British involvement in Muslim affairs in the Straits Settlements (Malacca, Penang and Singapore) was done at the behest of Muslim subjects in the colony. Arab Muslims, who were a minority in the region, exhorted British authorities to take charge of the administration of Muslim marriages and divorces. In this way, authority was vested by these Muslims in colonial legal institutions. Instead of trying to wrest religious authority from the secular colonial power, petitioners essentially attempted to remove religious authority from the hands of Muslim qāḍis by granting more control to non‐Muslim British colonial authorities. Though British authorities were initially reluctant to take on the mantle of administering legal lives of Muslim subjects who formed fifteen percent of the British Crown Colony, a petition in 1875 subsequently led to the application of legal codes and case law devised in British India in 1880 through the Mahomedan Marriage Ordinance that was brought into effect in 1882. This led to an unprecedented development in the administration of Islamic law in Southeast Asia. Thereafter, colonial legal practitioners relied heavily on this corpus of precedents and knowledge prepared by their predecessors in British India. Their conception of Islamic law was in other words based on a universal view of Islamic law, minimally affected by local understandings and customs. A universal view of Islam, coupled with centralized colonial bureaucracy suited the needs of highly mobile Arabs who traversed the Indian Ocean as they craved accountability on the part of legal administrators.

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This chapter opens up with a short story written in 1941 by a Dutch writer, which tells of a young Javanese man named Karto and his encounter with an old Arabian. The depiction of the Arab man as a vulture suggests that Arabs in the Dutch Indies were opportunistic scavengers always ready to pounce on the spoils of Natives' misfortunes and prey on their presumed naiveté. The chapter sees how the identities of the Arabs became more rooted in prejudice as Dutch jurisdictions hardened. Drawing upon these prejudices, Dutch legal authorities intensely cultivated the exclusion of Arabs from the bulk of the Native population from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The chapter also outlines the impact of divided Foreign Orientals and scattered Arabs in the Netherlands Indies over a huge geographical expanse across several thousand islands in the colony. Ultimately, the chapter analyses how the property fell into the hands of Foreign Orientals through various mechanisms such as inheritance, powers of attorney, and transfer of debt.