Al-Marhum Professor Tan Sri Datuk Ahmad Mohamed Ibrahim

Ahmad bin Mohamed Ibrahim born on 15 May 1916 was a Singaporean lawyer and law professor who served as the first Attorney-General of Singapore between 1965 and 1967. Ahmad was educated in Victoria Bridge School (now Victoria School), Raffles Institution, and Raffles College (now the National University of Singapore). In 1936, he received the Queen’s Scholarship (now known as the President’s Scholarship) to study in St John’s College, University of Cambridge. He graduated in 1939 with 1st Class Economics Tripos I and 1st Class Law Tripos II, then attained the Masters in Law in 1965. He was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) from the University of Singapore on 5 June 1965.

In 1948, Ahmad stood as an independent candidate in the Municipal Commission Election in Singapore and won. He became Singapore’s first State Advocate General in 1959, and the nation’s first non-British Attorney-General in 1966. He moved to Malaysia in 1969. In 1972, he became the dean of the law faculty of the University of Malaya. There he established the first law faculty in Malaysia. He was also later made Professor of Malaysian Law, and in 1984 University of Malaya honoured Ahmad with the highest academic title it could confer – Professor Emeritus. In 1984, Ahmad was instrumental in setting up the Kulliyyah of Laws at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), and was made the Shaikh and the Dean of the Kulliyyah. In 2000, the Kulliyyah was proclaimed as Ahmad Ibrahim Kulliyyah in honour of Ahmad as the founding father of the Kulliyyah.

Ahmad was a key person in the merger talks between Singapore and Malaysia in the early 1960s. He was also the legal expert in the Singapore delegation to the Malaysia Talks in London in 1963, which discussed independence from Britain.

Former Singaporean deputy prime minister Goh Keng Swee once described Ahmad as a man of “tremendous breadth and depth of intellect, whose ability as a legal draftsman is unsurpassed in this country”.