Islamic Governance and Socio-Legal Change in Brunei Darussalam

Dr. Dominik Müller

The project investigated the relationship between Islamization policy, Sharia law reforms and cultural changes in the Sultanate of Brunei since its independence (1984). Based on ethnological field research and primary sources, the project investigated how the formation of an official state Islam is discursively embedded, what social effects its implementation has and to what extent social actors participate in these processes or refuse to give their normative consent.
The project first examined the historical processes in the course of which the state Islam bureaucracy and the legal and justificatory relationships on which it is based gained their current influence. The genesis of state disciplinary and knowledge production mechanisms was then traced with a view to the negotiation of “God-ordained” normativity and religious “deviance”, using the example of the “Faith Control Authority” and the “Supreme Council for State Ideology” as well as its work at the state university. At the same time, various popular ways of dealing with official discourses on truth and deviance were analyzed in order to illustrate the complexity of socio-legal change. Cultural traditions that were practiced/tolerated by large parts of the population until they were banned by law and socially marginalized served as case studies. Finally, the ethnographic data was used to theorize the bureaucratization of Islam as an analytical phenomenon.
The project, which was primarily based in political anthropology, dealt with questions of law and normativity as well as state policy and religion and thus moved between the various disciplines involved in the cluster. A contribution was made to the cluster’s research programme by empirically investigating the micro-dynamics of normative transformation in the context of a non-democratic and decidedly anti-secular context characterized by sacralized orders of justification. Central concepts of the cluster, such as the assumption of normative orders as social orders of justification, which are socially produced and changed by justification narratives, served as analytical tools.
Several field research visits were carried out in 2012, 2013 and 2014. In addition to semi-structured interviews and informal conversations, participant observation was also carried out at state-run Islamic and associated educational institutions. Among other things, the ethnographic para-site method was experimented with.
In addition to mechanisms of state-ideological “education”, the empirical results also illustrated previously unexplored local everyday practices of Muslims who either non-confrontationally refuse to follow state Islam or creatively reinvent it as deviant-declared practices within the parameters of the state-Islamic discourse. Although postcolonial Islamization policies contributed to cultural changes and the naturalization of their justification narratives, these normative transformations are more complex than unidirectional explanatory models and common depictions of Brunei’s “authority-bound” society imply. Despite justification hegemony, threats of sanctions and surveillance, the indoctrination efforts of the absolute monarchy often reach their limits, whereby alternative justification narratives are pragmatically modified in order to maintain self-determined scope for action.
Within the cluster, the project was carried out in close cooperation with the chair of Prof. Susanne Schröter and her colleagues at the Frankfurt Research Center Global Islam (FFGI), which I co-founded during the project period and which is part of the cluster. Parts of my research were presented both at annual conferences of the cluster and at the FFGI colloquium, as well as in numerous national and international lectures. In Brunei, I cooperated with the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD, in particular the Academy of Brunei Studies), as well as with the National University of Singapore (NUS, in particular the Center for Asian Legal Studies). Knowledge transfer took place, among other things, through the participation in a larger research project of the Jakarta-based ASEAN think tank Human Rights Resource Centren (HRRC), as well as through media presence in reporting on Sharia law reforms in Brunei in German-language newspapers (including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Welt am Sonntag, Berliner Morgenpost).
The project will produce the first English-language ethnological monograph in which Brunei’s Islamization policy and its effects are analysed on the basis of field research. The manuscript is due to be completed by 2018, and concrete agreements have already been made with an American university press. Further results have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

The most important publications of the research project (selection):

Müller, Dominik M.: Islam, Politics and Youth in Malaysia: The Pop-Islamist Reinvention of PAS, Milton Park, Abingdon & New York, NY, Routledge (Contemporary Southeast Asia Series), 2014.

Müller, Dominik M.: “Paradoxical Normativities in Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia: Islamic Law and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration”, in: Asian Survey, 56 (3), 415-441, 2016, [published by University of California Press, UC Berkeley, IEAS].
*Müller, Dominik M.:, “Islamic Politics and Popular Culture in Malaysia: Negotiating Normative Change between Shariah Law and Electric Guitars”, in: Indonesia and the Malay World, 43 (127), 318-344, 2015.

The most important events of the research project (selection):

“Economies of Attention and Selective Empathy in Times of Multiple Refugee Crises: The Case of Rohingya in Southeast Asia”, lecture at the 9th Annual Conference of the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders. Title of the annual conference: “Normative (B)Orders. Migration and Citizenship in a Time of Crisis”, Goethe University Frankfurt, 24-25.11.2016.

Conceptualization and organization of the international workshop Islamism and the State: Contested Normativities in the Muslim World. Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt, 06 – 07.10.2015.

“Anti-Secular Modernity and the Rise of Pop-Islamism in Southeast Asia”, lecture at the 9th Annual Conference of the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”. Title of the annual conference: “Normative Orders in Transition: Global Challenges”, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 20-21.11.2014.

Participation in the planning and realization of the international conference Islamism versus Post-Islamism? Mapping Topographies of Islamic Political and Cultural Practices and Discourses. Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt (with Prof. S. Schröter et al.), 13-15.12.2013.