FOR MORE more than two decades, Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh: Dari AWAS ke Rejimen Ke-10 was openly available in Malaysia, having been published in 2004 and reprinted three times.
Then, in April this year, it was banned. The Home Ministry (KDN) said the action was based on its assessment of the publication, citing communist elements and ideology.
Three months later, the ban was revoked.
The episode offers a glimpse into a much larger history of publication prohibitions in Malaysia – one spanning 76 years and thousands of books, pamphlets, magazines and other publications.
A new data project by INITIATE.MY has compiled, cleaned and classified 3,212 prohibition records under the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA) and predecessor laws between 1950 and 2026.
However, these are historical prohibition records and do not necessarily represent the number of publications that remain prohibited today, INITIATE.MY researchers disclose.
As the data shows, the prohibitions covered a range of moral, ideological, political and religious material.
INITIATE.MY classified the 3,212 records into five broad content clusters, with obscene or immoral content accounting for 1,252 records, or 39%.
This was followed by subversive ideological and political content, with 973 records or 30.3%, and religious doctrinal deviance, with 684 records or 21.3%.
Together, the three categories accounted for 90.6% of the database. At the more specific level, erotic or immoral material accounted for 1,097 bans, or 34.2%, while communism or socialism accounted for 849, or 26.4%. Together, the two subcategories made up 60.6% of the records.
At the launching of the database, INITIATE.MY’s executive director Aizat Shamsuddin highlights the complexity of the government’s power over its discretion in such matters.
“There’s enforcement, a lot of enforcement agencies, and there are also, like, these gatekeepers who are trying to protect what’s in the system.
“So I think we can tell a little bit about our process in the National Action Plan on Countering and Preventing Violent Extremism, for example. So we questioned the people who drafted it, for example and the definition of violent extremism itself.
“So from the first definition, we could know how the government sees what’s a threat and what’s not a threat,” Aizat says.
Irregular waves
The database also shows that publication bans occurred in waves rather than at a steady rate, with 786 bans recorded in the 1950s, accounting for 24.5% of the database, and 715 in the 1990s, or 22.3%.
The numbers were uneven between the two periods, with 247 bans recorded in the 1960s, 408 in the 1970s, 358 in the 1980s and 399 in the 2000s.
INITIATE.MY researchers caution against reading the lower numbers recorded after 2000 as evidence of a decline in content regulation due to the irregular rate of banning.
“Lower numbers after (the year) 2000 also do not necessarily mean that overall content regulation declined, as this dataset captures formal publication bans rather than the wider regulation of digital and online content,” says INITIATE.MY.
The researchers also found that Chinese-language publications formed the largest language group, with 1,159 records, followed by English with 948 and Malay with 765.
INITIATE.MY notes that Chinese-language publications were strongly associated with earlier communist and socialist material, although language itself did not determine why a publication was banned.
The database is also dominated by printed material, with 3,147 of the 3,212 records (or 98% ) classified as printed documents.
Foreign-origin publications accounted for 1,476 records, or 46%, while 669, or 20.8%, were classified as local.
However, the origin of 1,067 records, or 33.2%, remained unclear.
INITIATE.MY says comparisons between foreign and local enforcement should therefore be treated cautiously because one-third of the records had no confirmed origin.
Morality rules
Another limitation concerns the reasons recorded for the prohibitions.
Official KDN justifications are available for 1,586 of the 3,212 records, with only five of those records dating from before 1984.
“Morality and public order dominate KDN’s recorded justifications,” says INITIATE.MY.
Morality accounted for 893 bans and public order for 652, together representing 97.4% of the available justifications.
Other grounds included causing public alarm, public interest, security, national interest and being contrary to law.
“These findings apply only to publications with a recorded KDN justification,” the researchers say.
The researchers also stress that their content classifications should not be confused with KDN’s formal legal grounds for prohibition. INITIATE.MY says the database was compiled from KDN’s Senarai Perintah Larangan, supplemented by a separate list of available official justifications from the ministry’s Enforcement and Control Division.
The team reviews and cleans the records, using publicly available sources where possible to verify titles, authors, publishers, printers and other details.
Clearer standards needed
INITIATE.MY has recommended a number of changes, including clearer reasons and legal grounds for prohibitions, supporting evidence, duration, review mechanisms and appeal rights.
It has also called for old bans to be periodically reviewed and for KDN to maintain a consolidated, searchable register showing whether each prohibition is active, revoked, quashed by a court, under review or of unclear status.
The database brings together a historical record that had previously been dispersed across prohibition notices and other sources, providing a way to examine what Malaysia prohibited, the grounds recorded for some of those decisions, and how those patterns varied over time.
It also says blanket bans should be a last resort.
“Not every harmful publication requires complete prohibition. Authorities should first consider age classifications, content advisories, restricted access, limited redactions or targeted action against direct incitement. This would address genuine harm while reducing unnecessary restrictions on political debate, academic freedom and access to knowledge.”
A panel discussion on the “Future of Printing Presses and Publications Act: Balancing Expression and National Security” was also held at the database launch, with speakers including International Islamic University Malaysia Associate Professor Dr Syaza Farhana Mohamad Shukri, Bangi MP Syahredzan Johan, Bar Council’s Constitutional Law and Human Rights Committee chair Larissa Ann Louis.
For more on the findings, visit https://dekolab.github.io/db4-website/#/story
