Malay

Several thousand Malaysians, nearly all of them Malay students, live in Egypt, continuing a link that began in the 1920s, when young Malays at Al-Azhar carried the reformist ideas of Cairo's Islamic modernists back to Malaya. Most study Islamic law, theology and Arabic at Al-Azhar in Cairo, while others train as doctors, dentists and pharmacists at the medical faculties of Delta cities such as Tanta, Mansoura and Zagazig, whose degrees Malaysia recognises. They live in rented flats and in student houses run by Malaysia's states, and belong to a Malay student federation that traces its roots to the 1920s and to state-based associations. Shafi'i Sunni Muslims, they keep Malay cooking and Hari Raya open houses alive far from home.

About 6,300 Malaysians live in Saudi Arabia, most of them Malays with some Chinese Malaysians and Kadazan-Dusun, Iban and other peoples of Sabah and Sarawak, nearly all on contracts in oil and gas, health care and services, with their families, students at the kingdom's Islamic universities, and the staff who look after Malaysia's 31,600 pilgrims each Hajj season. Malay identity is bound to Islam, and for many the chance to live within reach of Mecca and Medina is part of the pull. They are Shafi'i Sunni Muslims who keep Malay ways at home, from Hari Raya visits between families to Malay cooking, and gather around the embassy in Riyadh and the consulate general in Jeddah. Older Saudi families of Malay and Patani descent, settled in Mecca since the days of the sailing pilgrimage, now speak Arabic and count as Saudis.

The Malays in the Emirates are a small community of about five thousand, almost all Malaysian professionals and their families, with a few Singaporean and Bruneian Malays. They work as engineers in oil and gas, in aviation, banking and Islamic finance, construction and education, and around Malaysia's embassy, consulate and trade offices, living in family apartments in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. They are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, for whom being Malay and being Muslim are one identity. Hari Raya is the high point of their year, when families keep open house with rendang, ketupat and kuih, and the consulate gathers Malay, Chinese and Indian Malaysians for a shared feast.

The Malays in Yemen are a few hundred Malaysian religious students and their families, most of them in Tarim in the Wadi Hadramawt, where they study Islamic law and Sufi devotion at Dar al-Mustafa, Rubat Tarim and al-Ahgaff University. They follow a path opened centuries ago in the other direction, when Hadrami sayyids and traders carried Islam and the Shafi'i school to the Malay world, and many of their teachers belong to the same Ba 'Alawi families honoured in Malaysia. Their numbers rise and fall with Yemen's wars: more than 800 lived there before 2015, nearly 500 were evacuated by bus to Oman and by air that year, and 376 were registered with Malaysia's embassy in early 2024. Graduates return to Malaysia as teachers and preachers, bringing the Tarim style of litanies, mawlid poetry and turbans with them.