"(They) have deviated from Islam and should be condemned to hell." Dr Mahathir Mohamad on the proponents of the implementation of hudud ('A code of their own', Time Magazine, 2002)
The big winner in the public relations stakes of the recently concluded PAS muktamar would appear to be Abdul Hadi Awang.
The big winner in the public relations stakes of the recently concluded PAS muktamar would appear to be Abdul Hadi Awang.
The "for all" in the "PAS for all" tagline is mainly for the non-Muslims/Malay. I have often made the argument that the sole political party in Malaysia, which has a firm ideological stance and have demonstrated commitment to its rhetoric, is PAS.
Whatever your views on Islam, PAS over the long Umno watch has been consistent in its rejection of Umno framing the conflict in religious terms, which often times pitted them against DAP.
Whatever your views on Islam, PAS over the long Umno watch has been consistent in its rejection of Umno framing the conflict in religious terms, which often times pitted them against DAP.
The argument often made by DAP partisans is that PAS needs the coalition (thus the Chinese vote) to have a chance to claim the throne in Putrajaya. While this may be true, I would argue that without PAS, there would be no coalition with a credible chance of forming a new government.
Hadi Awang, who at one time was the poster boy of the Pakatan Rakyat apparatchiks as a vote spoiler and possible Umno puppet, has seen his image rehabilitated. Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has been partly responsible for Hadi Awang's good fortune in the public relations department.
Objective PAS watchers would no doubt recall the time when Hadi Awang was hell-bent on imposing hudud in Terengganu that resulted in the then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi proclaiming that the police would not enforce such laws.
Hadi Awang, who at one time was the poster boy of the Pakatan Rakyat apparatchiks as a vote spoiler and possible Umno puppet, has seen his image rehabilitated. Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has been partly responsible for Hadi Awang's good fortune in the public relations department.Objective PAS watchers would no doubt recall the time when Hadi Awang was hell-bent on imposing hudud in Terengganu that resulted in the then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi proclaiming that the police would not enforce such laws.
Hadi Awang who was convinced that Muslims and non-Muslims would embrace such laws had even identified specific sites where prisons would be built but did not offer any specifics on how amputations and stonings would be carried out.
This, of course, led the good doctor to utter the quote that begins this piece. All of which makes Mahathir's baiting of PAS concerning hudud for all, even more hilarious.
Winning the middle ground
Hadi Awang's ‘secular' response on PAS' commitment to respect the beliefs of ‘others' is further evidence that PAS is shrewdly maintaining the middle ground while Umno and its outsourced bullyboys doggedly spout right-wing bile in the hopes of fear-mongering their way back to the middle ground.
And therein lays the problem. Umno has no concept of what the middle ground is. For years, the Umno-defined middle ground was that of appeasement by its non-Malay coalition partners and system of discrimination in the guise of an affirmative action policy. As a former high-ranking Umno minister succinctly put it, Umno unlike PAS has no ideological foundation to build anything on.
What Umno has is a system of patronage that results in internal power struggles with warlords deciding the direction of the party. In others words, there is no ideological tensions within Umno. This is why on a micro level there has never been any need to discover a compromise. This translates into a macro level of not understanding that the middle ground is defined by a large section of the voting public.
PAS, on the other hand, has always had to contend with the tensions that arise when the moderate and extreme impulses within the party collide. Over the years, one or the other has held sway over the political and social direction of the party.
Post-tsunami 2008, the ascendancy of the moderates, or the so-called Erdrogans, has seen them having to contend with elements in their party who are singing the Umno tune and the realisation that for the time being they have to get used to the opposition benches.
These elements singing the Umno tune should not be confused with those who genuinely believe that PAS has lost its way. What Umno has been partially successful in doing is create an atmosphere within PAS where genuine dissent is conflated with the polemics emanating from Umno stool pigeons.
This whole idea of ‘tahaluf siyasi' (political consensus) with Pakatan and the concept of ‘welfare state' has been propagandised by Umno as a rejection of the Islamic path, but the reality is political compromise and socialistic elements is not alien to the Malaysian landscape, the only difference here is that Umno is not doing the defining.
The problem with Islam (anywhere in the world) is that the hardliners have always defined the religion. In PAS, where the ebb and flow of clashing ideologies has always favoured the hardliners, it has finally been halted by political expediency.
The prospect of federal rule is a prize too good to pass up and it is to the credit of PAS that they are slowly realising that the Wahhabi strain of Islam is not the only avenue of Islamic expression.
If Umno could in form portray itself as a moderate Islamic entity with the collusion of its non-Malay/Muslim partners, then perhaps PAS could in substance reinvent itself as a moderate Muslim force with partners who were not subservient to the sole political party that defines itself as the defender of Islam.
However, the real conundrum is that, the non-Malay/Muslim vote that has always been linked to the middle ground in the end would prove untenable because of the changing demographic.
This, of course, led the good doctor to utter the quote that begins this piece. All of which makes Mahathir's baiting of PAS concerning hudud for all, even more hilarious.
Winning the middle ground
Hadi Awang's ‘secular' response on PAS' commitment to respect the beliefs of ‘others' is further evidence that PAS is shrewdly maintaining the middle ground while Umno and its outsourced bullyboys doggedly spout right-wing bile in the hopes of fear-mongering their way back to the middle ground.
And therein lays the problem. Umno has no concept of what the middle ground is. For years, the Umno-defined middle ground was that of appeasement by its non-Malay coalition partners and system of discrimination in the guise of an affirmative action policy. As a former high-ranking Umno minister succinctly put it, Umno unlike PAS has no ideological foundation to build anything on.
What Umno has is a system of patronage that results in internal power struggles with warlords deciding the direction of the party. In others words, there is no ideological tensions within Umno. This is why on a micro level there has never been any need to discover a compromise. This translates into a macro level of not understanding that the middle ground is defined by a large section of the voting public.
PAS, on the other hand, has always had to contend with the tensions that arise when the moderate and extreme impulses within the party collide. Over the years, one or the other has held sway over the political and social direction of the party.Post-tsunami 2008, the ascendancy of the moderates, or the so-called Erdrogans, has seen them having to contend with elements in their party who are singing the Umno tune and the realisation that for the time being they have to get used to the opposition benches.
These elements singing the Umno tune should not be confused with those who genuinely believe that PAS has lost its way. What Umno has been partially successful in doing is create an atmosphere within PAS where genuine dissent is conflated with the polemics emanating from Umno stool pigeons.
This whole idea of ‘tahaluf siyasi' (political consensus) with Pakatan and the concept of ‘welfare state' has been propagandised by Umno as a rejection of the Islamic path, but the reality is political compromise and socialistic elements is not alien to the Malaysian landscape, the only difference here is that Umno is not doing the defining.
The problem with Islam (anywhere in the world) is that the hardliners have always defined the religion. In PAS, where the ebb and flow of clashing ideologies has always favoured the hardliners, it has finally been halted by political expediency.
The prospect of federal rule is a prize too good to pass up and it is to the credit of PAS that they are slowly realising that the Wahhabi strain of Islam is not the only avenue of Islamic expression.
If Umno could in form portray itself as a moderate Islamic entity with the collusion of its non-Malay/Muslim partners, then perhaps PAS could in substance reinvent itself as a moderate Muslim force with partners who were not subservient to the sole political party that defines itself as the defender of Islam.
However, the real conundrum is that, the non-Malay/Muslim vote that has always been linked to the middle ground in the end would prove untenable because of the changing demographic.
The brilliance of Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim and his partners is that they have tenuously defined the middle ground on issues of cronyism and corruption, but the downside of this is that they have not defined religious freedom as all encompassing.
What they have ensured is that Islam in theory never trespasses onto the domains of the non-Malays. In other words, the Malay/Islam majority population would still be at the mercy of their so-called religious betters in the form of PAS.
PAS has never had an incentive to recalibrate its dogma, assuming that its new-found popularity was because Islam or the kind PAS propagates was gaining acceptance by a large section of the voting public. This, of course, is nowhere near reality.
Heady times ahead
The separate but equal ideology that has pacified the more exuberant hardliners will in the end prove disastrous to the majority Malay community if ever PAS' influences become overpowering. Hadi Awang's speech with nary a mention of hudud must have warmed the hearts of Pakatan partisans as a confirmation that the whole hudud issue was passé.
However, PAS members themselves tell me that with the corruption shenanigans in Kedah, some members feel that PAS' existential crisis has more to do with a lack of moral fortitude within their own ranks brought upon by the quest for federal power.
These are heady times for the power players in PAS. Post-tsunami 2008 they have had to contend with a whole range of issues all the while dodging the hudud bullet.
PAS is on record as stating they have no objection to a non-Malay prime minister so long as that person is a Muslim. They have endorsed the concept of ‘Ketuanan Rakyat' in place of ‘Ketuanan Melayu'. They have remained steadfast in the face of the Umno onslaught on their religious credibility and they have provided the muscle (making up the numbers) and handling the logistics of large-scale public demonstrations against the current regime.
What they have not done is to define the middle ground without the aid of their partners. What they have not done is redefine their interpretation of Islam to make PAS an acceptable moderate choice even if they were not in the coalition.
What PAS should be doing is using this phase of political compromise as a starting point in reforming its ideas, perhaps reconnecting with its own leftist ideology that it abandoned in favour of the Saudi-influenced Islam that has proven disastrous everywhere in the world.
This is important because as long as Islam plays a role in the political process here in Malaysia and hudud is a card in the deck, the dream of a true multicultural/religious Malaysia will remain just that, a dream.
PAS has never had an incentive to recalibrate its dogma, assuming that its new-found popularity was because Islam or the kind PAS propagates was gaining acceptance by a large section of the voting public. This, of course, is nowhere near reality.
Heady times ahead
The separate but equal ideology that has pacified the more exuberant hardliners will in the end prove disastrous to the majority Malay community if ever PAS' influences become overpowering. Hadi Awang's speech with nary a mention of hudud must have warmed the hearts of Pakatan partisans as a confirmation that the whole hudud issue was passé.
However, PAS members themselves tell me that with the corruption shenanigans in Kedah, some members feel that PAS' existential crisis has more to do with a lack of moral fortitude within their own ranks brought upon by the quest for federal power.
These are heady times for the power players in PAS. Post-tsunami 2008 they have had to contend with a whole range of issues all the while dodging the hudud bullet.
PAS is on record as stating they have no objection to a non-Malay prime minister so long as that person is a Muslim. They have endorsed the concept of ‘Ketuanan Rakyat' in place of ‘Ketuanan Melayu'. They have remained steadfast in the face of the Umno onslaught on their religious credibility and they have provided the muscle (making up the numbers) and handling the logistics of large-scale public demonstrations against the current regime.What they have not done is to define the middle ground without the aid of their partners. What they have not done is redefine their interpretation of Islam to make PAS an acceptable moderate choice even if they were not in the coalition.
What PAS should be doing is using this phase of political compromise as a starting point in reforming its ideas, perhaps reconnecting with its own leftist ideology that it abandoned in favour of the Saudi-influenced Islam that has proven disastrous everywhere in the world.
This is important because as long as Islam plays a role in the political process here in Malaysia and hudud is a card in the deck, the dream of a true multicultural/religious Malaysia will remain just that, a dream.
S THAYAPARAN is Commander (rtd) of Royal Malaysian Navy.
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