How we assess Abdullah's writing and influence must affect our entire view of late nineteenth-century Malay society. This chapter suggests that his work forms a point of departure for a liberal critique of the kerajaan, a critique which proposed new ways of thinking about political life and urged the primacy of ‘race’ over raja as a focus of communal loyalty and identity. Much recent historiography plays down such indications of social dislocation in the first century of British involvement on the Malay Peninsula. Despite the fact that Penang had been under colonial administration since the 1780s and that vast economic, bureaucratic and communication changes had taken place during the 1800s, some scholars judge that only in the twentieth century did “accelerating processes of social change” develop in Malay society. Abdullah's works are vital in judging such a conclusion, because it is certainly the case that no other writer of the period can rival Abdullah as a possible nineteenth-century founder of Malay modernism.

One reason given for denying Abdullah's importance as an exponent of passive revolution is the suggestion that he exercised his principal impact on only a “section of the European community.” His postulated audience is also sometimes described as having been “European not Malay” and the Malays themselves are said, even today, to “have difficulty appreciating Abdullah”. He is accused of a lack of patriotism and of “disloyalty” to the Malays because of his “extreme Anglophilia” and it is observed that he “left behind him no school of writers”. Against this view, certain Malay writers describe the Munshi as the “father of modern Malay literature”.