and the screen around the drum below the main dome, drawing on the railings placed around ancient stupas. In British Malaya According to Thomas R. Metcalf, a leading scholar of the style, "the Indo-Saracenic, with its imagined past turned to the purposes of British colonialism, took shape outside India [ie the subcontinent] most fully only in Malaya". British Malaya was a predominantly Muslim society, where there was hardly any recent tradition of building in brick or stone, with even mosques and the palaces of the local rulers built in the abundant local hardwoods. Kuala Lumpur was only a small settlement when in 1895 the British decided to make it the capital of their new Federated Malay States; it needed a number of large public buildings. The British decided to use the Islamic style they were used to from India, despite its having little relationship to existing local architectural styles. Unlike in India, the British also built some palaces for the sultans of the several states into which modern Malaysia remains divided, and in some places where the population was greatly expanded, mosques, such as the Jamek Mosque and Ubudiah Mosque. These were both designed by Arthur Benison Hubback, the leading architect in the style between his arrival in 1895 and retirement in 1917, during which it experienced its peak in popularity. The lack of local precedents allowed the English architects to create "an architecture defined purely by Orientalist fantasy", according to Metcalf, who says Hubback's Ubudiah Mosque (Kuala Kangsar, 1913) "conjures up nothing less than a Victorian illustrator's fantasy from the Arabian Nights". Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, the leading figures were English professional architects (whereas in India former soldiers or military engineers were often used) who had never worked in India. Usually they could design in both Indo-Saracenic and European styles. For example, the major buildings by Regent Alfred John Bidwell, who left his career in London at the age of 34 in 1893 to take a public appointment in Malaysia, include Kuala Lumpur's Sultan Abdul Samad Building (originally the "Government Offices", 1894), in a free Islamic style, perhaps more Egyptian than Mughal, and with many horseshoe arches. After moving to private practice in Singapore, Bidwell designed the thoroughly European Raffles Hotel (1899). In Singapore European styles had been the norm since the first British public building there in 1827, both copying Calcutta and reflecting a smaller proportion