The present impasse that has grabbed hold of the opposition Barisan Alternatif front seems to be a bane suffered by all loose instrumental coalitions worldwide. While some of the parties within the BA are still desperately trying to cobble together a practicable ideological platform for political co-operation, many have accused PAS of letting the side down by refusing to compromise on its stand on the Islamic state and thorny issues like Hudud law.

In a sense, PAS cannot and should not be blamed for this: The party is, after all, an Islamist party and it has made political Islam the basis of its ideology and political project. Therefore the leaders of PAS are quite right to say that to ask PAS to water down its ideological stand would be like asking a communist party to be less communist.

Added to that is the fact that PAS has also been the most consistent among the members of the BA. It has not asked Keadilan or the PRM to water down their democratic-liberal principles at any point. (Though Keadilan and PRM's political demands are obviously less contentious than PAS'.)

The fact that the component parties of the BA have such different (some might even say contradictory) ideologies and approaches should not, however, prevent the BA from coming together for the sake of an instrumental alliance. But this can only happen when the members of the Islamist party begin to use their common sense and see the need to focus on less problematic and controversial issues like banning bikinis and calling for the amputation of hands in public.

One might have to look elsewhere for an example of such pragmatism at work, and oddly enough one can find such a working model in a land far away called Lebanon.

Hizbullahs rise

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb's recent book Hizbullah: politics and religion (1) reads as a wonderful antidote for the problems faced by our own troubled opposition alliance here in Malaysia. Her book reads less like a chronicle of the historical development of the party and more like a thesis that explains its unique success in the region.

The Lebanese Hizbullah movement emerged in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The movement's primary political constituency and base of the support at the time were the impoverished slum dwellers in the 'belts of misery' in the poorer cities and towns of the region.

From the beginning Hizbullah targeted the poor and underprivileged sections of the Shia community and regarded them as their most loyal supporters. But Hizbullah's origins go further back to the intra-Lebanese conflicts and power struggles that took place in the 1970s. After the creation of the Amal militia in 1975 and Amal's defection from the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) in 1976, the Lebanese community was divided along sectarian religious and ideological grounds. The Lebanese civil war of 1975 made things worse for the Shia community, which by then was desperate for political leadership and representation. Hizbullah was very much influenced by the model of leadership and organisation shown by Amal, and many of its early founders were themselves ex-members of Amal who were persuaded by the ideas of Amal's founder Imam Musa as-Sadr.

When Hizbullah was formed in 1982, the movement's first Majlis al-Shura was made up of three ex-Amal members, three Shia ulama and three members of the Committee in Support of the Iranian Revolution. (Saad-Ghorayeb, 2002. p15) This was the nucleus of the Hizbullah in 1982.

No holier-than-thou rhetoric

What makes the Hizbullah so different from other Islamist movements in the world was its open and flexible attitude towards political struggle. Though the movement saw Islam as the basis of its ideology and belief-system, its own understanding of Islam was far less dogmatic and narrow compared with other Islamist movements in other parts of the Muslim world. The Shia ulama who guided the movement applied their own rational thinking ( ijtihad ) when dealing with political problems in the here-and-now.

For a start, Hizbullah never adopted the 'holier-than-thou' rhetoric that has become so commonplace and tiresome among other radical Islamist groups elsewhere. Amal notes that unlike many other contemporary Islamist movements in the world today, the Hizbullah has no such takfir (2) discourse (accusing other Muslims of being kafir ). Above all, it is the oppressors who are anathematised, and not fellow Muslims. Furthermore, the Hizbullah does not equate secularism with oppression or sin. (p20)

This flexibility was enhanced by a pragmatic approach that allowed the Hizbullah to form instrumental coalitions with the most unlikely of allies. In the context of Lebanese politics, the Hizbullah was able to form working coalitions with secular nationalists, socialists, communists and non-Muslim liberation movements. Its main enemies were Israel and the United States of America, and they supported any political movement that was fighting for national liberation and against American hegemony. Hizbullah even extended its support to non-Muslim movements such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Marxist-influenced Third World leaders like Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela and Daniel Ortega (Saad-Ghorayeb, p21).

Conversely, they opposed any Muslim group that accepted the help of the USA, including the Mujahidin of Afghanistan whom they regarded as the puppets of Washington. (The same cannot be said about our own home-grown Islamists here in Malaysia, who were happy to support the Mujahidin and later the Taliban  two products of the CIA and Mossad from the beginning.)

Gaining maturity

Linked to this was an understanding of Islam that did not allow the Hizbullah to compromise its standing by using unsavoury methods for the sake of short-term goals. Unlike many other radical Islamist movements the Hizbullah rejected tactics like hostage-taking, kidnapping and indiscriminate attacks on civilians on the grounds that they were fundamentally un-Islamic (Saad-Ghorayeb, p97). Not only did they reject such violent tactics, the ulama of the Hizbullah even declared that the use of such indiscriminate violence was forbidden ( haram ) in Islam. (The suicide bombing of the American marines' barracks in Beirut in 1983 being a major exception.)

It was pragmatism of this kind that helped the Hizbullah mature into a legitimate and respectable political party in the end. After the implementation of UN resolution 598, the Hizbullah realised that it had to work within a domesticated political space where the gun and landmine were no longer the tools of discourse. Like the spoiled youths of Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange , the angry young men who joined the Hizbullah in the 1980s matured and grew up to become sensible adult politicians in the end. They put down their weapons, discarded their fiery rhetoric and opted for the politics of the ballot box instead.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hizbullah transformed itself from a radical militia movement into a social movement and finally a mainstream political party. Its pragmatic approach allowed it to form instrumental coalitions with secular and Christian parties and organisations.

In the 1992 parliamentary election in Lebanon, Hizbullah contested and won 12 seats, four of which it gave to its non-Shia allies. Later in the 1996 election it contested and won nine seats. By engaging in the democratic political process, providing welfare and social work as well as political representation, Hizbullah slowly made the transition to conventional politics and is now the biggest Shia political party in Lebanon.

Respect internal diversity

The lessons to be learnt here are obvious: Respectability comes with maturity, pragmatism and compromise. Any group that wishes to come to power must make the transition from its own marginalised position to the mainstream of society. The democratic space allows entry to all groups, but this entry is not unconditional: lunatics, hot-heads and hate-mongers will remain outside and relegated to the margins forever.

Hizbullah's success was not the result of a watering down of its ideology or reversal of its fundamental principles. It came only when the leaders of the movement realised that we all live in a complex and differentiated world with internal divisions and groupings. Any political party that wants to lead such a complex society must in turn respect that internal diversity and be able to mirror it in its own policies. Those who fail or refuse to do so will forever remain isolated and sidelined, for the simple reason that society as a whole will never choose as its leaders those who cannot include them in their dream of things to come.

Endnotes :

  1. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbullah: politics and religion . Pluto Press, London. 2002.

  • Takfir is the practice of Muslims accusing other Muslims of being kafir (unbelievers) munafikin (hypocrites) and murtad (apostates). One of the saddest features of Islamic history has been the prevalence of this detestable practice among Muslims from the very first century of Islam. Worse still, it remains common practice till today, as we have seen in Malaysia during the 1980s and 1990s when members of Islamist opposition groups were accusing members and supporters of the government of being kafir .

    • The Muslim scholar Fazlur Rahman (1979) notes that the characteristic of intolerance, fanaticism and exclusivism issuing in a policy, raised to an almost creedal status, and of effecting political change through desperate methods of violence distinguishes the earliest Islamic sect of the khawarij (p167) who were the first to engage in the practice of takfir . One fundamental aspect of kharajite thinking has been the rejection of justification by faith alone and their making deeds an essential part of faith. (ibid, p169) [See: Fazlur Rahman, Islam . University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1979 (2nd edition)]

    Apart from sowing the seeds of discord and division among Muslims, takfir is also fundamentally unIslamic for the simple reason that from an Islamic point of view only God can decide who is a true Muslim and who is not  a fact often forgotten by these so-called 'defenders of the faith' themselves, who obviously think they know better than God.

    Dr FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. The Other Malaysia' tries to unearth aspects of Malaysia's history and culture that have been erased or relegated to the margins in order to remind us that there remains another Malaysia that is often forgotten.