Note 124 — Chapter V · Magic Rites connected with the Several Departments of Nature

“Among the modern Malays avoidance of the flesh of swine and of contact with anything connected with the unclean animal is, of course, universal. No tenet of El-Islam is more rigidly enforced than this. It is singular to notice, among a people governed by the ordinances of the Prophet, traces of the observance of another form of abstinence enjoined by a different religion. The universal preference of the flesh of the Buffalo to that of the Ox in Malay countries is evidently a prejudice bequeathed to modern times by a period when cow-beef was as much an abomination to Malays as it is to the Hindus of India at the present day. This is not admitted or suspected by ordinary Malays, who would probably have some reason, based on the relative wholesomeness of buffalo and cow-beef, to allege in defence of their preference of the latter to the former.”124