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.In Malaysia a trend on the same order occurred, the culminating architectural high point being achieved in the official mosque at Shah Alam, the capital of the state of Selangor, and the National Mosque of the Federal District.Here the architecture continued to stress the Moorish form popularized by the British in the public buildings of Kuala Lumpur built in the early part of the twentieth century.In southern Thailand and the southern Philippines fewer mosques were built, but in important cities some did appear during the period.In Thailand some building was done at government expense, while in the Philippines several of the larger mosques were gifts of Middle Eastern countries using aid money to upgrade Islamic infrastructure in areas regarded as poor and undeveloped.A similar trend took place in Cambodia after the end of the Khmer Rouge period, when Middle Eastern countries assisted in rebuilding an Islamic infrastructure.In Brunei a great mosque was built at Gadong; it too used the very ornate Moorish architecture found in Malaysia.In the same year the government of Brunei created a department to oversee mosque construction and upgrading, so that all Muslims would have adequate learning and resource centers alongside formal prayer space.Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital, also completed the elaborate Asri Hasanul Bolkiah Mosque in the 1990s as a counterpart to the “national” mosques of neighboring countries.In Singapore the drive from 1960 to 1990 to reconstruct the city for apartment living resulted in the destruction of many places of worship.Chinese temples were most affected, although a large number of mosques were destroyed as well.It was public policy to rebuild all places of worship but relocate them in areas where people could use them.To finance the rebuilding, the Mosque Building Fund was created in 1975.According to this scheme all Muslims were charged fifty cents a month at first, later one Singapore dollar, and still later a dollar and a half, to create a fund to finance the building of new mosques.By 1981, over S$7 million had been collected and six new mosques had been constructed, and in 1989 a second stage of building was undertaken that provided another nine mosques.These mosques came in various styles, with some simple variations of the Moorish architecture used in Malaysia, while others drew on newer styles from the Middle East.They were built to serve as community centers as well as for general worship.Language and LiteratureVariants of Malay-Indonesian became the national language in all three states with Muslim majorities, and in Singapore it was accorded official language status as well.In Thailand and Cambodia it was used by many peo-4Fed_159-240 10/29/06 10:29 AM Page 229The Muslim Community229ple.The major development of the language occurred in Indonesia and Malaysia, where literary movements led the way and government agencies supported the work of publishing dictionaries and manuals for the study of the language in schools.Malay-Indonesian was the major language of the Muslim Zone and the lingua franca for about three-fourths of its area.In Malaysia the Malay literary movement after World War II, especially the “50 Generation,” sponsored a series of language and literature conferences in the early and mid-1950s.The conferences advocated the continued use of both Roman and Arabic scripts and urged that Malay be made the national language of the Federation of Malaya.Those efforts were successful, with the Malay-controlled government choosing to follow the recommendations of the conferences.In addition, a government-sponsored intellectual outlet, called the “House of Language and Printing,” was founded to sponsor the production of Malay-language publications.(Actually it was a continuation of the British-founded literary outlet discussed in the previous chapter.) In Indonesia the decision to use Malay-Indonesian as a national language had been decided earlier in the 1920s, and the 1945constitution certified the national status of the language.In Brunei as well, the use of the language was never in question before independence and was merely certified as the official language at independence
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