From mud-slinging to ‘Dajjal’: our heartfelt gratitude to Hadi

 As a vanguard of religious leadership, the PAS supremo has single-handedly elevated local political discourse into an apocalyptic battleground.

From Moaz Nair

We must all extend our heartfelt gratitude to PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang. For decades, ordinary Malaysians have blundered through political disagreements using tedious, secular terms like “policy differences”, “economic discrepancies” or “constitutional debates”. How utterly pedestrian.

As a vanguard of religious leadership, the PAS supremo has single-handedly elevated local political discourse into an apocalyptic battleground. While political analysts and opposition figures may fret over his “highly polarising language”, they simply lack the vision to appreciate the sheer artistry of his negative vocabulary. For those trying to understand how a man so deeply versed in Islam chooses to navigate the political arena, here is a handy guide to his masterclass in decorum.

‘Dajjal’ doctrine

In 2022, Hadi gracefully simplified the complex, systemic issue of financial crime. While anti-corruption agencies waste millions studying institutional loopholes, Hadi cracked the code by declaring non-Muslims and non-Bumiputeras the “roots of corruption” in Malaysia. When civil society groups like Transparency International Malaysia cried foul over xenophobia, they clearly missed the theological nuance: why fix a broken system when you can just blame a demographic?

Grammar lessons

Parliamentary decorum is so last century. In 2025, during a serious parliamentary debate, Hadi decided to give the Dewan Rakyat a live lesson in the finer points of the national language. When referring to a small group of white Westerners, he bypassed standard human pronouns entirely and opted for the animal classifier “ekor” (tails). While lawmakers questioned his basic courtesy, language purists had to admire his commitment to treating geopolitical adversaries like stray livestock.

Intellectual plebeians

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. When four Malay DAP leaders had the audacity to question Hadi’s shifting ideological stances over the years, he didn’t bother wasting precious scripture on them. Instead, he publicly dismissed them as “kurang berpendidikan” (uneducated). It is a flawless debate tactic: if someone points out an inconsistency, simply remind them they lack the spiritual PhD required to comprehend it.

Friendship flexibility

Over the decades, the PAS supremo has treated political alliances like fashion seasons – highly disposable and entirely dependent on the weather. Consider his decades-long dance with DAP. During the golden years of the Barisan Alternatif and Pakatan Rakyat coalitions (1999–2013), Hadi shared the stage with the very same DAP leaders he now rebukes. Back then, political cooperation (tahaluf siyasi) was championed as a noble, strategic pursuit.

Fast forward to the 2015 PAS muktamar, where the party abruptly severed ties with DAP without debate. Overnight, the former allies were retroactively transformed into the ultimate ideological adversaries. Progressive PAS members who dared to question this sudden U-turn were thoroughly purged, eventually leaving to form the splinter party Amanah.

The flexibility didn’t stop there. By 2019, Hadi had signed the Muafakat Nasional pact with Umno – the absolute arch-nemesis his infamous 1981 “Amanat Hadi” had once forcefully condemned. By 2020, he pivoted again to anchor Perikatan Nasional. It is a masterclass in situational theology: an alliance is perfectly holy right up until the exact moment it becomes politically inconvenient, at which point it is scrubbed from historical memory.

Political safari

When he is not channelling the end-times, our grand maestro moonlights as a visionary political safari guide, earning the fond moniker of an “amateur zoologist”. Under his taxonomic eye, a battered Umno was famously diagnosed as a hobbled “itik patah kaki” (lame duck) to justify PAS seizing the steering wheel.

Meanwhile, secular opportunists and those demanding Western-style updates are swiftly demoted to “binatang yang tidak berakal” (senseless animals). Should you dare criticise his shifting paradigms, you are seamlessly categorised into his menagerie as either a hyperactive “kera” (monkey), a relentlessly barking “anjing” (dog) or a “babi” (pig). Naturally, this rich pedagogical blueprint has inspired his disciples – PAS lawmakers recently took flight into the aviary, branding Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim a “burung tiong” (myna bird) to mock him as a mindless echo chamber for external policies.

Linguistic irony

This leads us to the ultimate comedic paradox of modern Malaysian politics: the profound irony of utilising the sacred vocabulary of the heavens to conduct everyday, transactional mud-slinging. Islam possesses a rich linguistic tradition designed to inspire spiritual contemplation and universal grace. Yet, in the hands of the PAS leadership, this vocabulary is weaponised as a highly specialised political toolkit.

When routine legislative agreements are framed through the lens of Islamic eschatology, a standard, secular agreement is artificially inflated into a cosmic battle between divine light and ultimate darkness. By deploying heavy theological concepts to score cheap points in the daily 24-hour news cycle, the sacred is systematically cheapened.

The greatest irony lies in the moral inversion it creates. While the faith heavily emphasises humility, restraint and the avoidance of slander, this brand of political rhetoric uses the language of the faith to justify the exact opposite: alienating minor demographics, dismissing critics as intellectually inferior and reducing foreign visitors to animal classifiers.

Entertaining spectacle

While monitoring bodies like the Centre for Independent Journalism track his vocabulary as a major driver of identity-based division, defenders stand firm, arguing this uncompromising tone is a steadfast defence of faith.

And who can blame them? Nothing screams “peaceful, universal faith” quite like reducing your neighbours to corrupt roots, your parliamentary colleagues to animals and basic governance to the work of the false Messiah.

Ultimately, this strategy yields a highly entertaining spectacle. By insisting that every standard political manoeuvre is either an act of divine necessity or a plot by the Dajjal, the political arena becomes an absurdist theatre – proving that nothing elevates a secular turf war quite like a heavy dusting of fire and brimstone. - FMT

Moaz Nair is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT