineers were court-martialled, and 47 were executed before a crowd of some 15,000 spectators. 

Later investigations revealed that many of the Muslim sepoys had been influenced by an Indian Muslim merchant in Singapore, Kasim Mansur, together with a local imam, Nur Alam Shah. At meetings in Mansur's home, they urged the soldiers to obey the Ottoman Sultan's fatwa and turn their weapons against their British officers. 

In their eyes, this was their jihad against the kafirs who were waging war on fellow Muslims defending the Caliphate. The Ottoman Empire would ultimately lose the First World War, and the centuries-old Caliphate would soon disappear forever.

But for one extraordinary moment in 1915, a call to jihad issued in distant Istanbul had shaken British Malaya from the streets of Singapore to the villages of Kelantan.