Azlan Shah

Sultan Azlan Shah (1928–2014) was Sultan of Perak from 1984 until his death and the ninth Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia from 1989 to 1994. Before the throne he was a judge: the youngest man appointed to Malaya's High Court, in 1965, and the youngest Lord President of the Federal Court, in 1982. His refusal, in 2009, to dissolve the Perak state assembly during a change of government was challenged in court and upheld, and his lifelong work for field hockey earned him the name Father of Malaysian Hockey. ^{1 2}

Raja Azlan Shah was born on 19 April 1928 at Kampung Manggis, Batu Gajah, Perak, the youngest son of Sultan Yussuf Izzuddin Shah by his second wife, Toh Puan Besar Hatijah, and was brought up by his mother outside royal circles. He was educated at the Government English School in Batu Gajah and at the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, then read law at the University of Nottingham, taking his degree in 1953; he was admitted to the English Bar on 23 November 1954. At school he began the field hockey he played for Perak and never left. ¹

Returning to Malaya, Azlan Shah joined the judicial and legal service and rose quickly — sessions court president, federal counsel, deputy public prosecutor, legal adviser to Pahang, registrar of the High Court and chief registrar of the Federal Court. In 1965, aged thirty-seven, he became the youngest judge ever appointed to the High Court of Malaya; he joined the Federal Court in 1973, became Chief Justice of the High Court of Malaya in 1979, and on 12 November 1982 became the youngest Lord President of the Federal Court, the country's highest judicial office. ^{1 3}

Azlan Shah's place in the Perak succession had climbed as his elder brothers died: made Raja Muda (crown prince) on 1 July 1983, he ascended the throne on 3 February 1984 on the death of his cousin Sultan Idris Shah II, and was installed as the thirty-fourth Sultan of Perak on 9 December 1985. In 1989 he was elected ninth Yang di-Pertuan Agong, Perak's ruler being the last of the nine Malay rulers not yet to have served in the office's first cycle; after the five-year term he returned to Perak in 1994. He reigned thirty years in all, the longest Perak reign since independence. He was chancellor of the University of Malaya from 1983 until his death. ^{1 4}

In 2009, when three assemblymen crossed the floor in Perak, Menteri Besar Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin asked the Sultan to dissolve the state assembly. Azlan Shah refused, citing royal discretion, and required the government to resign instead; the High Court first ruled against him, but the Court of Appeal and, unanimously, the Federal Court held that the Perak constitution gave him that discretion. Off the throne he was Malaysian hockey's central figure: president of the Malaysian Hockey Federation until 2005, president of the Asian Hockey Federation from 1997 until his death, founder in 1983 of the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup, and a leader in Malaysia's hosting of the 1975 and 2002 World Cups. Sultan Azlan Shah died on 28 May 2014 at the National Heart Institute, Kuala Lumpur, aged eighty-six, and was buried the next day at the Al-Ghufran Royal Mausoleum at Kuala Kangsar. No source read for this record names a religious school for him, and this record records none. ^{1 2}

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