Brunei Darussalam's quest for national ideology

By Bilveer Singh

This is the first of two articles examining the national ideology of Brunei Darussalam, the Melayu Islam Beraja.

SINGAPORE (JP): Countries have sought to develop a national ideology to serve various domestic and foreign policy functions.

Unlike the simple ideologies of the Cold War which divided the world into a communist and capitalist camps, ideologies in ASEAN are more complex. They are more than belief systems about what a good society should be.

While they do recommend a course of action for constructing such a society, in the main, they perform the task of holding and cementing people while exhorting them to make sacrifices to achieve such a society. While much has been written about the Pancasila of Indonesia, Rukunegara of Malaysia and the shared Values of Singapore, there is very little exposition about Brunei's national ideology called Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB) or the concept of Malay Islamic Monarchy.

Like other countries in the region, Brunei Darussalam sees the MIB as a system of ideas which are both normative and empirical, helping to explain and justify a preferred political order for society that is existing and proposed as well as one offering a strategy for its attainment.

The Brunei leadership has, since 1984, began popularizing the MIB as a set of ideas that purports to give meaning to the past, to explain the present and to prognosticate the future.

On the whole, the leadership sees the MIB as performing a number of functions. It helps to provide legitimacy for the government. Through its ethical basis, it helps to cohere its citizens with the state. It places the relations between the individual and state in a proper perspective. It helps to justify change and transformations that are taking place as well as bind together the heterogeneous people of the country. Finally, it provides Brunei and its people with a perceptual prism through which to see the outside world.

The first time the MIB was officially forwarded and received the blessings of the British colonial authorities was on Sep. 30, 1957. At that time the then Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien received confirmation from the colonial office stating that "Her Majesty's Government were determined that nothing should be proposed (in the forthcoming constitution) which would in any way depress the status of Brunei as a Malay Islamic Sultanate".

This was first given a legal basis for the Brunei's constitution in 1959. However, as Brunei was a British colony it could not pursue this too vigorously for fear of alarming London. This was, however, given a more formal status when the present ruler, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, in his independence declaration on Jan. 1 1984 stated that Brunei would become a Malay Islamic Monarchy state that is independent, sovereign and democratic following the Islamic teachings according to Ahli sunnah Wal- Jamaah".

At its core, the MIB has three pillars, namely, Malay, Islam and the Monarchy. Brunei's leading ideologue and the man entrusted to popularize the MIB, Pehin Abdul Aziz Bin Umar, the Education Minister, has compared the MIB to an organic cell, where Islam is the nucleus, Malay as the protoplasm and the Monarchy as the cell wall.

The MIB can only be understood if the three elements are taken together as an integrated unity, where through synergy, each element strengthens the other and over time would emerge the identity of the Brunei nation according to the MIB scheme.

However, what Pehin Aziz and other Brunei leaders are attempting to carve for Brunei through the MIB is not a totally novel way of life. On the contrary, it is to reinforce and make more relevant the Brunei way of life of the past for the present setting. For a long time, Brunei has essentially being a Malay nation.

Even though the country is presently made up of seven distinct tribes namely, Belait, Bisaya, Brunei Malay, Dusun, Kedayan, Murut and Tutong, they belong to the Malay race. Malay culture, traditions and adat have dominated the political entity for along time. Today, the Kemelayuan in Brunei is far more entrenched and intense in their day to day life than anywhere else in the Malay World.