did not achieve a high intellectual stage of development. He was particularly interested in the maritime codes of the Malays and their legal institutions. It was the absence of a well-defined and generally accepted system of law which according to Raffles was the greatest influence in the deterioration of the Malay character (Ibid).
II ROLEOFAL-IMAMINMALAYSOCIETY,1906- 1908
Malay language newspaper actually is relatively young compared to English language newspaper and Chinese newspaper in Malaysia (Lent, 1982). If government gazette hailed as first newspaper in English and Chinese monthly, Malay newspapers owes its beginning to the locally-born Indian Muslims of Singapore, which called Jawi Peranakan published in 1889 in Singapore. But in the whole Nusantara (Malay Archipelago), the first newspaper was Soerat Kabar Bahasa Melaijoe which was published in 1856 in Surabaya Indonesia (Ahmat Adam, 1992). The writer point of view, the first newspaper in Malaya (peninsular) should be attributed to Seri Perak, which was published in 1893 in Taiping, Perak since Perak is one of states in Peninsular Malaysia. Back to the point of Jawi Peranakan, it was locally born offspring of unions between indigenous Malay women and South Indian Muslim traders. In late 1876, this group formed and association in Singapore, which in turn published a weekly called Jawi Peranakan (Lent, 1977: 258) A writer of the time described Jawi Peranakan as having a circulation of 250 by 1880, “ably and punctually edited, having with only one exception, been issued consistently on the day on which it professes to come out” (Abu Bakar, 1991). The paper was also responsible for spawning other newspapers during that time most of the periodicals were hand lithographed weeklies modeled initially after English language newspaper and later using Egyptian and Arabic news content. The result was that the most of the content did not relate to the Malay community. In July 1906, the mood of the Malay journalism began to change with the appearance of Al-Imam (Ibid).
Al-Imam was a monthly periodical published by a group radical Muslims in Singapore in 1906 (Ibid: 1). Those responsible for the edition and publication of the journal were mostly educated in the Middle East particularly in those parts of the world that, according to certain sources, they began to observe, and subsequently became interested in the Fundamentalist