COMMENT PAS has shrewdly sidestepped Umno's offer of political cooperation, opting instead for a version of courtship that allows touching but no embracing.

It appears to be a strategy calculated to secure the Islamic party's short-term goals.

The first one is to avert a second splintering, which would result in an open embrace of Umno.

Divisive internal polls last June issued in a rout of the professionals in the party which led to their departure and formation of the splinter, Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah).

There are enough leaders in what is left of the present hierarchy in PAS who would strongly oppose an open embrace of Umno.

Another exodus, similar to the one that issued in the emergence of Amanah, would occur if the party opts for full-blown collusion with Umno.

PAS' other near-term goal is to entice Umno into an electoral arrangement aimed at forestalling the return of Kelantan to Umno at the next general election (GE14).

In return for the party's help, PAS would split the Malay Muslim vote in seats where Amanah holds the edge over them, and which Umno could win simply from PAS fielding a candiate to make the contest a three-way fight.

The PAS syura council - its highest decision-making body - met last Saturday and emerged with a decision that, in effect, declines the political embrace offered by Umno in preference to selective cooperation.

Months of dalliance between Umno president Najib Abdul Razak and PAS chief Abdul Hadi Awang had led to expectations that a political pact between the two rivals for the Malay Muslim vote was in the works.

It now appears that the apparent rapport between Najib and Hadi - not to mention the cosiness between the former and PAS spiritual leader Dr Haron Din - is not sufficiently strong a force to sweep away the obstacles to a pact that will embrace political and electoral strands.

Both parties need each other going into GE14 - Umno because of its slumping popularity stemming from the 1MDB imbroglio, the RM2.6 billion 'donation' to Prime Minister Najib's personal bank accounts, and the punitive exactions of the GST, while PAS is suffering erosions to its strength from internal ructions.

Quest for perfection

A political pact between them would have been expected to cut their losses and if not shore up their strength, it would at least maintain their respective bases.

The fact that the evident chumminess between the top leader in Umno and his counterparts in PAS is not strong enough to push both parties to embrace a pact more than just cosmetic cooperation, is attributable to the aversion and suspicion of Umno felt by significant segments of the Islamic party.

This wariness of Umno among several current PAS leaders has been long in the making, and would be long in the dispelling.

Hadi's presently announced plans to visit PAS redoubts all over the country to explain the contours of a new-fangled cooperation to be forged with Umno, is not likely to achieve more than a muting of open hostility.

Even if espoused under the banner of Islamic solidarity, it is doubtful that the effort will succeed because the concept is a myth, even if a potent one at that.

A cursory survey of events in the Middle East would be enough to confirm this reality.

But this won't mean the myth would lose its power to appeal to the faithful, just as the solidarity of workers or the proletariat was a myth that communists naively subscribed to until the Soviets and Red China began shooting at each other across their long border in 1969.

Though the Islamists would resent the comparison, there is considerable similarity between them and the communists: both are millenarian in temper, envisioning a utopia where subscription to a belief would usher in the “perfect” society, a term that Najib had used in inviting PAS to collaborate with Umno.

It's a quest for perfection in which millions have died - as victims and as executioners - in the last century, and tens of thousands more are continuing to perish in this one.

Yet the myth won't lose it power to draw and to delude.

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.