COMMENT In a way, PKR and Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak are in identical straits: the one thinks its erstwhile ally, PAS, is indispensable to the cause of upending Umno-BN at the next general election; the other feels the scandals plaguing his premiership are surmountable by the time of the next polls.

Both assessments are unduly sanguine: the one has not properly reckoned with the self-destructive rhetoric of the PAS president, the other has not wised up to the reality that the troubles besetting his administration are serial rather than sporadic.

Continued persistence in their stances would see PKR squander its once lofty position among the opposition parties, while Najib’s insistence on clinging on to power will lead Umno and, by extension, BN to the precipice.

Ironically, both PKR and the PM are in a courtship of PAS, the one publicly, the other discreetly, as in visits to ailing leaders of PAS.

This courtship isn’t going to get each anywhere because what the PAS president spouts has the effect of rendering his party an embarrassment to potential allies in the opposition and, in PAS' insistence on hudud in Kelantan, the party is a liability to the BN should its chair want to coopt the Islamic party into a multi-denominational coalition.

Also, it appears that this twin courtship has had a deranging effect on the PAS president, Abdul Hadi Awang; the more he is wooed the more he is erratic and obtuse.

The things he has said in recent weeks makes one wonder what is it that’s come upon him.

Take his defence of the bai’iah, the oath which in Kelantan requires a legislator elected on a PAS ticket to divorce his wife if he leaves PAS and joins another party.

When the oath was criticised as degrading to women, Hadi countered that it actually elevates them because he said that it equates a husband’s love of his wife to love of God.

This is a shaky parallel: the Muslim God allows polygamy and insists on monotheism, so if one’s love of wife equates to love of God, there is a corollary to the religion’s allowance for polygamy with implications for the sustainability of its repugnance for polytheism.

Hadi is respected in international councils as an Islamic theologian, a respect that’s hard to credit when he says such things as that PAS is more interested in upholding Islam than in winning elections.

Then why does the party adopt as a mark of allegiance to it an oath impacting its ability to win elections and maintain power that, if broken, has dire consequences for the taker’s marital state?

If it is not very concerned about winning elections and maintaining power, PAS won’t adopt such safeguards with huge impact on domestic tranquility.

Compounding fallacies with non-sequiturs

We know from past attempts that Hadi isn’t very good at explaining Islam to non-Muslims but when he says that Chinese and Indians, having accepted Marxism before, should find no difficulty now in accepting Islam, he compounds fallacies with non-sequiturs.

The upshot: so much mumbo-jumbo.

Some Chinese, Indians and (though Hadi omits to mention) Malays have in the past not only subscribed to Marxism, they have fought and died for the atheistic creed.

But many more Chinese, Indians and Malays have fought and died for the anti-communist cause.

Both realities do not furnish grounds for claiming that the susceptibility of some to communism logically paves the way for their legatees’ subscription to a creed that’s ostensibly superior.

When it comes to religious conversion, some exceptional souls may be converted by argument; others have their pathway cleared by explanation; but most begin, as children or adults, with experiences of spiritual reality that invite rational explanation.

On the basis of his recent attempts at the latter, few would invite Hadi to do the job of rationalisation: his explanations are more likely to confound than illuminate.

Which brings us to why PKR is so keen on courting a party that is led by someone as seemingly muddled as Hadi Awang.

That the party of a rationalist like Anwar Ibrahim is seen to take scant heed of the truism that ideas have consequences and that muddled ideas eventuate in grotesque realities is passing strange.

PKR is doing what its adviser has, referencing Ortega y Gasset, often cautioned against: never underestimate the intelligence of the masses.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.