Should it be tadbir urus or urus tadbir?
Those of us who have been reading some recent writings in Malay on “governance” or, more specifically, “good governance,” would have encountered the aforementioned two compound words, although not many of us may have thought it worthwhile to investigate which of the two usages is correct.
Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) apparently prefers the former albeit without totally ruling out the latter.
Many of us have in fact taken for granted that the two–tadbir and urus–are basically synonymous.
Their being combined into a compound word may well signify an understanding that governance, whether at the level of intellectual discourse or at the stage of implementation, is actually about “managing management” or “administering administration.”
According to such an understanding, governance as a discipline of study can be regarded as a second-order discipline, or a meta-discipline.
An alternative explanation may also be offered in this regard.
The word being a composite of two synonyms is meant to draw emphasis, spelling out that governance is a serious human endeavour pertaining to the management of human affairs–much like the Malay words intisari or intipati signifying essence or gist, or akal-budi signifying the mind or intellect.
Be that as it may, I for one think that tadbir as a term is less ambiguous than urus; the latter therefore is not synonymous with the former.
In addition, compared to “administration,” “management,” or “governance” in English, tadbir, originally an Arabic term with clear basic and derived meanings, already has an established meaning.
And because of its clear and established meaning, for the Malays in particular and Muslims in general, it should be the focal term from which those other related terms derive their significance.
As a matter of fact, the Arabic term tadbir has its origins in the triliteral root word dubur, a noun that conveys the idea of “back,” “end,” or “result.”
The Arabic expression dubur kull shay’, for instance, means “the outcome, or end, of every thing.”
Tadbir is actually a masdar (verbal noun) of the verb “dabbara.”
In that form, and when used with the Arabic word amr, it produces the phrase tadbir al-amr, signifying “the act of relating an affair to its end or result.”
Such a relation, insofar as human logic grants, can either be mental or extramental, intellectual or practical.
In fact, one simply has to peruse numerous books in the Islamic religious, intellectual and scientific tradition to find unanimity among scholars concerning the above meaning.
A few examples here will suffice.
Al-Baydawi (d. 791H), a well-known exegete of the Holy Qur’an, summarizes tadbir as “the intellectual act of looking into the consequences of the affairs so that a praiseworthy result will be obtained.”
Al-Sayyid al-Sharif Ali al-Jurjani (d. 816H) explains it as “the act of examining the outcomes by means of knowing what is good”; he also describes it as “the act of putting matters into effect in accordance with the knowledge of what will follow in the end.”
Al-Tahanawi’s (d. 1158H) description of it is perhaps the most precise; it is “one’s disposing of, or reflection, pertaining to the outcome of an affair.”
