I was on a one-day stopover in London recently on the way home from Toronto when the escalating Middle East violence led to the suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv discotheque that claimed 19 lives.

Sitting in my hotel room, I watched a few cycles of the Sky News broadcast depicting the mayhem and scenes of highly-charged emotions in the vicinity of the bombing.

Just a few days earlier on the other side of the world, the Abu Sayyaf guerillas staged a daring raid, taking a number of Filipinos and Americans hostage in the southern Philippines.

As a Muslim, even after so many years, it was excruciating to be bombarded with these news flashes of violence that seem to characterise political Islam all over the world.

To the purveyors of the international media, political Islam is synonymous with intolerance, violence, anti-democracy and anti-modernity. This is partly ignorance and partly wilful manipulation, as lucidly expounded by Edward Said in Covering Islam .

And not forgetting, too, the consumers who regard violent events as the only things newsworthy. For whatever that might be said of Muslim extremists who are not averse to committing acts of terrorism on innocent civilians in trying to achieve their objectives, the western media and the western power elite shed no tears when Islamists are subverted or denied their rightful victory won though peaceful democratic process, as the experience in Turkey and Algeria had shown.

In fact in the case of the latter, France openly approved, if not supported the Algerian military in hijacking the FIS electoral victory.

Then, I became aware that at home on that weekend when the news was saturated with Muslim violence, PAS was having its 47th muktamar . But who wants to know about an Islamic party that does not preach violence?

Democracy deterioration

Many observers have commented that the greatest beneficiaries following the falling-out in Umno between its president and his former deputy in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 is PAS, as shown by the surge in its popularity among the Malays, and its handsome win at the 1999 general elections.

For the hard work and commitment of their leaders and members, they have certainly more than deserved that. Following the wave of Internal Security Act (ISA) arrests of friends of the former deputy prime minister, the PAS president was among those who initiated Gerak.

The political crisis precipitated by the events of September 1998 opened the eyes of Malaysians to the deterioration of democracy and galvanised a significant section of the society to clamour for reforms.

Politically this led to the creation of a first ever credible Opposition front (the Barisan Alternatif) that could challenge the unbroken hegemony of the Barisan Nasional in Malaysian politics since Independence.

But this was not the first time PAS formed an Opposition coalition. This time around however, PAS spelt out its participation in the alliance based on the principles of social justice, transparency and good governance, in accordance with Islamic teachings from which it derives its ideology.

In 1990, its alliance with the now-defunct Semangat 46 was hard to take seriously, for the latter spoke with Islamic tones on the East Coast whereas on the west its cause was that of Malay nationalism.

Even today, detractors and sceptics question the viability of the Barisan Alternatif (BA) coalition, given that the two major partners are poles apart ideologically. On the other hand, looking more closely at what has been unfolding in the last two years or so, we can't help but notice that PAS is rapidly breaking out of its image of parochial provincialism and transforming itself into a mature, respected, national party.

Mischievous propaganda that attempted to link PAS to political violence and Taliban-inspired intolerance has generally met with failure.

Formidable barrier

When the Umno President invited Keadilan and PAS to the Malay Unity talks following the Suqiu request that the government fulfil its pre-election promises, the PAS president handled it brilliantly.

Instead of rejecting outright the invitation, the tables were turned on his Umno counterpart by suggesting national unity talks and set preconditions that exposed Umno's hollow claims of being the sole protector of Malay interests.

This managed to assuage the racial tension that was reportedly building up and the PAS president came out more statesmanly than his Umno counterpart.

While the efficiency and effectiveness of the PAS governance in Kelantan may be questioned, (but blame for this must also be apportioned to Palace interference and bullying by the Federal government), it has been very scrupulous in ensuring the protection of cultural and religious rights of minorities as demanded by Islam, and the same policies have been duplicated in newly-won Terengganu.

But for all these remarkable achievements, there is still a formidable barrier that prevents many non-Muslims from giving their support to PAS, despite acknowledging that their leaders are men and women of piety and high moral integrity, and that the party lays great emphasis on social justice and stringent accountability of those entrusted with positions of leadership.

From non-Muslim friends in my professional and social circles, I can see that the barrier in question is the idea of the Islamic state. But it would be quite incorrect to have the assumption that such barrier exists only among the non-Muslims.

Though PAS has been credited for having attracted young Malay professionals, and this has been one of the major factors for its success, a large section of the Malay middle class, who on the one hand clamours for fundamental liberties, remain on the other, unconvinced of PAS' vision of an Islamic state.

Utopian society

Being part of the Muslim students community in Australia in the early 1980s, I could recall how the polemics on an Islamic state was a passionate subject at annual meetings and seemed to me the overarching objective of every Islamic movement around the world.

The ideologues of the idealised Islamic state were largely leaders of Islamic movements from the Middle East whose societies are homogeneously Muslim and they operated under conditions of persecution and even brutal repression by avowedly anti-religion secularist regimes which were aligned either to the Western or Eastern bloc.

It must be remembered that at the height of the Cold War, democracy was seen with much disdain by the Islamic intelligentsia as the United States, for its own strategic interests, propped up client regimes in the Middle East, South America and Southeast Asia whose rules were anything but democratic.

They were hardly any better than the despotic blend of Arab socialism and nationalism. And Islam as a religion is not only concerned with private worship but does provide an ethical frame-work for the governance of society.

This has produced a great civilisation, which at its peak stretched from Spain and Eastern Europe to eastern China. Furthermore, the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 and the unexpected resilience of the Afghan Mujahidin against the military might of Russia, fired the imagination and optimism of Islamic movements.

I remember very well attending weekend lectures by a visiting fire-brand PAS leader in 1983 on Islamic politics and the Islamic state. At that time PAS has re-invented itself, installed a new leadership with a political ideology under the banner of 'Leadership of the Ulama'.

The subtle reference was decidedly to the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini, borrowing the lexicon of the Iranian struggle against the Shah and later the United States. The idealised Islamic state will be a perfect, Utopian society where problems, either moral, economic or social, will be minimal because it will be run by God-given laws, unlike the modern states whose laws and governance are the product of human intellectual endeavour, which is necessarily imperfect, so the arguments went.

But such arguments were too simplistic as governance does not revolve only around laws, and with the tone that these were delivered, I couldn't help imagining that there would be very little room for intellectual pluralism even within the Muslim community, and the nation would be a cultural desert, with the stifling of freedom for creative expressions and literature.

Afghan catastrophe

But for a Malaysian, a most baffling question was that what if the non-Muslims, who, despite their guaranteed rights, wished for active political participation and demand power sharing, as they have always done, for, after all, are they not already a minority?

The turn of events in the last few years must have been perplexing for those harbouring the project for an idealised Islamic state.

The wheel has turned a full circle. With the end of the Cold War and the globalisation of ideas, the trend for democratisation and challenge to authoritarian regimes has swept much of the world, including the Muslim world.

Respect for human rights and fundamental liberties, and governance that truly represents the people, in essence, democracy, offers the real hope for social justice and freedom from despotism.

At the same time, the experiments with theocratic, ulama -led Islamic states have led to the collapse of governance and a catastrophe in Afghanistan and these are now rejected by the people of Iran.

The resounding victory of Mohamad Khatami who garnered 77 percent of the votes in Iran's recent presidential election sent a clear signal that the ulama class cannot take for granted that it has the God-given right to govern because it thinks it knows what is best for the people.

Khatami's landslide victory and the extraordinary voter turnout baffled many sceptics. The majority of the people, especially the young, still have hopes for an alternative vision of Islamic polity - a more tolerant and participatory system with a fair judicial process, a freer press and more opportunities for young people and women.

It is as if they could blame his failures of his first term on the ruling conservative clerical establishment who thwarted his efforts at reforms at every turn. Had the Afghans the freedom to vote, one would have little doubt as to which direction the country's politics will take.

Of course, Khatami's victory should not be interpreted as a rejection of Islam. Khatami said his goal was to merge independence, freedom and progress with Iran's Islamic identity. It is merely a rejection of the excesses of the ulama leadership with its exclusivist and rigid worldview that is out of touch with the aspirations of a people living in a modern society.

The desire for genuine democratic reforms and the failure of the Islamic state experiment should make us reorientate our priorities - is the overarching objective of establishing an idealised Islamic state baggage carried over from the 1970s and 1980s that it should now make way for governance that respects the people's will, intelligence and cultural pluralism, and be guided by Islamic values that emphasise justice and compassion, and at the same time, the rejection of any form of corruption, tyranny and oppression?

If in homogeneous Iran such a project had failed what would be the prospect in Malaysia where Muslims only make up slightly more than half the population? Even so, within the Muslim community, many are still unclear about the shape and form of the desired Islamic state, for very little has been explained to the public.

Rationality and reason

What is clear is that the Muslims generally love Islam and respect the ulama but not necessarily share their vision for a rigidly theocratic Islamic state.

For the present, by simple arithmetics, the chances of PAS establishing an Islamic state through the ballot box is almost impossible even if it wins every seat contested. Politics is an arena that requires the exercise of rationality and reason. It makes little sense in trying to win the support of the non- Muslims while at the same time placing a barrier that would prevent their acceptance.

There is the risk that their efforts of reaching out to the non-Muslims might be misconstrued as insincere political manoeuvring rather than the performing of a religious obligation.

Wouldn't it be better to shelve that lofty dream for the time being and together with its coalition partners concentrate on what really matters - the restoration of genuine democracy in Malaysia?