The sultan has in recent decades advocated a hard-line vision of Islam at odds with the royal family’s opulent ways
When Brunei put harsh new laws in place this week that made adultery and gay sex punishable by stoning, it focused international attention on the country’s sovereign, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, whose vast wealth and family spending have landed his name in the tabloids for decades.
Sultan Hassanal ascended to the throne while Brunei was still a British protectorate, and he studied at a military academy in Britain before becoming sultan. “Brunei has been religiously very conservative and highly restrictive for a long time,” said Amy Freedman, a research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. “In the 1990s, when it felt like Malaysia and Indonesia were seeing more relaxed attitudes about social conventions, Brunei was already exercising very tight state control over religious interpretation and practice.
Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the sultan’s younger brother, built an amusement park that was free to visitors, purchased hotels around the world and gained a reputation in Western tabloids for mansions and mistresses. Similar condemnation followed the recent announcement that Brunei would go ahead with the laws, which took effect on Wednesday. Celebrities and Los Angeles officials called for boycotts of the hotels, and students at King’s College London and Oxford have asked their universities to strip the sultan of honorary degrees. The United States, Britain and other countries also denounced the penalties.
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