COMMENT Perhaps pushback time has come.

For some time now - make that, a long some time - it seemed that the forces of racial and religious stridency were dominating the debate whenever issues of race and religion popped up in the national conversation.

True, now and then a Marina Mahathir would fire a broadside against fire-breathing Isma and Perkasa but sporadic sallies were not enough to stall the two NGOs’ ardour for the racial-cum-religious fray.

As the voices of moderation and rationality seemed lost for what to say or do as a Ridhuan Tee and an Abdullah Zaik ( right ) ratcheted up the tempo of bigotry, it appeared that all bellowing and screeching of the ultras would be taken as the dominant voices of the day.

They would set the terms of the debate and everyone else would have to fall into line.

Voices in opposition to the strident ones were either too wan or too witless to mount a pushback.

It didn’t help that the moderates seemed to wish that the pyromaniacs would soon tire of their mania and fade or recede, after which everyone could go back to being salt and sane again.

But no such recession has occurred.

And for good reason too. For once people choose to ride the back of the tiger, there’s no saying when they would dismount.

It’s like what the lawyer Atticus Finch discovered in the novel To Kill a Mocking Bird - that a lynch party can only be stood down if you don’t give way to them.

Now it appears ‘Campaign Pushback’ against the forces of racial and religious stridency in the Malaysian public square has begun, with parliamentary opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim joining the counterattack.

Today, Anwar trotted out a favorite epithet of his - “arrogance of power” - to describe the conduct of a body that this year alone has comported itself like it is the religious version of the Gestapo.

Earlier this year, the Selangor Islamic Affairs Department (Jais) had seized copies of Malay and Iban language copies of the Bible from their Christian possessors in apparent contravention of the terms of a modus vivendi worked out between the government and Christian leaders just before the Sarawak state election in 2011.

Five months after impounding them, Jais are refusing to return the Bibles and neither Selangor Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim nor attorney-general Abdul Gani Patail seems able to do anything to make Jais truckle to the terms of the understanding worked out between the Najib Abdul Razak cabinet and Christian leaders just before Sarawak went to the polls in April 2011.

Alone among Malaysian politicians of a democratic disposition, Anwar had chosen to erect his career on an Islamic platform.    

    

When he first began doing so a little more than four decades ago, it would have taken a seer to foresee that Islam’s compatibility with democracy would become a world historical issue.

Practically the only credible exponent

More than 40 years on from his career’s start, Anwar, 66, has become practically the Islamic world’s only credible exponent of his religion’s compatibility with democracy.

Recent putative exponents of that compatibility have withered spectacularly on the vine.

Tayeep Recep Erdogan ( left in photo ), the Turkish leader and admirer of Anwar, has dwindled into a petty autocrat after a promising start, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi of Egypt doomed himself the day in November 2012 when he placed himself above his country’s judiciary.

This has practically left Anwar as the sole torchbearer of Islam’s compatibility with democracy.

Of late, he hasn’t been dong much to bolster his credentials in this respect, by affecting a dubious neutrality in his party - PKR’s - internal elections and by being relatively silent on the issue of the implementation of hudud in Kelantan by his opposition coalition’s partner, PAS.

Just as certainly as the clean Manmohan Singh’s egregious silence on massive corruption within the Congress Party coalition that ruled India before last month’s election on the subcontinent had doomed him and his party, so was Anwar’s unsustainable stances on his party’s polls and the hudud measure in Kelantan going to put the skids under him.

But today he has decided to charge himself out of the rut of an ineffectual and dubious discretion to face issues of Islamic religion head-on.

The “arrogance of power” is a phrase made famous in the late 1960s by the United States Senator James William Fulbright when he led the fight, as chairperson of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations committee, against escalation of the Vietnam War.

Since then this phrase has seen much use as an epithet employed by political rhetoricians out of denounce the pride that usually goes before a fall, as in Greek classical and Shakespearean tragic dramas.

On the local scene, the phrase usefully indicts the recent deportment of Jais and the stridency of Isma and Perkasa as each displays the hubris that leads to perdition.

It’s about time the opposition leader called them out on their arrogance. Otherwise they’d think themselves monarchs of all they survey.

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.