"Play with matches, you get burned."

- Vincent Vega (Pulp Fiction)

COMMENT | PAS information chief Kamaruzaman Mohamad is neither a religious nor an ignorant fool when he suggested suspending the sale of alcohol. He knows exactly what he is doing. For instance, the banning of cinemas in Kelantan to curb “social ills” has done nothing of the sort.

Former minister Zaid Ibrahim once said that the social ills in Kelantan, styled by PAS as the “Verandah of Mecca”, had been admitted by the party’s leaders when they defended the need for public caning.

Stopping social ills was never the intention and I wish people would stop propagating this narrative. The intention is imposing order on the majority Muslim population. For proponents of this kind of Islam, the suffering that happens here on Earth is merely a prelude to a better afterlife, if you adhere to dogma.

This is why Abdul Hadi Awang muses that only hell awaits if non-Muslims lead. It also why some Muslims believe (as promulgated by the likes of Zakir Naik), that cruel, even corrupt Muslim leaders, are better than honest non-Muslim leaders - “Don’t ever take the infidel West as an example, because the best of them will still end up in hell, since their kindness is without any faith to Allah...