Brunei Darussalam's quest for national ideology

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.