Prologue: diasporic networks and connectivity across oceans

During the advance of European colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, empire and merchants generated an active flow of goods, capital, peoples, and ideas, thereby integrating vast portions of the Middle East and South East Asia. But recent research has revealed that, long before colonialism, travel on the Indian Ocean had generated an active exchange of people, goods, and ideas that cut across ethnic and language boundaries. For centuries, Jews, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Malays, and other peoples moved freely around and across the Indian Ocean as merchants, pirates, explorers, missionaries, and pilgrims. The recent research on diasporic networks and connectivity across oceans has subverted the traditional land-based, state-centred paradigms that once dominated scholarly works. By focusing on trade networks and nodal maritime centres of power such as port cities rather than on state structures, these studies critique meta-geographical constructs and raise new questions.Footnote ¹ How should we conceptualize these diasporic groups, their boundaries and power, in the eras before and after South East Asia was divided into colonial spheres of influence? What effects did European imperial expansion have on Indian Ocean trade and migration patterns? This article explores how the advent of European empires in the nineteenth century affected the power structure of one of these diasporic groups, the Hadhrami Arabs, from the Middle East to South East Asia. In particular, it examines the role of their corporate property (known as awaqf) in British Singapore in creating a family network across space and time. This study responds to an upsurge of research interest in four areas that are germane today: (1) trade diasporas and connectivity; (2) dynamics within diasporic groups; (3) interactions between corporate property and state control; and (4) interactions between diasporic groups, their ‘host’ societies, and rising ‘state’ power.Footnote ²

Connecting the dots: corporate property and legal archives

The Hadhrami traders began leaving their arid homeland at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula some 500 years ago to seek their fortunes in the East. They served as teachers, judges, and traders settling in India, East Africa, and South East Asia. Their descendants played important parts in their adoptive societies, and continued to navigate the Indian Ocean and inhabit its far-flung littorals. Their itinerancy, accumulated wealth, and extensive networks gave them a competitive advantage over other migrant groups in the region. A remarkable feature of this diaspora was the ability of Hadhrami expatriates to retain connections to their original homeland from their various host societies, sometimes over generations, even as they put down roots in their adopted lands. Many scholars have been impressed by the ‘longevity’ of these diasporic networks around the Indian Ocean.Footnote ³ Engseng Ho suggests that both genealogy and grave building provided a way for these mobile traders to connect to each other across the ocean. He notes that graves in Tarim (which are supposed to hold the remains of the legendary ancestors of the men titled ‘Syed’) created such ‘powerful dynamics of signification’ that they had the ‘potential to create communities’ across space and time.Footnote ⁴

In a parallel development, researchers noted that, for more than 600 years, large families of many generations lived along the waterway of the Pearl River Delta in South China. What accounted for the longevity of these families? Before the 1950s, historians had a tendency to view them in terms of their rituals around a patriarchal ancestor. The founding of an ‘ancestral hall’ and compilation of a genealogy were significant aspects of this ‘kin group building’. In the 1950s, anthropologist Maurice Freedman looked beyond the ritual aspects of these groups and examined the importance of joint property owning and ancestral land to keep group membership high. Freedman thus introduced the idea of the ‘lineage’ as a corporate property-controlling group and argued that large lineages in South China were an outgrowth of a frontier environment, where the need for cooperation in opening wild land and defending life stimulated the rapid growth of kin groups into large lineage groups.Footnote ⁵ Recently, David Faure has revised this idea, indicating that it was not the absence of the state in a frontier environment, but its presence that encouraged the formation of lineage groups. He posits that the lineage became a corporate, property-controlling institution as the local frontier society was integrated into the state. In the sixteenth century, its inhabitants began to transform the Pearl River Delta as they reclaimed land from the sea (by building dykes, and so on). After putting in the work of land reclamation, some residents registered their land with the central government. In return for paying land taxes, they received official recognition of ownership when land disputes arose. In this instance, the presence of the state (and its law courts) drove the formation of lineage groups to protect property. Large family groups became partners of the state in managing local societies.Footnote ⁶

Leigh Denault focused on court cases that considered the ‘joint family’ as a social unit under siege or a property collective at the point of dissolution, to examine colonial rule in South Asia. She notes that individuals were driven to favour certain social bonds (for example, family bonds) above others in order to establish a clear identity before the colonial courts, while the British colonial courts felt free to assign identities and to codify customs. The British desire to create alienable property rights and markets in land led them to support the North Indian Hindu joint family as a social norm across India, and then to create ‘the Hindu joint family’ as a codified ritual and property-holding collective.Footnote ⁷ Like the Chinese lineages, these property-holding collectives partnered the colonial government in managing local societies.

The above studies suggest that property holding and state control interacted with descent lines to create large family groups who were partners of the state in managing local societies. Inspired by the above findings, this article will examine the dynamics of the Hadhrami diasporic group by tracking the story of the Alsagoffs in Singapore. It will examine the changing role of corporate property (awaqf) in colonial and post-colonial Singapore. It will suggest that case law and legal archives deserve more recognition for their role in writing the histories of the empires and South East Asia. Through their litigations in the fields of inheritance and religious endowments, the Hadhrami community made their imprint on law as well as on the history of diasporic communities in South East Asia. Legal archives in the colonial courts give important evidence of the historical links between the Middle East and South East Asia.Footnote ⁸ These archives also suggest that the confusion created by multiple sources of law in Singapore gave the Hadhramis traders room to manoeuvre between different discourses of law. As we shall see below, the archives will illustrate how the Hadhramis handled such legal uncertainties.

Hadhrami connection across the Indian Ocean—its fluidity

Although it is well known that Hadhrami seafaring traders had settled in countries around the Indian Ocean and in South East Asia for centuries, the existing literature tends to define the Hadhrami diaspora in regional terms, regarding the Middle East and South East Asia as separate cultural categories. Thus, this phenomenon of cross-ocean connection lacks a solid historical study. Recently, in his book, The Longest Journey, Eric Tagliacozzo revealed that the Haj played a vital role in fusing religious and political power in both the Malay and Indian Ocean worlds long before the European colonial moment. Studies of previously neglected links between the peoples who sailed between the Middle East and South East Asia, especially the Hadhramis from Hadhramaut (in present-day Yemen), have gradually found their way into the centre of academic debates.Footnote ⁹ In his book, The Graves of Tarim, Ho Ensang explored South East Asia's historical connections with Hadhramaut. He examines the story of the Hadhrami groups and challenges the predilection for neatly dividing world history into pre-colonial and colonial eras. Ho's study reveals that, until the nineteenth century, South East Asia and the larger Indian Ocean basin was a fluid social environment, especially for Muslims, who intermarried extensively. Marriages between Hadhrami and local Muslims like Malays and Bugis lifted the Hadhramis to high positions in their host societies. In particular, Ho notes that marriages between Hadhrami men and the women of their host societies created a special category of descendants whom Ho dubs ‘creoles’ and portrays as sojourners moving between their places of birth around the Indian Ocean and their Hadhrami ‘fatherland’, with the town of Tarim in the Hadhramaut Valley as its sacred centre. ‘Creoles’ belonged to diverse language groups and dynastic polities, yet they were always aware of their status as Hadhrami Syed, the Muslim elite, respected for their wealth and their alleged kinship to the Prophet Mohammed.Footnote ¹⁰

British colonial administrators were well aware of the high status of the Arabs in the region. In 1819, when Singapore was founded, Sir Stamford Raffles encouraged them to settle in the new colony, and his blueprint for Singapore included an Arab district.Footnote ¹¹ Raffles noted that the ‘enterprise of the Arabs, Chinese and Bugis is very conspicuous. They are in general fair traders and Europeans acquainted with them can rely on their engagements and command their confidence’. Wealthy Arabs from Java relocated to Singapore. Since they already had close ties with Malay leaders through marriage and trade, and an influence on local culture through their religion, it made sense for them to step into the leadership position left vacant by local Malay rulers. In this way, Arabs became intermediaries between the British and the Malays and other Muslims. The Hadhramis began to migrate in larger numbers in the latter half of the nineteenth century to do business with the new colonial regimes, and later to buy land in British port cities like Singapore. The Alsagoffs were notable among them.Footnote ¹²

The Alsagoffs in Singapore traced their descent back to Syed Abdul Rahman Alsagoff, a seafarer and spice trader from Mecca who began to trade in South East Asia in the 1810s. He went first to Malacca, where he established himself as a spice trader. He traded throughout South East Asia and had several places of residence, including a home in Java.Footnote ¹³ In 1824, a few years after Singapore was founded as a free port, Syed Abdul Rahman moved there with his son, Syed Ahmed.

The Alsagoff father and son became even more powerful, and more rooted in Singapore, when Ahmed married Raja Siti, the only daughter of the wealthy Bugis Sultana Hajjah Fatimah. Fatimah, who came from a well-known Malaccan family, had married the Sultan of Gowa Karaeng Chanda Pulih, a Bugis prince whose family were ship owners with a trading post in Singapore. Sultana Hajjah Fatimah had been widowed young, taken over her husband's business, and prospered. The marriage of her Bugis/Malay daughter to the Alsagoff son meant their businesses combined as well, adding a veritable fleet of Bugis ships to the extensive connections of both families.

The Bugis, like the Hadhramis, had been seafarers and traders for centuries. Originally from the Celebes Islands (in present-day Indonesia), scholar William Roff described them as ‘the Phoenicians of Malaysia’ because their ships went everywhere within the archipelago.Footnote ¹⁴ Inter-island traders and adventurous sailors, they also profited by the British presence in South East Asia. The Dutch had blockaded their spice routes; in the new British free port, the Bugis could evade Dutch constraints, extend their trading networks, and enjoy a safe political and financial haven. By the 1830s, the Bugis were prominent in the pioneer communities in Singapore.Footnote ¹⁵

Thus, the marriage of Abdul Rahman's son Ahmed to Fatimah's daughter Raja linked the families and expanded their trading ventures exponentially. Both families demonstrated more cultural fluidity as a result. In 1848, father and son established Alsagoff & Company for spice trading throughout the archipelago.Footnote ¹⁶ (Thereafter, they used this anglicized version of their name in most English documents.) With the addition of Fatimah's ships, the company became a famous wholesaler by the 1850s, supplying a wide variety of foods to Arab retailers in the region. When Syed Abdul Rahman died (in Java), Ahmed inherited his father's business. Upon Fatimah's death, Ahmed inherited his mother-in-law's business as well; together, this amounted to a considerable fortune.Footnote ¹⁷

In their travels from the Middle East throughout South East Asia, the Hadhrami traders in general, and the Alsagoffs in particular, created bridges between different worlds. As noted earlier, the marriages between Hadhrami men and local women produced offspring who could navigate in the worlds of both of their parents—individuals Ho Ensang described as ‘creoles’, who were remarkable for a kind of cultural fluidity. In the union between Ahmed and Raja, the couple produced one son and six daughters. The Alsagoff son was the maternal grandson of Fatimah. His Arab name was Syed Mohamed bin Ahmed Alsagoff (1836–1906) but, to his family and in the Malay community, he was known as Nong Chik—a Bugis name that means ‘little prince’. (To emphasize his dual identities, he will be called Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik in this article.)

Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik and his sisters’ sons were influential in Malay communities, not only because they were wealthy Hadhrami traders with ‘Syed’ titles, but also because they were maternal descendants of Hajjah Fatimah. Indeed, the Malay Sultans gave some of them the honorific title ‘Dato’. As for Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik's sisters, as daughters of a Syed, their Arab names included the honourable title ‘Sherifa’. According to a 2010 oral account by a great-granddaughter of Ahmed and Raja, the family (Fatimah/Alsagoff descendants) maintained a lively Bugis/Malay culture, and it was reflected in the names they used in their daily lives: they were all addressed as Engku, which denotes Bugis nobility.Footnote ¹⁸

Ho Ensang portrayed these ‘creoles’ as wanderers between their fabled ‘fatherland’ in Hadhramaut and their birthplaces around the Indian Ocean. The Alsagoff story tells us more: that Ho underestimated the local female half of these Arab families. The Alsagoffs also had a ‘motherland’ in Singapore, symbolized by a famous mosque dedicated to Fatimah, their Bugis matriarch.

According to the Alsagoff/Raja offspring, around 1830, Fatimah built a home at Java Road in Kampung Glam, which later became a Malay community in Singapore. Her home was ransacked by thieves and set on fire twice, which was commonplace in early Singapore. In gratitude to God for protecting her life, Fatimah donated land and money for the Hajjah Fatimah Mosque, building houses for her family and for the poor on an adjacent plot. The mosque was the material expression of the family's hybrid identity, reflected in its architectural blend of Malaccan and European styles. When Fatimah died in her 90s, she was buried in a private enclosure behind the mosque, where the anniversary of her death is still commemorated with an annual feast. Over time, this enclosure became the Alsagoff Family Burial Ground.Footnote ¹⁹ The mosque became a symbol of the Alsagoffs, giving these mobile merchants a ritual anchor in Singapore.

Even though Fatimah's name is immortalized in the mosque, at this point, the Bugis role and name, like ‘princess’ Raja Siti herself, were overshadowed by the Alsagoff name, which became synonymous with wealth from the shipping business. Yet the legacy of Fatimah cannot be overlooked. Like Fatimah, other women of the Alsagoffs were active in social and business circles. Sherifa Zaina Alsagoff, a great-great-granddaughter of Fatimah, and a great-granddaughter of Syed Ahmed, was a well-known author of Jawi novels and poetry who wrote under the male pseudonym ‘Tahsin Alsagoff’. Zaina was a major heir of her grandfather's wealth and passed it on to her only daughter, Khadiga Alsagoff. As we shall see, Khadiga was another woman who played an important role in the Alsagoff story.

Bridging different worlds: the Alsagoff descendants

Most of Mohamed/Nong Chik's six sisters married Alsagoff relatives from South East Asia or the Middle East, in this way passing on the family name and title through their children.Footnote ²⁰ Since these children were raised in such different locales and cultures, they embodied the fluidity of the Alsagoff identity. Their combined experience in a variety of cultures could also be a valuable business asset, as we shall see below.

Sherifa Kadijah/Engku Ijah, one of Mohamed/Nong Chik's sisters, married an Alsagoff who was a seafaring trader from Hadhramaut, and she and her husband lived for half the year in Singapore. They had a son, Syed Abdulrahman bin Taha Alsagoff (1880–1955), who married one of Mohammed/Nong Chik's daughters, so the young man became Mohamed/Nong Chik's son-in-law as well as his nephew. Syed Abdulrahman, addressed as Engku Aman in Singapore, was popular with the Malay community. Mohamed/Nong Chik gave him the administration of the Muslim charitable institutions the Alsagoffs had set up, which included the Alsagoff school and the Hajjah Fatimah Mosque.Footnote ²¹

In 1874, Mohamed/Nong Chik partnered with another nephew, his sister Aisha's son Syed Omar bin Mohamed Alsagoff (1850–1927), who had been educated in the Middle East (Aisha had moved to Hadhramaut to marry). To open a branch of Alsagoff & Company in Arabia, Mohamed/Nong Chik made Omar a business partner when Omar was 20 years old. Omar brought no capital to the enterprise, but his familiarity with the Arabian world enabled him to conduct business in Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and the Middle East.

Around this time, the opening of the Suez Canal (in 1869) and the invention of the steamship made possible the mass transport of pilgrims to Mecca by sea. Even the more far-flung populations of South East Asia, some 2,000 Indonesians a year, were able to make the journey. Singapore became a popular transit point for the expanding pilgrim trade, especially for those who wished to avoid Dutch discriminatory measures.Footnote ²²

Under Mohamed/Nong Chik and Omar, Alsagoff & Company began to ferry Haj pilgrims between South East Asia and Mecca, and then to include shipping and money-lending in their pilgrimage business. In 1890, Mohamed/Nong Chik and Omar signed a Deed of Partnership that functioned like a traditional Muslim ‘Mudaraba’—a contract between a financier and a manager. Omar's contribution came from his networks in and knowledge of the Middle East.Footnote ²³

In addition to his Haj and money-lending ventures, Mohamed/Nong Chik diversified his investments by buying land in Singapore. Transferring money from trade to land in British Singapore was a good way for diaspora traders to store their wealth. With extensive property holdings in the British colony, Mohamed/Nong Chik's wealth was protected, and he maintained a good relationship with British officials, who appointed him as Singapore's municipal commissioner from 1872 to 1898.Footnote ²⁴

Tapping and storing wealth: real estate in Singapore

The Alsagoff story opens a window on the Hadhrami diasporaic experience; so far, it has shown us how different generations in a family of itinerant traders accumulated wealth in various locales around the Indian Ocean, while maintaining ties to the Middle East through marriages and partnerships. As well, we have seen that, under the British colonial system, the Alsagoffs found a way to store and preserve their wealth through investing in real estate in Singapore.

The idea of owning a particular piece of land, delineated by precise boundaries, was alien to indigenous Malay thought. The concept of ‘real estate’, which was based on land ownership, grew with the rise of capitalist nation-states.Footnote ²⁵ The British introduction of the concept of land as property and marketable commodity would provide Hadhrami trader families like the Alsagoffs with a place and a way to store their wealth. As we shall see, when coupled with the colonial acceptance of Islamic law, their investments in land would even affect the Alsagoffs’ definition of ‘family’.

As mentioned earlier, when British influence grew in South East Asia and the Dutch lost their monopolistic grip on the spice trade, Hadhrami traders, and others, moved in. But, unlike other migrant groups, most Hadhrami merchants already were established spice traders in the region (in Java) before coming to Singapore.Footnote ²⁶ This pattern of remigration gave them another economic advantage in the new colony. By 1885, the 80 Arab commercial firms in Singapore accounted for 29 per cent of all Arab firms in the Malay archipelago, making Singapore one of the most flourishing Arab colonies in the Indian archipelago.Footnote ²⁷

In the early years of British rule, when the EIC was more interested in trade than governance, land-development policies were aimed at attracting immigrants and opening up virgin territories. To accomplish this, laws and customs from multiple sources loosely regulated landed property.

Starting from 1830, the SS was placed under Bengal's Administration. More English law was transplanted into the SS through British India. In 1835, Judge Benjamin Malkin stated that, although English law was the default law in the SS, ‘any man who wishes his property to devolve according to the Mahomedan, Chinese, or other law has only to make his Will to that effect, and the Court will be bound to ascertain that law and apply it for him’. In other words, the British were willing to accommodate the customary laws of their very diverse colonial populations, with the result that the SS had multiple sources of law, creating legal grey areas that allowed room to manoeuvre.Footnote ²⁸

Despite their attempts to implement a coherent system of law, colonial legal practitioners ended up making decisions based on their own ideas of equity, modified by what they knew of Malay, Muslim, and Chinese customs and the Indian Penal Code. In the Goods of Abdullah (1835), for instance, the court accepted a will by an Islamic man that transferred the whole of his assets, even though this contravened the Islamic principle that only one-third of an estate could be distributed through a will. In this particular case, the judge interpreted the desire of the deceased as lawful in the British colony. In principle, then, colonial subjects were free to dispose of their landed property as they wished in the SS, although how this principle was to be interpreted and enforced in different communities (Muslim, Hindu, Chinese) was unclear.Footnote ²⁹

After 1867, the Colonial Office in London took control of Singapore, and the role of government and its land policy became more visible in the colony. Land surveys turned more land into private property as numbered lots to be bought, sold, and taxed. With new land laws on registration and conveyance, land gradually became an alienable, marketable commodity protected by British law. An active land-owning class came into being, making Singapore unique in the Malay world. The Hadhramis were one of the largest and the most influential ethnic groups among the emerging landowners.Footnote ³⁰ Singapore became their home base and their anchor.

At the same time as the British made real estate a popular commodity and a safe and convenient vessel for holding wealth, their attempt to accommodate the traditional legal institutions of their diverse populace also extended to the Islamic endowment known as waqf—as the Hadhramis, like the Alsagoffs, started to preserve family estates through buying land and setting up awaqf in British Singapore.Footnote ³¹ The waqf (plural awaqf) has a long history. In its generic form, the waqf consisted of assets (land and properties) to be held in perpetuity. Ownership of the waqf was transferred to God; as such, waqf properties could not be sold, inherited, or given away as a gift. Thus, the waqf was a device to organize and maintain wealth, and was used in the Middle East and throughout South East Asia by various Muslim communities, including Indian Muslims, Jawi Peranakan (Kelings), Arabs, and Javanese.Footnote ³²

In the SS, the legal validity of the waqf became a subject for dispute, although the particulars of the cases varied by locale. A study by Nagata, Khoo, and Dharmalingan of the largest waqf community in British Penang bears this out. Their research on the Capitan Kling Mosque—an iconic waqf that was subject to frequent lawsuits—examines the Indian Muslim community that evolved over decades around the mosque, and which consisted mainly of Tamil Muslims from South Asia. Initially, the waqf was established and administered by local Tamil merchant leaders, but gradually it became a formal ‘public’ institution supervised by a statutory board set up by the British and then the post-war Malaysian government.Footnote ³³

Like Nagata et al.’s Penang study, Brown and Yahaya's study of waqf communities in Singapore also shows the governments expanding their role over time in supervising waqf properties. Yet Brown and Yahaya's findings reveal some distinctive features of the waqf community in Singapore. The waqf community in Singapore was dominated by large Hadhrami families. Lawsuits related to Hadhrami waqf in Singapore even came to court in the form of family disputes.Footnote ³⁴ Why were the Hadhrami awaqf and the litigations around them presented in the context of ‘family’?

Preserving wealth in family endowments

The numerous debates about property rights are evidence that land ownership in diasporic communities in Singapore was hotly contested. Law reports show that the practice of setting up ‘religious endowments’ to preserve their fortunes was common among the wealthy Chinese as well as the Muslims. These endowments, the Muslim waqf and Chinese tong, were often established in the form of joint family property. As such, they occupied an ambiguous legal position, since they were situated within the realm of personal (family) law, even as they consisted of immoveable property that potentially infringed on the English Rule against Perpetuities. The Rule's basic tenet was that no property could be held in trust for an indefinite period of time; in this way, the Rule prevented the Crown from losing its ultimate ownership of the land to a perpetual trust.Footnote ³⁵ In Britain, exceptions to the Rule only occurred when property was held for charitable purposes. How the Rule would apply in colonial Singapore was a matter for the courts to decide.

The British judicial system in the SS had had a chaotic beginning. In 1786, Britain took the island of Penang, whose inhabitants were traders from various regions, and applied English law and local customs in whatever ways were most expedient to trade. In 1792, Captain Light authorized local headmen to administer justice to their own people; the charters of 1807 and 1826 also allowed for justice to be administered by ‘Native Captains’ in the SS. The only professional judge in the SS was based in Penang.Footnote ³⁶ Meanwhile, Singapore had overshadowed Penang, and was flourishing economically. Founded in 1819 as a free port, Singapore had attracted traders from all over, and quickly become cosmopolitan and multi-cultural, home to a variety of ethnic groups, practices, and legal customs.Footnote ³⁷ In 1832, Singapore replaced Penang as the headquarters of the SS, although the judiciary was still based in Penang. The court was highly inefficient. In 1855, in response to repeated requests from Singapore merchants, the Third Charter of Justice added a court in Singapore and recruited two professional judges from Ireland. With these changes, a regime of local ‘personal laws’ quickly sprung up, with laws applied to ‘Mahometans, Hindoos, and Buddhists’ (loosely connoting Malay, Indian, and Chinese by their religions).Footnote ³⁸ The SS courts inherited a number of legal codes, translations, and precedents from British India to do with Hindu and Muslim customs but, in the ‘Buddhist’ and Chinese communities, the court entered uncharted territory. In this context, the two Irish judges set significant legal precedents. The Chao Chong Long case (1868) was notable among them.

The Chao Chong Long case concerned gift property for performing Sinchew or ‘ancestor worship’. Choa was a Baba Chinese born in Malacca, who moved to Penang and finally settled in Singapore. He left behind a will in English, which contained a clause allocating properties in Penang and Singapore to form an estate for financing the Sinchew ceremony. His descendants challenged the clause and filed a lawsuit in the colonial courts against the will's executors. They wanted the courts to void the estate so they could redistribute it among themselves.

The lawsuit was crucial because the judge (Sir Peter Benson Maxwell, 1817–93) had to decide: first, whether the British Rule against Perpetuities applied to Singapore, in which case the Sinchew estate was illegal unless it was being held for charitable purposes; and, second, the legal meaning of ‘charity’ in the colonial context. During court proceedings, the judge confirmed that the court's mandate extended to the economy, and that part of their task was to ensure a free market (including the land market) in the SS. The verdict was that the British Rule against Perpetuities applied to Singapore, and that the Sinchew clause in Choa's will infringed on the Rule. But, to see whether an exception could be made, he went on to examine the issue of tying up property to provide money for ancestor worship, to decide whether ancestor worship could be legally defined as a charity (and thus exempt from the Rule). One of the core concerns was whether the feast after the performance of Sinchew could be seen as charitable. The judge found that a feast that was only for members of the same family was not public enough to qualify as a charity.Footnote ³⁹ The court decided that Sinchew had little to do with ‘general public utility’, and therefore property maintained to pay for Sinchew could not be exempt from the Rule against Perpetuities.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Choa Chong Long case set a legal precedent for all Chinese communities under British rule, with repercussions in other diasporic communities as well. A few years later, in the case of Fatimah versus Logan & others (1871) in Penang, which involved a wealthy Tamil Muslim trader, one of the issues arising from Tamil Muslim bequests was whether the waqf for Kenduri (Kandoorie, a ritual feasting) was a ‘charitable’ gift. Not coincidentally, British judges ruled that the feast was not ‘public enough’ to be regarded as a charity. Through a number of lawsuits in British Singapore and Penang, the definition of charity in the SS was narrowed down, shifting from a benefit to an unspecified ‘community’ (such as the testator's immediate family) to a benefit to the ‘public’. Eventually, a gift for charitable purposes was defined as a gift for public benefit. Therefore, these gifted properties had to pass a ‘general public utility’ test before they could be defined as a charity.Footnote ⁴¹

Legal shopping: awaqf and British law

As we have seen, Choa's case established the validity of the Rule against Perpetuities in the SS. British judges did not want immoveable property held in perpetuity, as that prevented its free marketability. To get around the Rule, a religious endowment had to benefit the public and not simply one family, no matter how extensive. In principle, then, this legal development discouraged the founding of awaqf. Yet, since Singapore was established as a free port, how the perpetuity rule could be interpreted and enforced in different communities was an open question. If setting up awaqf in Singapore was risky and could be voided easily by the courts, why did so many Hadhramis still establish awaqf in the colony?

While the British legal system did provide a degree of predictability, the application of Islamic law in the SS was far from consistent. But the confusion created by multiple sources of law in Singapore gave the Hadhramis room to manoeuvre between different structures and discourses of law and property. The Alsagoff wills show how Ahmed, Raja Siti, and their son Mohamed/Nong Chik handled, and made good use of, such legal uncertainties.

In 1868, Syed Ahmed drew up a will in Arabic in which ‘his land and houses shall not be sold’ but made into a waqf ‘forever’.Footnote ⁴² Then he made a second will in English to address the Rule against Perpetuities. In this carefully crafted will, drawn up by British lawyers, Ahmed declared that ‘his freehold and leasehold estate shall be managed and descend to future generations according to the rule of Mohamedan law’. In this second will, to protect the principle of the waqf for as long as possible, Ahmed was willing to turn it into something else: a trust. His English will stipulated that, if the waqf, which controlled 53 properties in Singapore, became void under British law, then two alternative income trusts should be set up: one while Ahmed was still living, and one to last for 21 years after the death of his last descendant, the maximum time allowed for such a trust under British law. Syed Ahmed's two wills show that he recognized that English law could supersede Islamic law; but, even as he made allowances for that eventuality, he made it clear that the Arabic will was to take precedence unless directly challenged.Footnote ⁴³

In 1883, Syed Ahmed's widow, Princess Raja Siti, made a will in Arabic. She stipulated that ‘if my next-of-kin [her children] agree to sell the houses which I had inherited from my mother Alhajjah Fatimah, my executors shall sell the same and divide the proceeds into two’, with half going to her children and the other half used to buy houses to be ‘converted into a perpetual wakaff [waqf]’ that ‘shall not be sold or mortgaged’. Although written in Arabic, her will was modelled upon the British legal standard. Like her husband, she made their son, Mohamed/Nong Chik, the executor of her will and trustee of her waqf. She arranged for three Alsagoff men to witness her will, which was dated according to the Arabic as well as the Gregorian calendar. In this way, she created a waqf with a will modelled upon the standard British will.Footnote ⁴⁴

Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik also prepared two wills: one in Arabic setting up a waqf and one in English that included an alternative trust and its expiration date. In 1904, he established another waqf, in his name, with a property in the town of Kukub in Johor.Footnote ⁴⁵ One-third of the investments from the estate was set aside for charity, which included maintaining the Alsagoff Arab School and Muslim orphanages. His nephews, Syed Abdulrahman/Engku Aman and Syed Omar, were the trustees of this waqf.Footnote ⁴⁶

Under British colonial law, the Hadhramis in Singapore were able to use an array of tools for preserving their family wealth, as well as new methods for succession and transmission. These included making a will modelled upon an English one, and setting up an English form of a trust. By entering their wills into probate at colonial courts in Singapore, and by alienating their land to form family waqf, Hadhrami patriarchs were able to test the legal waters in the British colony. While the Alsagoffs were prepared to make concessions to English law (most likely their legal representatives had learnt from the Choa Chong Long case), the decision to set up awaqf in Singapore suggests that they believed that real estate in Singapore was a safe place for their wealth, even if they could not endow their awaqf in perpetuity to accord with Islamic tradition. Instead, the Alsagoffs tried to preserve their estates for as long as possible under colonial law.

The Alsagoff examples show how Muslim testators could use the default application of English law in Singapore to their advantage. In addition, the default administration of Islamic law in the colony gave a testator more freedom in the transmission of his property than a strict application of Islamic law would have done.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus, despite the uncertainties of their legal status, awaqf flourished in Singapore.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Arabs owned around 75 per cent of the private land alienated by the British, or about 50 per cent of Singapore's total land. Arab land ownership peaked in the 1920s when Arabs owned 80 per cent of the large estates.Footnote ⁴⁸ During their heyday in the 1920s and ’30s, the Alsagoffs not only managed their own family property (often as awaqf) in Singapore, but were also agents and rent collectors for other Arab landlords. Some Singapore Hadhrami landowners, including the Alsagoffs, became real-estate managers as well. As an added benefit, the Alsagoffs were able to use real estate as collateral for loans instead of asking for interest payments; in this way, they also could avoid the Koranic ban on usury.Footnote ⁴⁹

Joint property, litigations, and archive building

Most of the land in modern-day Singapore's central business district was once owned by Hadhrami awaqf. But, despite their unstated aim of holding onto a joint wealth to benefit the family, many awaqf became sources of bitter contention. Even though Arabs comprised only a small percentage of the population, more than 50 cases involving ‘Arab families’ and their properties were brought to SS courts between 1868 and 1963. What was the core of these debates and what did they suggest?

To answer these questions, we will look at three lawsuits. The ambiguity of waqf status in British courts was reflected in lengthy debates in law reports. Remarkably, these reports also show that many itinerant Hadhramis turned to the court in Singapore rather than to their own community leaders to settle these disputes among themselves.

The first dispute occurred between two generations of Alsagoffs. The background is as follows: after his parents died, Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik took over Alsagoff & Company and became the trustee of the awaqf they had set up. In 1906, when Mohamed/Nong Chik died, his nephew and business partner, Syed Omar, who had been living in Egypt, relocated to Singapore to take over the management of Alsagoff & Company. Omar also became the executor and trustee of Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik's estate and, by extension, the derivative trustee of the awaqf of Syed Ahmed and Raji Siti. Then, in 1917, Syed Hassin, the eldest son of Mohamed/Nong Chik, returned to Singapore from Hadhramaut, where he had been sent as a child to be educated and had lived with his maternal grandfather. Backed by this grandfather, he filed a series of legal actions against his uncle, Omar, in Singapore.

First, Hassin accused Omar of ‘misbehaviour’ as the manager of Alsagoff & Company. After hearing from both sides, the judge appointed an Englishman named P. R. Hill to be an interim manager. Omar appealed to the Court but the judge dismissed his appeal, commenting that Omar's management of the company had showed ‘deliberate misbehavior for spoliation’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Eventually, Omar stepped down as manager and set up his own company—a property agency. Meanwhile, Hassin also had filed a case against Omar as the derivative trustee of the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff (Syed Ahmed's waqf) and proposed himself as a replacement trustee. Hassin claimed that, since Omar already had been found untrustworthy as the manager of Alsagoff & Company, he was an unsuitable trustee as well. The court agreed that Omar should no longer be the trustee of Syed Ahmed's waqf, but ordered the Registrar to select the person to replace him.Footnote ⁵¹ Several months later, in November 1917, Hassin reapplied to the court, rejecting the Registrar's choices of two outsiders (William Joseph Mayson and Mirza Mohamed Ali Namazie), once again suggesting himself as a replacement—and, once again, the court dismissed his application.Footnote ⁵² Thereafter, the trustees of the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff were court appointed and none of them was from the Alsagoff family until 1957, which was just before the waqf was dissolved.

This case shows that it was only in response to litigants’ requests that British courts interfered with the management of the Alsagoffs’ company and awaqf. Legal disputation over their awaqf, in particular, allowed the colonial state to encroach upon their family affairs. By initiating litigations, the Hadhramis helped make the colonial court into an institution that meddled in their kin relations and economic lives, within and outside of Singapore.

The colonial courts seldom questioned the legal legitimacy of a waqf on their own. Most awaqf existed for decades before lawsuits brought them to the notice of the courts. The following lawsuit shows that, surprisingly enough, a waqf founder's descendants would challenge the validity of the Islamic waqf with English law. Once again, the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff, which had existed for 43 years before being disputed in court, was the subject of the dispute. In 1918, several Arab women and one Arab man claiming to be descendants of Syed Ahmed sued the trustee of the waqf. The plaintiffs argued that, if the testator's English will and Arab will were read together, it was clear that Ahmed had been attempting to tie up the land in perpetuity, which made it illegal according to British law; therefore, it should be voided and dissolved, and its property distributed among Ahmed's descendants, which included themselves. The British judge agreed that ‘the general principle forbidding perpetuities had for a long time been held to apply in this Colony’, but he did not void the waqf, as its income went to serve ‘charitable purposes’ such as the Alsagoff school.Footnote ⁵³

The plaintiffs appealed immediately. They argued that, whether or not the testator's waqf was judged legal, its income should be distributed among Ahmed's next-of-kin. They further argued that the testator's grandchildren should not be given their deceased parents’ shares because the grandchildren were a generation ‘more remote’ from the testator than the parents, and therefore not entitled to the same amount the parents would have received. (Removing the grandchildren as beneficiaries would increase the existing beneficiaries’ interest.) Then the judge held that the Arab will ‘was invalid’, as it was trying to set up a waqf, which was a perpetual trust, but that the English will provided for an ‘alternative trust’ to expire 21 years after the death of the last descendant. Since 21 years was the longest permissible period for this kind of trust under the British Rule against Perpetuities, the judge noted that the testator had ‘been careful to keep well within the period allowed’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Therefore, the English will should be the sole basis of the trust, and the Arabic will used only as a reference to the testator's intention. Concerning beneficiaries, the judge believed that the intended meaning of ‘descendants’ included ‘the remotest generation’ born before the waqf was dissolved, and those children should receive their deceased parents’ shares. He concluded that benefits should be distributed according to the wills of Syed Ahmed—heirs were entitled to their benefits according to Mohammedan Law.Footnote ⁵⁵ The plaintiffs appealed in late 1919 and early 1920, but both appeals were dismissed.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a result, Syed Ahmed's estate was ruled legal as an ‘alternative trust’, but the waqf as a perpetual trust was abolished in favour of a more limited temporal trust. (The judge ruled that the trust should expire 21 years after the death of the last descendant ‘born when the testator had been alive’.)

The lawsuits indicate that, although the Rule against Perpetuities had not prevented the legal establishment of awaqf, once a waqf came under court examination, it ran the risk of dissolution, either partially or wholly. In the above case, the ruling was a double-edged sword. It set the precedent that awaqf were restricted by the Rule against Perpetuities, and set up an alternative trust with an expiry date. Twenty-one years from the death of the ‘last descendant’ born when the testator was alive, the residuary estate would become distributable. As will be seen, the Alsagoff ‘last descendant’ died in 1941; what had been the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff began to be liquidated in 1961.

The waqf set up by Syed Mohamed/Nong Chik was also subject to family disputes. In this particular lawsuit, the British court would also determine who were rightful heirs of family joint property. In 1921, the plaintiffs Syed Mohamed Yassin and Sherifa Rogayah claimed to be the children of the testator and his widow, Asiah binte Haji Arshad, and therefore rightful heirs to their father's estate. Syed Omar, as the trustee at that time, was the defendant. Omar pointed out that the mother of the plaintiffs had already divorced the testator before she had her children, thus, according to Muslim Law, the plaintiffs were not entitled to trust benefits. Initially, legal proceedings centred on the issue of whether Mohamed/NC had legally divorced his wife when the two plaintiffs were conceived, since he did live occasionally with his ex-wife after the divorce.Footnote ⁵⁷ British judges on the case referred to a number of established Islamic law textbooks to investigate the concept of divorce in Islam. Eventually, the court decided that the two plaintiffs were not entitled to the benefits of their father's estate on the grounds that their mother had remarried before their father died. The plaintiffs appealed in 1921, but with the same result.Footnote ⁵⁸ A blood relationship did not guarantee them legal status as heirs.

In all three of these lawsuits, the agenda was financial, and ultimately set an artificial boundary to delineate family membership. The litigants were kin members who were either included in or excluded from the list of beneficiaries. Both groups employed similar strategies. They took advantage of the colonial legal system to re-examine the testator's will, with non-beneficiaries attempting to become beneficiaries, while beneficiaries sought to profit by questioning the good faith of waqf trustees.

The British court as arbiter and archive

Despite their mobility around the Indian Ocean, which gave them a wide spectrum of legal jurisdictions to choose from, most wealthy Hadhramis raised their lawsuits in British Singapore (their economic anchor).Footnote ⁵⁹ Their land wealth, held as corporate property under British protection, helped the Alsagoffs to maintain connections with a wide-stretching ‘family’ network in the Middle East and South East Asia.

Unlike Islamic courts that emphasized oral deposition and accepted a verbal will, documentary evidence was a distinctive feature of the British legal system. To bequeath wealth across geographic distances and generations of descendants, oral instructions were insufficient. Since the wills might depart from Islamic regulations, testators needed written documents to prove their intentions in setting up awaqf. The itinerant lives of the Hadhramis made these institutional records—notarized land deeds and wills by colonial officials, stored in Singapore—all the more crucial to protecting and preserving their wealth. During court proceedings and attempts to define kin networks, the legal documents in central depositories in Singapore could be used to resolve disputes over family properties. As these legal documents around family waqf rights accumulated, those of Hadhrami descent also built up their genealogies as evidence of their claim on succession rights. The courts thus became repositories of genealogies written as legal claims—a textual memory bank bridging several generations. Thus, by setting up waqf property in Singapore and then using British laws to settle their financial disputes, Hadhrami itinerant traders also recorded and defined their kinship relations. In this way, with genealogies built around the desire to safeguard the corporate fortunes during litigations over who could receive benefits, the British courts became a repository of Hadhrami family history.

Over the years, court rulings on who was entitled to what benefits delineated the contour of kin relatedness that comprised ‘family’. As the court became the arbiter of litigations related to waqf properties and the key preservers of family history in Singapore, the legal archive in the colonial court became an important reference to the links between the Middle East and the Malay world. The family waqf functioned as the nexus between far-flung kin groups around the Indian Ocean, while the colonial courts helped reinforce the Hadhrami family as a property-holding collective.

The lawsuits in Singapore also provided a way for Hadhramis to negotiate their family relationships and structure their family narratives. As the realm of personal law became the framework through which Hadhramis interacted with the colonial state, individuals were driven to place certain social bonds (for example, family bonds) above others, to establish a valid identity and claim legal rights before the courts.

The expanding state: looking for new institutions to manage diasporic groups

Hadhrami families like the Alsagoffs, who were leaders in the Muslim community, acted as intermediaries between the local Muslim population and the colonial government in Singapore. Since landed property was entwined with personal law (especially case laws related to family waqf), Hadhrami property holdings were linked to British colonial power.Footnote ⁶⁰ By losing a measure of control over awaqf management, the colonial regime gained power over the Hadhrami community, as shown by a list of partially disabled awaqf. Through lawsuits the Hadhrami raised, the colonial court indirectly regulated power relations within Hadhrami groups, for the stability of the colonial state and the creation of an orderly property market. At the same time, as one of the most influential land-owning classes in Singapore, the Hadhramis were crucial supports of the young colony's economic stability.

This situation had changed by the turn of the twentieth century, when a new breed of Malay-Muslim leaders, mostly men who had been educated in the English language, became influential in the Muslim community. These men not only challenged Arab leadership, but also wanted more land for the Malay community. As land became an increasingly sensitive political issue, awaqf properties were called to account for fostering the stagnation that had led to slum conditions. In 1906, a Mahomedan and Hindu Endowments Board was set up and made slum clearance a priority. In 1927, the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) was established to implement urban-renewal projects that targeted a number of immovable properties in the city centre, including awaqf properties. Legislative measures (such as setting up statutory boards) were adopted to advance government agendas regarding land usage and slum clearance.Footnote ⁶¹

After the Second World War, when the British were forced to retreat and new nations emerged in the region, land issues became politically charged. Islam had long been a factor in Hadhrami assimilation but, after decolonization, Hadhramis shared the role with other Muslim groups, particularly the emerging Malay leaders.Footnote ⁶² In post-colonial Malaysia, where the privileged status of the Malays largely shaped the direction of the young country, Muslim institutions changed as well. The waqf became a focus of intense debate as Malay-Muslim interest groups questioned its validity as an Arab-dominated institution. As Malay influence emerged, the Hadhrami were driven to respond to the new political environment.Footnote ⁶³

Land ownership, citizenship, and ethnic identity became volatile political topics, especially in Singapore—a small city-state surrounded by hostile neighbours. The new government wanted new institutions to manage, but also to integrate its migrant and religious communities as citizens of Singapore. At this point, the government decided that allowing courts to be the final arbiter and handling waqf litigations as ‘family disputes’ were not in its best interests and set up more institutions, like the Housing and Development Board and the Singapore Muslim Religious Council, to deal with these complex land and religious issues.Footnote ⁶⁴

By the time Singapore attained self-government in 1959, the lack of affordable housing for its ‘citizens’ had become a political issue. In 1960, Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party (PAP) set up the Housing and Development Board (HDB) to provide low-cost public housing on a large scale. PAP wanted to build a new Singapore by strengthening government control of land usage, including waqf land. Thus, in 1966, the Singapore parliament passed the Administration of Muslim Law Act (AMLA), paving the way for the formation of the Singapore Muslim Religious Council (also called Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura, or MUIS) in 1968.Footnote ⁶⁵ MUIS was a corporate body with the power to oversee awaqf administration in Singapore, which would affect many Hadhrami landowners. To examine the impact of these new institutions in depth, we shall consider two incidents related to the Alsagoffs.

We have seen that, once a waqf came under scrutiny in the courts, it risked dissolution, as happened with the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff. This waqf (which had an alternative trust, set to expire 21 years from the death of the last descendant to be born when the testator was alive) began to be liquidated in 1961.Footnote ⁶⁶ The dissolution of this waqf coincided with momentous political changes on Peninsular Malaya. What happened to the Alsagoffs and their accumulated fortune (invested in land) during these turbulent years shows how emerging state power overrode the Hadhrami ‘family’ and sealed the fate of waqf properties in Singapore.

In July 1961, the trustee of Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff appointed Messrs Donaldson and Burkinshaw (a British law firm in Singapore that had worked for the Alsagoffs for over six decades) as legal representatives and announced in a local newspaper that the waqf would be dissolved. All creditors and beneficiaries had to send in claims to receive their rightful shares after the waqf properties were auctioned off.Footnote ⁶⁷ Among the waqf properties was the land on which the Raffles Hotel was built. After several rounds of negotiations from 1961 to 1963, Miss Khadiga Abdalla Alsagoff became the ‘new’ owner of the Raffles Hotel land. In 1963, she paid $1.4 million for it; in the 1970s, she would sell the land and her shares in the hotel for a hefty profit.Footnote ⁶⁸

Khadiga was the great-great-granddaughter of Syed Ahmed, a fourth-generation heir through the maternal side. She was the daughter of author Sherifa Zaina Alsagoff, who was a great-granddaughter of Syed Ahmed by way of his daughter, Sherifa Rugayah. Khadiga's share of the waqf had passed through three generations of female heirs (from Sherifa Rugayah to Sherifa Meriam to Sherifa Zaina); all three had married Alsagoff men to pass on the name to their daughters. Upon her return from Egypt to Singapore, Khadiga immediately attracted media attention.Footnote ⁶⁹ She was featured in The Straits Times more than once, where her photo shows a modern urban woman in Western clothing and hairstyle, who went by the English ‘Miss’ rather than the Arabic ‘Sherifa’. In the accompanying interview, she told a reporter that her mother, Zaina, had resented the way women had been treated in Singapore some 30 years earlier and, thinking of her baby daughter's future, decided to leave the country for Cairo. Khadiga also mentioned that her mother had been a well-known author who had been compelled to use a man's name as a pseudonym.Footnote ⁷⁰

When Khadiga returned to Singapore and bid for the land where the Raffles Hotel stood, she was only 37 years old. She was rich, famous, well-educated, the mother of a 17-year-old son, and a managing partner for a Cairo women's magazine, for which she wrote articles in Arabic. Of about 165 beneficiaries recognized as legitimate heirs, Khadiga had inherited a large share of the total waqf benefit. (Syed Ahmed had had seven children; when Zaina died in 1928, Khadiga inherited all her share.) Khadiga thus had a great deal of influence over the fate of other auctioned Alsagoff properties, particularly the Alsagoff Estate, a Malay settlement in Geyland Serai.Footnote ⁷¹

Like the Raffles Hotel, the auction of the Alsagoff Estate in Geyland Serai attracted attention within and outside Singapore. Since Geylang Serai was a Malay region, some of the Alsagoff men asked the new Singapore government ‘to acquire the land, cut it up and sell back plots to those now living there’.Footnote ⁷² By proposing such a solution, the Alsagoffs gave the impression that they identified with Malay-Muslim interests. They were responding to the new political environment—emerging Malay influence after decolonization. Some Alsagoffs went even further and suggested redeveloping the Alsagoff Estate themselves for the Malay residents on the auctioned land plots. They proposed to establish a limited company to build two-storey shophouses and ‘low-cost flats for sale to Malay families at $6,000 each’.Footnote ⁷³

They proposed their redevelopment plan in 1963, at a critical moment in Southeast Asian history: the birth of Malaysia. The proposal immediately attracted the attention of the Malaysian Federation government in Kuala Lumpur. Prime Minister Tengku Abdulrahman expressed support for the plan, publicly commenting that it was a ‘good idea’.Footnote ⁷⁴ But not all waqf beneficiaries supported redevelopment. Miss Khadiga was its main opponent. As the major beneficiary, she wielded more power than most other Alsagoffs, and she insisted that the family property be sold and the redevelopment plan scrapped because of the expense. Khadiga enlisted the support of other Alsagoff beneficiaries to mount strong opposition to the plan.

The 1963 dissolution of the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff together with the birth of Malaysia probably initiated some identity ‘adjustments’ among the Alsagoffs. It was around this time that Syed Moshen, Omar's grandson, began gathering textual records for a history of the Alsagoffs in Singapore.Footnote ⁷⁵ In this book, he identified the members of the Alsagoff family who could trace their bloodline back to Syed Abdul Rahman, the spice trader who had come to Singapore in 1824 with his son, Ahmed. According to Syed Moshen's book, by the 1860s, there were fewer than ten Alsagoffs in Singapore (only Syed Abdul Rahman's immediate family) but, by 1963, the family had grown to about 165 people living in the Middle East, North Africa, and South East Asia. Each family member was assigned a number from 1 to 165, with Ahmed as 1, his son Mohamed as 2, and so on. All male and female Alsagoffs were numbered. The list was nearly the same as the list of beneficiaries in the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff, which makes it the most updated membership record of the waqf before its 1963 dissolution. These individuals had diverse cultural backgrounds, but waqf membership and court archives in Singapore had maintained the threads of descent that connected them. (Despite how influential she was at the time, Khadiga was not even mentioned in the main body of the book, but only listed in the genealogy at the back.) Neither of Mohammed/Nong Chik's alleged children whom the colonial courts had ruled against, deciding they were not legal heirs of Mohamed/Nong Chik, was mentioned in the genealogy. In this way, the book mirrored legal archives—evidence of the colonial court's part in structuring the Alsagoffs’ ‘family’ relations and narratives.

In 1964, one year after the Waqf S.A.A. Alsagoff was dissolved and the family history published, three Alsagoff men, great-grandsons of Syed Ahmed (two of whom had been trustees of his just-dissolved waqf) hurriedly petitioned the court to be appointed trustees of Waqf Raja Siti. The move was an attempt to hold onto the family's last joint wealth in spite of the new government institutions that encroached upon it, and would lead to another lawsuit in 2008, this time between the Alsagoffs and one of those government institutions.

Meanwhile, relations between Singapore and the Malaysian Federation deteriorated, with rioting in Singapore. In April 1964, a bomb exploded at Geylang Serai. In July, more riots broke out on the eve of celebrations for the Prophet Mohammed's birthday, and the violence lasted for days. In such an atmosphere, the future of the Alsagoff Estate in Geyland Serai became even more of a political issue. Then, in April 1965, the Malaysia government sent the Federal Minister of Lands and Mines to Singapore to meet with Alsagoff men about buying the 1,000-acre estate to build houses for their Malay population in Singapore.Footnote ⁷⁶ But this plan was never enacted. As conflicts escalated, Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. Even then, Alsagoff promoters told the press repeatedly that they would continue their own redevelopment plan, and asked for support from Malay residents on the estate.Footnote ⁷⁷ Again, the Alsagoffs were trying to align themselves with the emerging Malay community, promising that, if their project materialized, Malay residents could purchase their own houses and live there permanently.Footnote ⁷⁸ But the Alsagoff redevelopment proposal was never realized, partly because of Khadiga's opposition, partly because of Singapore's new urban-renewal policy.

In the nationwide push for public housing in Singapore in the 1960s, Geylang Serai became the first public housing estate built by the HDB in eastern Singapore. It was rebuilt as a stereotypical ‘ethnic district’. The new Geylang Serai Market Complex, completed in 1967, became a pilgrim spot—‘the Malay emporium’ of Singapore. But, despite the ethnic packaging, the old Malay community had been dispersed. With its disappearance, the Alsagoffs lost their historical links to Geylang Serai.

The push toward public housing would change the neighbourhoods of Singapore completely. In 1960, less than ten per cent of the population lived in public housing. By 1988, HDB apartment complexes housed 86 per cent of the population. Many mosques, as well as the Muslim communities that had surrounded them, were lost in these public housing projects. Government policies for ethnic integration broke up the Arab communities even further.Footnote ⁷⁹

Meanwhile, more waqf properties were put under MUIS's supervision. By 1981, two of the three Alsagoff trustees of Waqf Raja Siti had passed away; without their management of rental income, distributions from the waqf diminished to nothing by 1993. In 1991, the third and last trustee had resigned; his two sons became the waqf trustees. In 2003, MUIS filed to remove the sons from office, claiming mismanagement; the court appointed MUIS as the trustee. In 2008, two Alsagoff men applied to the court to become the trustees. MUIS fought them and won the case; the judge referenced the AMLA, which gave MUIS the authority to administer all waqf in Singapore.Footnote ⁸⁰ Interesting to note, the Alsagoff men did not cite Islamic tradition, nor define the issue as a ‘family affair’ to support their case; instead, they cited the Trustee Act in Singapore. By this time, both plaintiffs and defendants had removed the waqf from the context of a religious endowment or of the Alsagoff ‘family’; they discussed the waqf from the perspective of state land. The role of the ‘family’ had been downsized silently, signifying the expansion of the state/public at the expense of the family/private.