'An Umno-PAS deal is bad for everyone’

An academic says it's wrong to assume that only non-Muslims and liberal Muslims will suffer.

PETALING JAYA: An academic at the National University of Singapore has added his voice to a warning of dire consequences for Malaysians in the event of a Barisan Nasional election victory that is attributable to Umno’s collaboration with PAS.

Syed Farid Alatas, a professor of sociology, told FMT it would be wrong to think that only non-Muslims and liberal Muslims would suffer.

A PAS-Umno arrangement would be a problem for the whole country, he said, alleging that problems related to the corruption and the administration of justice would remain unsettled.

Referring to a discussion of the issue in the East Asia Forum, he said: “It is wrong to assume that this is a Muslim and non-Muslim issue or a secular-liberal versus extremist Muslim issue.”

He said many of the problems the country was facing affected every section of Malaysian society, “whether you are a so-called liberal, extremist, Christian, Buddhist or Hindu.”

A recent East Asia Forum article said the rule of Barisan Nasional looked set to continue for many years if the Umno-PAS arrangement worked. It said this would be bad news for non-Muslims and liberal Muslims because Umno would have to bend to the Islamist party’s demands.

Alatas noted that some Malaysians had been criticising the Umno-led BN for alleged lack of rigour in fighting corruption and others had been complaining about the political use of Islam by both Umno and PAS.

He criticised religious authorities in the country for “always talking about khalwat or hudud but never about corruption”.

He said Islam placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of fighting corruption and lamented that only secular groups seemed to be actively calling for an end to the scourge.

If Umno and PAS were as Islamic as they claimed to be, he added, they would have ensured the dominance of the corruption issue in the national debate.

He said he expected the new BN government to formulate more PAS-like Islamisation policies if Umno were to work with the Islamist party.

However, International Islamic University lecturer Maszlee Malik told FMT he doubted that Prime Minister Najib Razak would go for more use of shariah law to attract voters.

He said the prime minister was surely aware that people were more concerned about the quality of life, the higher cost of living, the quality of education and the need to improve public services. -FMT