This article investigates the developments of hawker discourse and movements across the Malay(si)an peninsula in the first decade of independence. Looking at news coverage and municipal records, it examines the contingent, gendered, and egalitarian qualities of hawking as labour which led to its adoption by people experiencing hardship, and influenced the ways in which municipal authorities and the public discussed hawkers. In effect, hawkers, long significant to the historical and cultural systems of Malayan trade, were recharacterized as vulnerable subjects at the urban margins. The article then explores how local administrations understood and regulated hawkers through categories of location, race, and food, shaping the politics and governance of hawkers in public spaces. To engage with such governance, hawkers formed associations that protested against injustice and established dialogue with municipal and town councils, impelling authorities to consider a more significant inclusion of hawking in street planning. Throughout the period, the potential and limits of hawker inclusion in post-colonial public spaces became subject to significant debate between municipal authorities, political representatives, and hawkers. As local administrations eventually deepened their commitment to support hawkers, they also expanded their regulation, signifying a cautious imperative to legitimate hawkers and influencing the logic of post-independence planned spaces.

Panulirus stimpsoni is restricted to southern China, Vietnam, and Japan but has been rarely reported in tropical Gulf of Thailand. In Malaysia, only six species were previously reported. This study (1) reports the seventh Malaysian species – a new record of P. stimpsoni with morphological and genetic data; (2) establishes a checklist of Malaysian Panulirus species. Surveys from 2021 to 2022 sampled lobsters across Malaysia by SCUBA or from fishermen. Seven species were identified and a modified key of Malaysian species was constructed. The COI gene was used for genetic identification and phylogenetic tree reconstruction with maximum likelihood (ML). The best model was GTR + I + G. The ML tree comprised Clades I and II with sequences clustering by species and strong support. Most Peninsular Malaysian lobsters were P. polyphagus while P. versicolor dominated Sabah. Information on P. stimpsoni's full fishery potential, distribution, ecology, and biology is limited. Further research is needed to ensure conservation and management as data are only available for six previously reported species. Further studies are required to discover sustainable use approaches for all Panulirus species, particularly P. stimpsoni, given limited ecological understanding.

Despite significant advancements in the development of psychotropic medications, increasing adherence rates remain a challenge in the treatment and management of psychiatric disorders. The purpose of this study is to qualitatively explore the challenges underlying medication adherence and strategies to improve it among adolescents with psychiatric disorders in Malaysia. This qualitative research design presents results from 17 semi-structured interviews with adolescent psychiatric patients, aged 11 to 19 years old, from public hospitals across Peninsular Malaysia. The data collected from interviews were transcribed and processed through thematic analysis using the NVivo 11 software. A total of three main themes concerning medication adherence were identified: (1) challenges; (2) coping strategies and (3) protective factors. In this study, thirteen subthemes emerge as challenges underlying medication adherence experienced by adolescent psychiatric patients. The coping strategies identified in this study fall under three broad subthemes which are problem-focused strategies, emotion-focused strategies and maladaptive strategies. This study also highlights social support and positive medicinal effects as protective factors for non-adherence issues in adolescent psychiatric patients. In conclusion, this study supports the notion that adherence is a multi-factorial phenomenon. This study can inform future development of interventions and targeted health promotion programmes in enhancing adherence.

Seahorses Hippocampus spp. are commercially and culturally important to many communities. Although seahorses are widely used in traditional medicine, as curios and as aquarium fishes in Southeast Asia, documentation on the current nature and extent of culturally motivated seahorse uses in Malaysia is lacking. To examine how ethnicity and other socio-demographic drivers shape traditional medicinal use and underlying cultural beliefs involving seahorses, we administered a questionnaire-based survey during March 2021–April 2022 to members of the general public and fishers in Malaysia. Approximately one-fifth (21.0%) of respondents reported consuming seahorses (34.4% of these used seahorses for medicinal purposes, 55.2% for other non-medicinal uses and 10.4% for both types). Consumers of seahorses were from all ethnic groups except for Indigenous groups. In the general public group, medicinal use was more common amongst the Chinese respondents, whereas in the fisher group, other uses were more common amongst the Malay respondents. Amongst the threats facing seahorses, which include overfishing, habitat destruction, bycatch and ocean plastic pollution, only bycatch was perceived as a major threat by most of the general public and fisher respondents. The relatively low prevalence of reported seahorse use amongst Malaysians is an encouraging finding from a conservation perspective. However, the high proportion of non-medicinal uses indicates the need to focus on such other uses to ensure the sustainability of seahorse use in Malaysia.

The crisis over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses exposed the contrasting ways Western and Muslim actors understand the place of religion in international order and the responsibilities of states in religious controversies. No other Muslim national leader supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death in 1989, but many Muslims expressed anger and disbelief that Britain and Western powers could not restrict a book that caused so much international disturbance. This paper seeks to understand this discord through the overlapping but conflicted language games of Western and Muslim national leaders. It analyses a previously unreported exchange of letters between British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with other recently released archival material from the diplomatic crisis. These letters reflected different unwritten rules informing the actors’ understandings and practices of international order, despite their shared acceptance of the sovereignty of national states. For Mahathir, the Western world was itself a religious identity, and its collective propagation of The Satanic Verses compounded a religious insult to the Muslim world. But Thatcher and other British actors did not see religious identities, especially their own, as basic elements of international relations, instead reasserting the secular primacy of national states.

Multiple copies of a particular clay sealing bearing the Buddhist Bodhigarbhālaṅkāralakṣa-dhāraṇī (mantra) inscription were discovered in Gua Berhala—a cave in Perlis, Malaysia. These sealings can be roughly assigned to the tenth century and they appear to have been stamped with an identical seal. However, critical reading of the textual rendition of the dhāraṇī had not yet been done despite several attempts to study it. Therefore, based on several fragments of these sealings, this article provides a detailed reading and translation of the dhāraṇī and considers the cultural significance of their production. The article also examines the textual structure of this Perlis dhāraṇī and compares it with similar dhāraṇīs preserved in a palm-leaf manuscript and other materials found across Asia. This includes a survey on the wider transmission of the dhāraṇī in the continent. In this comparative exercise, the physical characteristics of the Perlis sealing appear to be unique and express a distinct artistic style, while its textual tradition is slightly compressed compared with others, with no identical equivalent found elsewhere. This observation suggests that Perlis, with its proximity to the Bujang Valley, participated in the wider network of dhāraṇī culture rooted in Eastern India and was just not a passive recipient of this practice.

Almost half of countries globally are implementing national strategies to lower population salt intake towards the World Health Organization’s target of a 30% reduction by 2025(1). However, most are yet to lower population salt intake(1). We conducted process evaluations of national salt reduction strategies in Malaysia and Mongolia to understand the extent to which they were implemented and achieving their intended outcomes, using the findings to generate insights on how to strengthen strategies and accelerate population salt reduction. Mixed methods process evaluations were conducted at the mid-point of implementation of the strategies in Malaysia (2018-19) and Mongolia (2020-21)(2). Guided by theoretical frameworks, information on the implementation, mechanism and contextual barriers and enablers of the strategies were collected through desk-based reviews of documents related to salt reduction, interviews with key stakeholders (n = 12 Malaysia, n = 10 Mongolia), and focus group discussions with health professionals in Malaysia (n = 43) and health provider surveys in Mongolia (n = 12). Both countries generated high-quality evidence about salt intake and salt levels in foods, and culturally-specific education resources in 3 and 5 years respectively. However, in Malaysia there was moderate dose delivered and low reach in terms of education and reformulation activities. Within 5 years, Mongolia implemented education among schools, health professionals and food producers on salt reduction with high reach but with moderate dose and reach among the general population. There were challenges in both countries with respect to implementing legislative interventions and both could improve the scaling up of their reformulation and education activities to have population-wide reach and impact. In the first half of Malaysia’s and Mongolia’s strategies, both countries generated necessary evidence and education materials, mobilised health professionals to deliver salt reduction education and achieved small-scale salt reformulation in foods. However, both faced challenges in implementing regulatory policies and the scaling up of their reformulation and education activities to have population-wide reach and impact could be strengthened. Similar process evaluations of existing salt reduction strategies are needed to strengthen intervention delivery and inform areas for adaptation, to aid achievement of the WHO’s global target of a 30% reduction in population salt intake by 2025.

This article demonstrates how the application of a broad and decontextualized distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” Muslims can undermine our assessment of an Islamic identity, security, and radicalization. It compares how this distinction has been used by the British colonial administrators (in Raffles, Crawfurd, Marsden, and Swettenham) in nineteenth-century Malaya and by Malaysia's Prime Ministers (Mahathir, Badawi, and Najib) in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This comparison demonstrates that both groups, despite their very different backgrounds (Western non-Muslim and Muslim non-Western), introduced a similar distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” driven more by socio-political objectives than by religious ones. Furthermore, the article stresses the importance of considering the socio-political and contextual dimensions of Islamic identity before attempting to explain the process of radicalization and its implications for security. Such an approach discourages reference to broad categories such as “moderate,” “extremist,” “Islamism,” or “Salafism,” and allows for discussion of their contextual and socio-political connotations.

The Malaysian Government has initiated the National COVID-19 Immunisation Programme, known as PICK, to be a national strategy for addressing the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic across the country. Although the government intensified public awareness to increase program registration, the total number that registered in the state of Sabah, located in East Malaysia, was relatively low during August 2021, accounting for only 42.9% as compared to that of Peninsular Malaysia. Therefore, this paper examines the public perception toward the PICK program in Sabah based on 4 main components: safety, communication, psychology, and milieu. This study is based on the empirical findings drawn from 1024 respondents across Sabah using online Google Form surveys. This study adopts 5 methodologies for data analysis by using K-means clustering, mean score, Mann–Whitney U test, spatial analysis, and frequency analysis. It has been revealed that the percentage of respondents (categorized as Cluster 1) who have a negative perception toward the vaccination program is higher (55.9%) than those who have a positive perception (44.1%). This study further discovered that Cluster 1 has shown high skepticism regarding the vaccination program, which can be explained through the communication component (M = 3.33, SD = 0.588), especially Co2, Co3, Co1, and Co4. Following the communication factor, a chain of negative perceptions also affects other components such as safety, psychology, and milieu among Cluster 1, all of which contribute to poor participation in the PICK program. The study outcomes are extremely useful for informing local authorities to establish policies related to public interests, primarily in the areas of public health. Understanding the community’s perspectives and their obstacles in participating in such programs may assist local authorities in developing or implementing public policies and campaigns that ensure such related public programs can be conducted more effectively in the future.