Not the time to play politics
Umno feels threatened with this scenario and now makes a big meal of it, claiming that we have lost a bigger Malay support. This piece is surely one, where it is craftily written or ‘spun’ to achieve the similar objective that PAS is ‘playing politics’ again.
Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad
The BN-media got it wrong again and never seemed to understand why PAS is taking such a stance. If only this BN-media could understand it for once that all of our political positions must be premised on clear Islamist precepts usually verses of the Qur’an or authentic tradition of the Prophet Muhammad. If there are no such explicit sources we will have to resort to the Principles and Wisdom of the Islamic jurisprudence (Usul and Maqasid of Islamic Juurisprudence). We later look into how it contextualises into our current political and social realities.
Doing it the reverse order will befit a ‘pragmatic’ approach and conforms to BN-media’s idea of ‘playing politics’,the like of this article’s assertion. PAS is not into such game of ‘playing-politics’. This is quite unlike or plainly opposite to her political nemesis, where Islam is resorted to when it matters to their survival and conveniently debunked when it is a hindrance.
Because of such methodology, PAS has to sometimes suffer from taking very ‘fundamentalist and principled’ stand as in the case of our stand in relation to Hudud and Syariah, etc. We don’t double-speak, much less ‘play politics’.
Very fortunately, however, of late all our stands on the issue of Justice for All, war on racism and racial supremacy, name of Allah, against corruption and abuse of power, good governance, meritocracy, colour-blind affirmative action, etc, seemed to resonate well with the bigger constituency of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. PAS quite understand the ‘double-edged’ nature of these issues sometimes, given the 60-40 mixed demography, but we relentlessly make our position clear.
Umno feels threatened with this scenario and now makes a big meal of it, claiming that we have lost a bigger Malay support. This piece is surely one, where it is craftily written or ‘spun’ to achieve the similar objective that PAS is ‘playing politics’ again.
Politics is not a game to PAS. We are not here to play politics. Our raison d’etre is our platform of advocating Islamic Justice and Fairness to All. We seek the support and political mandate of the people, as we are a bona fide Islamist political party. As we are now in a Coalition Politics in Pakatan Rakyat, we collectively advocate the Common Policy Framework, CPF of Pakatan. If that is playing politics to some, especially the BN-media, so be it!
