I would like to address points that Abdul Rashid Mohd Said raised when claiming that PAS' Islamic state provides a freedom of choice for all.

As all Muslims have made a choice to abide by Syariah law, he said, then no Muslim will deny that it is their obligation to follow it.

Unfortunately, I do not believe this view is borne out in reality. The large majority of Muslims in the West for example, do not believe that it is a prerogative for them to abide by Syariah law nor do they seek to establish such a legal institution in their country of residence.

Furthermore Abdul Rashid speaks of Syariah law and Islam as if these two were a singular entity. This is clearly not the case, as the Islamic jurisprudence system dominant in Malaysia is the Shafiee school of Sunni Islam, whose Syariah implementation is different from the other three other schools of Sunni Islam (Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali) and Shia Islam.

As an example of the wide disparity between these schools, consider the recent controversial Syariah conviction of a Nigerian woman whose pregnancy outside marriage was proof of her adultery. Her sentence to be stoned to death is allowed in the Maliki school but not in the other three Sunni schools or any of the Shia schools.

There is, in other words, no common body of Syariah law that can be applied uniformly to all Muslims across the world. There are even Islamic law professors, such as Prof Abdullahi An-Na'm (professor of law at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia) who claim that the Syariah, while its sources are in the Quran, is nevertheless man-made, and therefore challengeable and arguable.

In Malaysia, Muslims who wish to follow Shia Islam (a very small minority admittedly) are heavily discriminated against by the Islamic establishment of the current government. For there to be truly freedom of choice for all, Muslims should be able to choose which tradition of Islam to follow (Sunni, Shia, Sufi). Will PAS be willing or able to guarantee this freedom ?

Abdul Rashid then goes on to say that Malaysian Muslims, by wanting to stay as Muslims, have effectively made their choice. Does he then imply that under PAS, Muslims would have the freedom of choice to renounce Islam?

The hudud enactment passed by the Kelantan state assembly in 1993 makes a provision for the death sentence to be imposed on an apostate. If we assume that this legal precedent reflects the core motivations of PAS, then how can there really be any freedom of choice when effectively any Muslim in this country has to either accept a specific version of Islam (Sunni Shafiee) or suffer the penalty of death?

The irony of the situation here is that the group whose freedoms will be most threatened if PAS comes to power are not the non-Muslims (as is frequently touted by the non-Malay political parties), but rather the existing Malay Muslim community.

Lest Abdul Rashid or a member of PAS now wants to claim that every single Malaysian Muslim is perfectly happy under Sunni Shafiee system, let me first point out that no public poll has yet been conducted to date with regard to ascertaining the religious preferences of Malaysian Muslims.

To apply a sweeping assumption that all Malaysian Muslims will be accepting of the specific Syariah law implementation that PAS proposes is arrogant to the extreme and renders PAS guilty of all the charges of intolerance that have been frequently heaped upon them by their adversaries.

It is also of interest to note that one of the places where Sunnis, Shias and Sufis can co-exist amiably without oppressing each other is in the supposedly decadent and immoral Western countries.