The “White Caliph” of Sarawak, and the Scottish Governor of Medina
Sarawak, located on the western coast of the island of Borneo, is today part of the state of Malaysia. The coast of Sarawak fell under the influence of the Bruneian Empire (the present day Sultanate of Brunei) from the sixteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, Sarawak’s story became intertwined with the Brooke family. James Brooke was born and raised in British India, and served in the Bengal Army. After leaving military service he bought a ship and set a course for the Malay archipelago. Brooke immediately became embroiled in the internal politics of Brunei. He helped the Sultan suppress a rebellion and regain control of his empire, as well as playing a key role in suppressing the activities of so-called ‘pirates’ in the area. In return for Brooke’s activities, the Sultan of Brunei made Brooke the Rajah of Sarawak, which he ruled from 1842 to 1868, when he died. Brooke’s descendants continued to govern Sarawak. With the growth of British imperial power in the region and the declining power of Brunei, the Brookes were able to rule Sarawak as their private fiefdom. During the Second World War, Sarawak suffered greatly under Japanese occupation. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the devastated state of the country caused the last White Rajah, Charles Vyner Brooke, to cede Sarawak to Britain as a Crown Colony, until it joined Malaysia in 1963.
In 1920, a man named Gerald MacBryan entered into the unusual political and administrative world of Sarawak. A former naval man, intermittently employed in the government of Sarawak from 1920, MacBryan was the sometime Private Secretary to the last White Rajah of Sarawak, Charles Vyner Brooke. His contemporaries in the Sarawak civil service saw him as extremely intelligent but highly-strung — almost unbalanced. Gerald was a skillful linguist, and authored a Dyak dictionary. But Gerald was prone to hallucinations. Charles Vyner Brooke thought he was “a wonderful fellow, but…nuts”, and his wife Sylvia referred to “evil seeds” in his brain. MacBryan schemed with Sylvia to try and ensure that her daughters would succeed as rulers of Sarawak once Brooke died. Vyner’s nephew Anthony Brooke called him a “revolutionary monstrosity”. Bertram Brooke described MacBryan as a man who “can’t help indulging in scheming and meddling and political juggling any more than people can’t help having arthritis”. In 1930, Vyner Brooke fired him from the civil service (Runcimann, White Rajah, pp.246–247; Reece, In the name of Brooke, p.20).
MacBryan converted to Islam in 1935, taking the name of Abdul Rahman, and married Sa’erah, a Malay woman who worked on one of Brooke’s rubber plantations. In 1936, the couple travelled to the Hijaz, in western Arabia. The ruler of the Hijaz and founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, had grown more suspicious of the trickle of European converts to his domains, and had introduced new restrictions such as a certificate attesting to converts’ pious living for at least four years (Report for January 1936, Jedda Diaries, Vol. 4, pp.82–84). MacBryan was apparently “kept on tenterhooks until the last moment” and then granted permission to travel to Mecca (Report for February 1936, Jedda Diaries, Vol. 4, pp.88–89). His romanticized travel account of the sacred journey, Triumphant Pilgrimage, ghost-written and using a pseudonym David Chale, yet accompanied by MacBryan’s photo, was criticized by some, including another British convert to Islam, Eldon Rutter, for being a fabrication (Runcimann, White Rajah, p.246; Eldon Rutter’s review of Triumphant Pilgrimage).
Although MacBryan had been interested in Islam for many years, he ultimately saw conversion to the faith as a way of building political support among Sarawak’s indigenous population for his plan to succeed Rajah Vyner Brooke as a future “White Caliph of Sarawak”. This would be a launching pad to bring other Muslim territories in Southeast Asia into his putative Caliphate, principally the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia) and Malaya (present day peninsular Malaysia). A Caliphate in Southeast Asia, ruled by a British convert to Islam, is arguably one of the most fantastical geopolitical ideas of the twentieth century (Reece, In the name of Brooke, pp.27–28. See also Philip Eade, Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters, https://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/the-white-caliph/, https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/a-british-haji-in-sarawak-and-his-england-loving-malay-wife/).
And yet, British converts to Islam had found themselves in very unusual positions of power in the Islamic world in the past. Thomas Keith, of the British Army’s 78th Highlanders, was captured during the 1807 British Alexandria Expedition in Egypt. While in captivity, Keith converted to Islam, and took the name Ibrahim Agha. Keith’s soldiering skills were recognized in Egypt, and he rose to become was second in command of the army led by the son of the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali, in their campaign against the Saudi forces who had invaded the Hijaz. Ultimately, in 1815, Thomas Keith was appointed Governor of Medina, the second holiest city in Islam, a role he held for only a few months, before he was killed fighting the Saudis defending Medina and Prophet Muhammad’s tomb (McGregor, A Military History of Modern Egypt, pp.56–58. Hogarth, Penetration of Arabia, 1904, p.70; James Grant, The Constable of France and other military histroriettes, 1866, pp.85–107; James Grant, The Scottish Soldiers of Fortune, 1890, pp.109–114). Keith was surely one of Scotland’s most extraordinary expatriates.
Returning to Southeast Asia, after the outbreak of World War Two, Vyner Brooke recalled MacBryan back into his service as his private secretary in 1941, and tasked him with transferring Sarawak to a form of constitutional rather than absolutist, personal rule. Brooke, along with MacBryan, was in Sydney, Australia, when the Japanese invaded Sarawak. In 1943, MacBryan tried to make his way back to Sarawak, unauthorized. Before the Japanese invasion, he had used his linguistic skills to broker a land deal for a Japanese company. The Australian authorities, now aware of MacBryan’s attempted return to Sarawak, were concerned that MacBryan intended to put his plan to become White Caliph in practice: “he might have designs on being appointed by the Japanese as a Quisling Muslim Rajah of Sarawak” (https://leminhkhai.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/1.jpg). MacBryan was arrested by the Australians, but released shortly afterwards. The files on this episode in the British national archives remain sealed until 2043. After the war, despite MacBryan’s dubious loyalty, Brooke retained him to help transfer Sarawak to formal British colonial control.
MacBryan’s trajectory after this episode was incredible and tragic. He was arrested after stealing a peach from a market stall in London. Claiming to the police that he could make himself invisible as the reason for his theft, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Epsom, Surrey. After he was released (or escaped?) from the hospital, he made his way to Hong Kong. There, in 1951, he was arrested for unauthorized directing of traffic, and subsequently died in mysterious circumstances (Reece, In the name of Brooke, p.279). Was MacBryan still seen as a political threat to Sarawak by the British colonial authorities? Given his mental state, this seems unlikely. Did MacBryan hold sensitive or compromising information on the Brookes, which led to his demise? Perhaps, but again, given MacBryan’s state of health, any claims he made publicly about the Brookes would be given little credence.
This unusual man and his schemes might be dismissed as the products of a fevered imagination of someone with mental health issues, a colourful episode in the extra-ordinary saga of the Brooke family, the White Rajahs of Sarawak. Yet the Second World War opened up political opportunities globally and locally that had not existed before. The Japanese actively sought local collaborators who could legitimize their newly won empire across Southeast Asia. While it is unlikely that Japan would have offered MacBryan the role of Rajah, the exigencies of wartime created strange bedfellows. But it does seem likely that MacBryan, in attempting to return to a Japanese-occupied Sarawak, believed that he might be closer than ever to achieving his political ambition of becoming the White Caliph. The role of Islam is important here; without his status as a Muslim, MacBryan knew he had no chance of supplanting the Brookes dynasty, as he had as little legitimacy as they in ruling over the indigenous population. However, being a Muslim, Abdul Rahman MacBryan thought this gave him more justification and legitimacy to rule over Sarawak’s Muslim population as a White Caliph than the White Rajah, Charles Vyner Brooke.
In the end, perhaps MacBryan’s vision of himself as a White Caliph in Southeast Asia was not so far-fetched in the context of Sarawak’s political history; after all, James Brooke, an ex-East India Company officer, had become the first Rajah of Sarawak in 1842.
