Omar Ali Saifuddien III

Omar Ali Saifuddien III (1914–1986) was the twenty-eighth Sultan of Brunei, reigning from 1950 until his abdication in 1967, and is remembered as the Architect of Modern Brunei. A younger brother of Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin, he gave Brunei its first written constitution in 1959, kept the sultanate out of the new Malaysian federation in 1963, regularised its Islamic administration and built its religious schools, then abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Hassanal Bolkiah, and guided him as the retired Seri Begawan Sultan until his death, three years after he had stood at Brunei's independence proclamation in 1984. ^{1 2}

Born Pengiran Muda Tengah on 23 September 1914 at Istana Kota, Kampong Sultan Lama, in Brunei Town, Omar Ali Saifuddien was the seventh of the ten children of Sultan Muhammad Jamalul Alam II and Raja Isteri Fatimah. His palace education centred on Islamic custom and the Quran, which he began at ten and completed with forty formal recitations, together with English and court custom. From 1932 to 1936 he attended the Malay College Kuala Kangsar in Perak — the first of Brunei's sultans to be formally educated abroad. ^{1 3}

Returning home, he served briefly as a forestry cadet at Kuala Belait, then joined the judiciary department in 1937 and became an administrative officer in 1938, working through the Japanese occupation of 1941–1945 in the state secretariat. In 1947 he joined the State Council, chaired the Syariah Court, and was made Pengiran Bendahara, the senior wazir, by his brother Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin; in 1948 he chaired the new Mohammedan Religious Advisers council, the seed of Brunei's later religious administration. When Ahmad Tajuddin died suddenly in Singapore on 4 June 1950, leaving no male heir, Omar Ali Saifuddien was proclaimed sultan on 6 June 1950 and crowned on 31 May 1951, becoming on his accession head of the Islamic religion in Brunei. ¹

The Sultan set a seven-man commission, the Tujuh Serangkai, to gather opinion across Brunei, and on 29 September 1959 he signed Brunei's first written constitution, which made him supreme head of state and left Britain only defence and foreign affairs. The first elections, in August 1962, were won by the Brunei People's Party; that December its armed wing rose in revolt, and British Gurkhas flown from Singapore rescued the Sultan and his son Hassanal from the palace. He had at first welcomed Tunku Abdul Rahman's Malaysia proposal, but a quarrel over oil revenues and taxes hardened into refusal: when Malaysia was formed in September 1963, Brunei stayed out. ^{1 2}

Omar Ali Saifuddien built the machinery of Brunei's Islam: a Department of Religious Affairs in 1954, evening religious schools from 1956 staffed partly by teachers brought from Johor, scholarships to al-Azhar and to Islamic colleges in Singapore and Malaya, and a first Arabic secondary school in 1964. Oil income funded a national education policy and new secondary schools across the sultanate, and he composed patriotic syair poetry, including the Syair Perlembagaan of 1960. The state philosophy his son later proclaimed, Melayu Islam Beraja, was formed in his reign, and the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque in the capital bears his name. ¹

On 4 October 1967, after seventeen years and a long illness, he abdicated — the Peristiwa 4 Oktober — in favour of his twenty-one-year-old son, taking the title Paduka Seri Begawan Sultan and continuing as his son's mentor; the new sultan later made him minister of defence with the rank of field marshal. He accompanied the independence negotiations and stood at the proclamation of independence on 1 January 1984. He died at Istana Darussalam on 7 September 1986, aged seventy-one; Brunei mourned for forty days. The parent_of edge to his son is written once, in this record; no source read for this record names a religious school for Omar Ali Saifuddien III, and this record records none. ^{1 2}

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