Syed Sheikh al-Hadi

Syed Sheikh bin Ahmad al-Hadi (22 November 1867 – 20 February 1934) was a Malay writer and reformer of Hadrami Arab descent, born in Malacca, who became a founder of the Kaum Muda movement in British Malaya. He co-founded the journal Al-Imam, ran reformist madrasas in Singapore, Malacca and Penang, founded the Jelutong Press in Penang, and wrote Hikayat Faridah Hanom, regarded as the first Malay novel. ^{1 2}

He was born at Kampung Hulu, Malacca, the fourth of five children, of whom he alone survived infancy; the English article pairs his birth with 25 Rajab 1284 AH and the Malay article with 22 Rajab of the same year. His father was a Hadrami Arab of the al-Hadi family of the Ba 'Alawi sada, and his mother Malay. At seven he followed his father and uncle to Penyengat Island in the Riau archipelago, where he was adopted by Raja Ali Kelana, heir of the Yamtuan Muda of Riau-Lingga, and educated in Malay language and culture and in fiqh, partly by the Raja himself; he continued his studies in Terengganu. In 1894/95 he travelled with Tahir Jalaluddin to invite Malay students in Mecca, Beirut and Cairo home, and heard Muhammad Abduh lecture at al-Azhar and Rashid Rida in Mecca — the encounters that fixed his reformist direction. Neither article makes him a student of Ahmad Khatib al-Minangkabawi, and no such relation is recorded. ^{1 2}

With Tahir Jalaluddin, Muhammad Salim al-Kalili and Abbas Muhammad Tahar he launched Al-Imam in Singapore on 23 July 1906, modelled on Rida's al-Manar; it published 31 issues before closing in December 1908. In 1908 he opened the Madrasah al-Iqbal al-Islamiyyah in Singapore, worked as a lawyer in the sharia court of Johor Bahru from 1909 to 1915, then returned to Malacca to open the Madrasah al-Hadi, whose teaching the local community found too radical. In 1916 he moved to Penang and opened the Madrasah al-Mashoor, where Tahir Jalaluddin was among the teachers. ^{2 1}

In 1927 he left teaching and founded the Jelutong Press in Jelutong, the largest Malay publishing house of its day and the centre of reformist publishing in Malaya. It issued his monthly journal al-Ikhwan (from 1926) and his daily newspaper Saudara (from 1928), his translations of Abduh's Qur'an commentary, works by Za'ba and Tahir Jalaluddin, and his own Angan-angan kehidupan novel series, including the Rokambul detective stories he translated from Arabic, which introduced the detective genre into modern Malay literature. The financial crisis of 1929 broke the enterprise's finances; al-Ikhwan ceased in December 1931 and Saudara passed to other hands. ^{1 2}

Al-Hadi named the traditionalist scholars Kaum Tua and the modernists Kaum Muda. His book Ugama Islam dan 'Akal ("The Religion of Islam and Reason", 1931) argues through the five pillars that Islam is a rational religion; his writings attack the exploitation of religion by what he called greedy religious leaders, and press for women's education and against forced marriage, drawing on Abduh and Qasim Amin. His novel Hikayat Faridah Hanom (1925/26), set in Cairo, joins a love story to a programme of women's emancipation and is counted the first Malay novel; later hikayat take up divorce abuse, inheritance and married life. ^{1 2}

No source consulted names his school of law. The articles present a Kaum Muda reformer, which is a movement, not a madhhab; the one Shafi'i datum in the English article is that the marriage he solemnised for his own daughter in 1914 was permitted under the Shafiite school — a statement about the act within Johor's official legal school, not about his affiliation. His Hadrami descent is family background. Wikidata gives Islam in general. His record therefore carries his faith as unknown, flagged for the founder. ^{1 3}

He died at his home in Jelutong, Penang, on 20 February 1934 and was buried in the Jelutong cemetery after Friday prayers, at a simple funeral at his own request at which Tahir Jalaluddin led the prayers. His son Alwi attributed his death to a brain infection; his grandson, from the symptoms, doubted it and thought it a heart attack; neither account is adopted here over the other. Za'ba's obituary in Saudara called his death a great loss to the reform movement across the Peninsula. ^{2 1}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• No Arabic or Urdu Wikipedia article exists for him; the Arabic and Urdu versions of this page are written from the English and Malay articles and the Wikidata item cited above.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.