TUNKU ABDUL RAHMAN

'Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj ibni Almarhum Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah', CH (February 8 1903 – December 6 1990) usually known as "the Tunku" (a princely title in Malaysia), and also called ''Bapa Kemerdekaan'' (Father of Independence) or ''Bapa Malaysia'' (Father of Malaysia), was Chief Minister of the Federation of Malaya from 1955, and the country's first Prime Minister from independence in 1957. He remained Prime Minister after Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore joined in 1963 to form Malaysia.

Contents

Birth

Early Life

Early political career

Road to independence

Premiership

Involvements in Islam

Sports involvement

Later life

Death

Family

Awards and Recognition

Trivia

Reference

Birth

Born in Istana Pelamin, Alor Star, Kedah, Abdul Rahman was the fourteenth son and twentieth child of Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah, the twenty-fourth Sultan of Kedah. His mother, Cik Menjalara, was the Sultan's sixth wife and the daughter of Siamese nobleman, Luang Naraborirak (Kleb), a Thai district officer during the reign of King Rama V of Thailand.
Of all the Prime Ministers, Tunku had the most interesting story of birth. In 1902, the Keeper of the Ruler’s Seal was exposed as a man who had misused the trust placed in him and had sold state land for his own gain. Punishment lay with the Sultan, who ordered death for the Keeper, and decreed that the right thumb of the Keeper’s wife as well as those of his children should be chopped off as a taint they would carry on for the rest of their lives.
The Keeper’s wife rushed to Menjalara, then known to be the Sultan’s favourite and implored her intervention. Menjalara, following her maternal instincts, agreed to intercede. She had an audience with her husband, the Sultan and told him that she was pregnant again, but feared her child might be seriously affected if the punishment on the Keeper and his family were to be carried out.
Menjalara was a subtly a clever woman. There is a Malay superstition that a husband should do nothing evil during the period of his wife’s pregnancy, otherwise a dark spirit would enter the child in the womb.
Sultan Abdul Hamid was so elated at the news that his favourite wife was presenting him with another child, and so anxious that nothing unfortunate should happen that he ordered the Keeper to prison instead and cancelled the punishment on his family.
The truth, however, was that Menjalara was not pregnant at that time. But she conceived soon afterwards, and the child born was Abdul Rahman who delights to say when he was alive that he was “born under a lie”.

Early Life

As a child, he liked nothing better than to play with the children in the kampungs, beyond the istana (palace) in which he was reared – an istana built by a Chinese contractor in the style of a pagoda with fire-snorting dragons climbing around the walls in tiled fantasies. The istana no longer stands as it was razed by fire and on its foundations rose the State Council chamber which marked a new era in the history of Kedah.
Abdul Rahman began his education in 1909 at a Malay Primary School, Jalan Baharu, in Alor Star and was later transferred to the Government English School, now the Sultan Abdul Hamid College, Alor Star, where he studied during the day and read the Qur'an in the afternoon.
When he first went to school in Alor Star, Kedah, little Tunku screamed against what he considered was the indignity of being carried to and fro by a Court retainer. Royalty was autocratic those days and little princes were not suppose to dirty their feet, hence they were carried everywhere. The Tunku rejoiced the day he didn’t have to be carried to school.
Two years later in