Malaysia today bears witness to the struggle between two apparently irreconcilable forces: the conservative-nationalists of Umno and the Islamists of PAS.

Most of us who became politically mature over the past two decades have come to accept this dialectical opposition between the two parties as a natural feature of Malaysian politics and we cannot even conceive of a time where things could have been different. But in fact they were.

For it must be remembered that the history of PAS dates back almost as far as Umno. In fact PAS grew out of an internal rift within Umno itself, when members of the Umno Bureau for Religious Affairs decided to break away from the party and form a political organisation of their own.

During the first few years of PAS, many of its members carried dual memberships to both Umno and the Islamist party. Its first president, Haji Ahmad Fuad, was both president of PAS as well as an Umno member.

But in the early years, fortune did not smile upon the fledgling Islamic party. It was so poor and under-resourced that for the elections of 1955 it could only field 11 candidates and provide them with the most rudimentary form of aid: posters and banners.

Things only began to change for the better when the leadership of the party was taken over by Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, the third president of PAS, in 1956. Burhanuddin remains as one of the most brilliant thinkers and political campaigners in Malaysian history, yet hardly anything has been written about him.

This man came so close to being the first leader of Malaysia (that is, had the Japanese not surrendered so abruptly at the end of the Second World War and kept to their promise to grant independence to Malaya and Indonesia). Worse still, his own political party has not seen fit to reward the man for all that he did for it.

This neglect of the legacy of Burhanuddin is understandable in the context of Malaysia, where history is written by the victors for the victors themselves. Those who have fallen by the wayside, like the recently departed James Puthucheary, are often left to the margins and footnotes of history.

The feudal culture of the ruling elite ensures that only those among the feudal aristocracy and nobility will ever get a mention in the obituary columns of the press.

But what is even more interesting to note is how and why the legacy of Burhanuddin has been neglected by members of his own party today. This becomes apparent only when we look at how different PAS was in the 1960s compared to its current avatar under the leadership of the ulama.

PAS in the late 1950s and 1960s was a radically different party to what we see today. This was largely due to the world view of its president Burhanuddin himself. Set against the broader context of developments within the Muslim world at the time, the ideology and vision of Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy were very much in tandem with the developments of the world around him.

This was an era when Islamist thinkers and leaders were contemplating the host of alternatives that lay before them. Like many of the progressive Islamists of his generation, Burhanuddin had tried to graft together the streams of Islamist and nationalist thought with the intention of promoting a broad and universalist understanding of nationalism that went beyond the narrow confines of ethnocentrism and race-centred politics.

Under his leadership, PAS developed into a radical Islamist party that was both nationalist and anti-imperialist in its outlook. The party articulated concerns related to economic independence, the struggle against colonialism and neo-colonial hegemony as well as the need to promote a dynamic and issue-based form of popular Islam.

The broad-based nationalism of Burhanuddin was one that was not anchored solely on the essentialist categories of race or a politics of authenticity. He regarded national identity and cultural belonging as historically determined and evolving categories that needed to be developed on a sounder foundation which was provided by religion and ethics instead.

To this end, he embraced nationalism from an Islamist viewpoint, with the intention of creating an Islamist-nationalist ideology that would serve as a tool for both national liberation as well as cultural emancipation. It was this melange of ideological streams that gave PAS its complex and progressive Islamist philosophy while it was under the leadership of Burhanuddin.

The political philosophy of Burhanuddin stands in stark contrast to the position that is held by the leadership of his party today. The leadership of PAS had openly committed the party to the struggle for an Islamic state, but the party's president was a man who was grafting together elements of Islamist, nationalist, socialist and reformist thought which was in keeping with the intellectual current en vogue in the post-colonial world then.

Unlike the conservative ulama, Burhanuddin did not resort to the use of sanctimonious religious phrases or obscure esoteric terms in order to beguile his followers and opponents alike. Ahmad Boestaman (founder president of PRM) once described Burhanuddin as the only Malayan Islamist leader who did not use the language of the lebai kolot or fanatik agama.

Burhanuddin's practical approach to political and social struggles was one which placed human will and rational agency at the centre of the world. Human beings were for him the primary actors of history and his was a profane political universe where the conflict of power and interests was paramount.

He was, like many other Islamist reformers and modernists of the 20th century, an Islamist who struggled in the "here and now". Unlike the more conservative and dogmatic Islamist thinkers of his time who continued to rely upon their invented traditions and history of the "golden age" of Islam in the past, Burhanuddin's heroes and models were men of the day, like President Sukarno of Indonesia and Gammel Nasser of Egypt.

His notion of the ideal Islamic society and political order was also one that was rooted in the developments of the present: He looked to the Bandung conference and the pan-Arabic axis as models of political alliances rather than the Muslim community of Medinah during the time of the Prophet.

Unlike many other Islamist thinkers, Burhanuddin recognised the fact that the universalism of Islam had its limits. Although he promoted an understanding of Islam that was universal in its scope, the doctor also recognised that it could not appeal to those who did not share or agree with its theological metadiscourse.

The universalism of Islam remained a particular universalism that could not be entirely reconciled with other universalist discourses like communism, socialism and liberal humanism. In such cases, negotiation with difference and alterity was the key to political action and hegemony.

Rather than concentrating on the differences between the ideological positions of the Islamists, Nationalists and the Leftists, Burhanuddin preferred to stress the chains of equivalences that bound their projects together.

This was why he was so successful in disseminating the message of political Islam to such a broad audience that spanned the entire political spectrum. Burhanuddin's skills at negotiation also helped the party bridge the ideological gap between the Islamists and the leftists of the Parti Rakyat and Parti Buruh as well.

While Islamist thinkers in other parts of the Islamic world at the time were openly critical of other political and ideological systems (The leader of the Jama'ati Islami, Ab'ul Al'aa Maudoodi had declared in 1969 that "whoever speaks about socialism should have his tongue pulled out"), Burhanuddin realised the practical need to form instrumental alliances with them.

Yet despite his achievements in broadening and pushing forward the agenda of political Islam, the reforms that had been put in place by Burhanuddin would be dismantled in the years to come thanks the manoeuvres made the party's next president Muhammad Asri Muda between 1970 to 1982.

Asri Muda's brand of ethnocentric politics which stood in defence of Malay interests alienated PAS from the other non-Malay and non-Muslim parties and organisations in the land. Thanks to his own megalomaniacal tendency to exercise total control over his party, Asri was finally rejected by the membership of PAS itself after a series of personal scandals and heated intra-party confrontations.

Since 1982, PAS has come under the leadership of a new wave of ulama and radical Islamist leaders who have sought to redefine Islam in purist terms. Their own brand of revolutionary Islam, couched in terms of a discourse of authenticity which seeks to "purify" Islam and Muslims of all unIslamic elements such as nationalism, humanism and secularism, has severed the link between PAS of the present and the PAS of the past for good.

The practical outlook of Burhanuddin, with his keen emphasis on dealing with the problems of the immediate present, finds no space within the theocratic discourse of the present generation of PAS ulama who continue to look to the past for role models and solutions.

Out of place and out of time, Burhanuddin remains one of the most important figures in the development of Malaysian politics and Islam in the country, yet recognised by none.