Tunku Abdul Rahman

Tunku Abdul Rahman (1903–1990) was a Malaysian statesman, a prince of the Kedah Sultanate, who led Malaya to independence and became its first prime minister, then oversaw the formation of Malaysia in 1963 and governed until 1970. He is recognised as the country's founding father. "Tunku" is his Kedah princely title, carried here as in common usage; his name was Abdul Rahman. ^{1 2}

He was born on 8 February 1903 at Alor Setar, Kedah, seventh son of Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah, the sultan of Kedah, by a consort of Thai descent. Schooled at Alor Setar, Bangkok and Penang, he won a Kedah state scholarship to England at seventeen, read law and history at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1925; pressed by his brother the regent, he returned to England to prepare for the Bar, passing part one in 1939 before war recalled him. ^{1 3}

From 1931 he served the Kedah civil service as a district officer — at Kulim, Padang Terap, where he drained the malaria swamps of Kuala Nerang at his own insistence, and in remote Langkawi, where he raised public money for a jetty and roads. During the Japanese invasion he sheltered his aged father the sultan rather than evacuate him, kept order in Kulim after the police deserted, and served the occupation administrations as district officer and superintendent of education. ¹

Entering politics, he won the presidency of UMNO in 1951, built the Alliance of UMNO with the Malayan Chinese and Indian congresses, and led it to a landslide in the 1955 election, becoming chief minister. After the Treaty of London he proclaimed the independence of the Federation of Malaya on 31 August 1957 as its first prime minister. In 1963 he brought Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak into the wider federation of Malaysia; in 1965, amid communal confrontation, he resolved on Singapore's separation. ^{1 4}

Re-elected in 1969 with a reduced majority, he governed through the emergency that followed the 13 May riots and stepped down in 1970 in favour of Abdul Razak Hussein. In retirement he presided over the Asian Football Confederation, wrote newspaper columns critical of the government, and remained, in his words, for a state that would "continue as a secular State with Islam as the official religion". ¹

Under his government Islam became the religion of the federation in 1960; he founded PERKIM, the welfare organisation for Muslim converts, and presided over it almost until his death, began the International Qur'an Recital Competition, and served from 1970 as the first secretary-general of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, founded at Kuala Lumpur in 1969. These were the works of a head of government and organisation president: the sources read for this record name no religious school for the man himself, and this record records none. He died at Kuala Lumpur on 6 December 1990 and was buried, as he had wished, at the Langgar Royal Mausoleum in Alor Setar. ^{1 5 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.