He was of Arab Yemen descent, but had Tamil blood in his veins. He was not Malay, and yet is often considered to be the "pioneer of modern Malay literature". Living in the hybrid Southeast Asia of the 19th century, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir was a paradox: he stood apart, and he reached out broadly to widely different areas.

It started with letters. In his autobiography the Hikayat Abdullah, completed in 1843 when he was 46, we read