COMMENT Umno vice-president Zahid Hamidi cannot resist the temptation to strut the muscular stuff before an Umno audience.

To Zahid, an Umno audience is like the red bandanna a matador flashes at a bull to get its nostrils all flared up for a charge which usually ends with a rapier lodged in its skull.

It is not certain that Zahid would, in the latest episode of his rambunctious ways, end up as neatly dispatched as most charging bovines are in the bullfighting arena.

Still, the thought that Umno has someone in its No 3 position who can slip his moorings as easily as Zahid can, is disconcerting.

At the winding-up session of the annual Umno general assembly yesterday, a swaggering Zahid charged at Umno's newfangled bogey which now happens to be Shia Islam and its supposedly highly placed adherents in the country.

pas muktamar 231113 mat sabu According to Zahid, it seems Shiite Islam has had PAS deputy president Mohammed Sabu ( right ) in its clutches though he did not specifically name the PAS leader as a Shiite enthusiast.

The home minister went about it the circuitous way.

He said he could not understand how the Islamic party could re-elect to its No. 2 position an admirer of this branch of Islam when Muslims in Malaysia are overwhelmingly of the Sunni persuasion.

Last month Mat Sabu, who is not from the ulamak wing of PAS, won the deputy presidency of the party for the second time in succession by outpolling his scholarly rival.

His latest victory was a setback to those in Umno - Zahid included - who had hoped to see an ulamak positioned in the No. 2 post in PAS.

The ulama faction in PAS is reputed to more amenable to the idea of a unity government with Umno. Mat Sabu belongs to the group that is flatly opposed to the idea.

Shia bogey

It has become fashionable in Umno to saddle PAS with the bogey of Shiaism after it became known that Mat Sabu, after the Iranian revolution in 1979, was much taken with the high learning displayed by the mullahs there.

bersih 3 rally 090512 11 unit amal The uniformed unit of PAS, called Unit Amal, deployed at PAS gatherings to provide security and to help in crowd control, was modelled after the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

Participants in the gatherings that polls reform advocacy group Berish organised in 2007, 2011 and 2012 would have observed - favorably, most likely - the discipline and usefulness of this unit at crowd control.

It is said that Mat Sabu was the prime proponent of the setting up of this unit in PAS.

Saddled with the accusation that he is a Shiite, Mat Sabu has been at pains to explain that his admiration for the mullah regime extended only to the erudition of the mullahs and to modelling Unit Amal on the Revolutionary Guards.

It must be said here that Unit Amal has not acquired the obnoxiousness that the Revolutionary Guards has assumed in recent years for their participation in the repression of the Green movement that lost in the presidential election in the country in 2009.

Despite his disavowals of Shiite leanings and insistence he is Sunni, Mat Sabu has been typecast as a follower of the former sect.

In his winding-up speech at the Umno assembly yesterday, Home Minister Zahid urged the Islamic Affairs Department under Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Jamil Khir Baharom to take action against the PAS No 2.

sg limau vote counting 041113 01 jamil khir But a more circumspect Jamil ( left ) cautioned against taking action without proper evidence.

The absence of evidence is not a matter that would trouble Zahid unduly.

Last October, at a security briefing for Umno-supporting community leaders in Malacca, he said he was more concerned for the plight of victims of crimes than for the rights of presumed criminals. Hence he would much rather the police shoot first and ask questions later.

His remarks at the briefing triggered a furor but tough-talking Zahid was unfazed. He was soon to top the vice-presidential race in party elections later that month, his strong performance attributed to his hard-on-criminals stance.

Now he has taken a similar stance against Islamic sects that are not Sunni and, in the process, targeted a senior PAS leader who has publicly avowed his adherence to the Sunni denomination.

It's unlikely his quarry is going to take it sitting down.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.