The university takes its name from Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III, the man Brunei calls the Architect of Modern Brunei. During his 17-year reign from 1950 to 1967, Omar Ali Saifuddien III transformed a sleepy protectorate into a functioning state with modern infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. He developed the Melayu Islam Beraja philosophy -- Malay Islamic Monarchy -- that remains the country's governing ideology. He launched social and economic reforms, negotiated greater autonomy from British administrators, and prepared his people for the sovereignty his son would eventually declare. When he abdicated on 4 October 1967, he took the title Seri Begawan Sultan. Naming a university after him was not mere ceremony. It was a statement of purpose: that this institution would carry forward his vision of education grounded in Islamic principles and national identity.

The roots reach back to 1964, when Omar Ali Saifuddien III approved construction of a Religious Teachers College at Batu Satu along Jalan Tutong. A planning committee was established in 1968, and Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah formally founded the Maktab Perguruan Ugama on 8 July of that year, emphasizing that Brunei needed higher education institutions for teacher preparation beyond elementary and secondary schools. The building was completed in 1970 and handed to the Department of Religious Affairs in early 1971. For decades the college trained religious educators in relative obscurity, a modest institution doing necessary work. Then in January 2007, the Sultan elevated it to university college status. Classes began that August with new faculties of Sharia and Usuluddin, offering programs from diplomas through doctoral degrees. The Faculty of Social Science Education followed in 2022, expanding into areas like sports science, digital entrepreneurship, and halal entrepreneurship -- a curriculum that would have been unimaginable in the original 1970s classrooms.

As of early 2024, approximately 779 undergraduates were enrolled at KUPU SB, supported by an educational staff of 50. The numbers are modest by global standards, but the institution's ambitions are not. Thirty-two students pursue doctorates in religious education. Partnerships extend to Mindanao State University in the Philippines, Dharmawangsa University in Indonesia, Selangor Islamic University College in Malaysia, and the Markfield Institute of Higher Education in the United Kingdom. In 2024, an agreement was signed with Nahdlatul Ulama University of West Kalimantan. KUPU SB holds membership in the Asia-Pacific University-Community Engagement Network and the Consortium of Asia Pacific Education Universities. For a campus of fewer than a thousand students in a nation of roughly 450,000 people, the international footprint is considerable -- a deliberate effort to position Bruneian religious education within a broader scholarly conversation rather than letting it remain a purely domestic affair.

The 2024 unannounced visit was not the first time Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah had flagged problems at KUPU SB. He noted that the challenges he raised -- weak auditing, questionable contractor appointments, governance failures -- had persisted since his previous visit in 2020. He questioned why the university continued to employ specific contractors for maintenance and restoration when competitors offered lower prices. He criticized the practice of selling services or items framed as sedekah or waqaf -- charitable donations and endowments -- perceiving it as potentially corrupt. He pointed to disorganized scholarship processes and inappropriate conversations around approvals that had led to overdue tuition costs. The Sultan's directness was unusual even by Brunei's standards, where the royal titah carries the force of law. His message was unmistakable: an institution that teaches Islamic values must embody them, and financial mismanagement is not a technicality. It is a failure of the very principles KUPU SB was established to uphold.