However, being mostly Muslim and Malay, it was politically impossible to ignore their plight.
The Waja - which means steel in Malay - is not yet pure Malaysian.
An incident this month involved a quarrel between a Malay bus driver and a Madurese passenger.
Singapore's Straits Times at once responded by printing photographs of Malay officers on its front page.
The difficult areas are likely to be the Malay heartland states of Trengganu, Perlis and Kelantan.
Reforms to pro-Malay policies he promised when he assumed the leadership, meanwhile, largely did not to materialise.
But such is the effectiveness of Western propaganda that even the Malays themselves want Malay businessmen .
But he did not make any drastic changes to policies which had long favoured the Malay-Muslim majority.
The new cabinet includes a large number of ministers from Sabah as opposed to from the Malay heartland.
Mr. Najib probably recognizes the need to move faster, but he can't afford to alienate his Malay base.
The three provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat once formed the heart of an independent Malay Muslim sultanate.
Two local Malay youths, Rosli bin Dobi and Moshidi bin Sedek, were tried for murder and later hanged.
But it now works just as much against the mixed but Malay-majority satellite towns and suburbs created by urbanization.
Further, Mr Najib has to contend with a ginger group, Perkasa, that claims to defend Malay rights within UMNO.
The word Perhentian is Malay for 'stop' - not as in cease, but as in 'rest before continuing onward'.
PAS's gains in the November general election, especially as most of those gains came in the traditional Malay heartland.
Each country cultivates its own version of a common language, Malay, which ought to unite them but often divides.
Suppliers (even the Malay ones) now have to bid for contracts, rather than stitch them up in backroom deals.
Ms Ambiga believes the attacks on her, all by Malay men, are racist.
Two new supported languages added, bringing the total to 44: Malay and Urdu.
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"Mahathir has lost the Malay votes, " says Hishamuddin Yahya, acting secretary-general of Pas.
Denying there was a split in the Malay community, he put the blame on a lack of loyalty within UMNO.
She points out that her Malay co-leader of Bersih, a famous writer called A. Samad Said, has never been targeted.
Its Spanish-American colonial experience, invigorated by Malay, Chinese and indigenous influences, has produced an Asian variant of the rum-and-Coca-Cola culture.
But they don't worry Rohayu Ramli, a former Malay cultural dancer who has a very personal idea of what constitutes fun.
But Thenmoli quickly ran into a bureaucratic brick wall when she tried to put on a performance in English and Malay.
Malays as a whole, like other races, have got richer but the gap between the Malay haves and have-nots has widened.
Malaysia is part of the Malay Archipelago and Sweden has tens of thousands of islands -- 24, 000 in the Stockholm Archipelago alone.
Bijan is one of KL's best Malay restaurants, offering traditional dishes in a dining room that spills out into a tropical garden.
"Anwar has gotten the Malay middle class to take a new look at their relationship with authority, " says political scientist Chandra Muzaffar.
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