PAS struggles with old vs new image

(The Straits Times) It has been a year since Khalid Samad, a liberal-minded Member of Parliament from PAS, visited a church in his constituency, but it is still being talked about. More than anything else, the visit epitomised the “new” PAS.

Conservative Muslims will not usually enter a church, and Khalid is from the most conservative Islamic party in Malaysia. The visit occurred just after the opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat won an unprecedented number of seats in the general election last year.

PAS itself also did very well in that election. Traditionally shunned by non-Muslims, it broke through racial and religious barriers — thanks in part to progressive leaders such as Khalid, the MP for Shah Alam in Selangor.

“We wanted to break the prejudices against PAS, and we did so. Now we have a new challenge to manage,” said the party's election strategist, Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad, an MP for Kuala Selangor.

It is, indeed, a new challenge: The party has reached the point where it has to decide on its future interaction with non-Muslim supporters.

The PAS Supporters' Club — meant for non-Muslim supporters — claims up to 50,000 members. PAS itself has a membership of about one million. Dzulkefly said his constituency had 36 supporters' divisions, compared with 32 members' divisions.

The party's 55th annual assembly (or muktamar in PAS language) and its biennial elections this week will shed some light on its future course.

The party has long tussled with finding a balance between multiracialism and its Islamic agenda. But after last year's general election, more pressing political interests kicked in. A rift opened up between a faction that favoured remaining with Pakatan and a faction that favoured closer ties with Umno.

The pro-Umno group came about after PAS president Datuk Hadi Awang held secret unity talks with the ruling party to bring the two main Malay-Muslim parties together.

The group is identified with the conservative ulama, while the pro-opposition faction is said to consist of progressive professionals. But these are only very loose categories.

“It is not clear-cut. There are ulama who are professionals, and professionals who are conservatives,” noted International Islamic University law professor Aziz Bari. It is by no means the case that all ulama are pro-Umno.

“PAS has always been anti-Umno until now, because some have become jittery about our alliance with Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and DAP,” said Dzulkefly.

As he sees it, the rift is between a group that wants to stick with multiracialism and a group that is afflicted with fear — the fear that PAS's Islamic foundation would be eroded by associating with non-Muslim parties.

The success of the “new” PAS remains fragile. The ulamas would be mistaken if they believed that non-Muslims have accepted their Islamic agenda.

They have not. They — especially the Indian community — flocked to PAS because they saw the opposition as a better protector of their rights than Umno. An overt return to exclusionary Islamic policies would turn them away.

Many PAS-watchers credit its former president, the late Fadzil Noor, for transforming the party from a “parti lebai” (party of village religious heads) to a national player. Aziz, however, notes that the party had started earlier, in 1986, when it set up a Chinese Consultative Council, though that did not go very far.

In the mid-1990s, Fadzil began to change the image of a party once seen as dogmatic, narrow-minded, suspicious of progress and hostile to non-Muslims. This was an image fanned by its rival Umno, of course, but PAS had fed it with enough fodder to keep it alive.

PAS leaders, dressed in robes and turbans, were always at the forefront of protests against entertainment outlets. They blamed television for promoting immorality and banned women from using lipstick.

Fadzil, who was an ulama himself, set a new tone. He nudged the party to focus on broader issues like good governance.

The party grabbed 27 seats in the 1999 general election. Even so, many non-Muslims remained wary. And after Fadzil died in 2002, PAS slipped back into its Islamic mode.

In 2003, it issued a document on the Islamic State, damaging its ties with the DAP. A year later, it won only seven seats in the 2004 general election. Its overtly Islamic agenda had clearly turned voters off. The party then refocused on social justice and welfare, and played up universal values while toning down Islamic issues. By then, it had already attracted a large number of well-educated professionals into its ranks. It won 23 seats in the 2008 general election.

When PAS took over the leadership of Kedah last year, it did not attempt to enact hudud laws that prescribe punishments like amputation for theft. This was in marked contrast to how it behaved after winning Terengganu in 1999. Hudud was its priority then. It lost the state in 2004.

But the conservative part of PAS has not gone away. It will and has surfaced. A few months ago, in opposition-held Selangor, PAS proposed to ban the open sale of alcohol. Some PAS leaders have spoken of the need to model opposition-held states on PAS-held Kelantan.

This conservative wing is now resisting the “new” PAS. We will know in the next few days the outcome of PAS's soul-searching.