Fleeting ride of moderate Islamist Fadzil Noor
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Death came rather unexpectedly to Ustaz Fadzil Noor, the PAS president and Opposition Leader; but it was, in a sense, an apposite coda to a career whose author had already become marginal to the tide he rode with prescience to a central role in the Malaysian Opposition and that petered out in the aftermath of Sept 11.
From late August 1998, when he set aside ideology and relied on intuition to make common cause with Anwar Ibrahim he elected to commiserate with his ex-Abim comrade at the latter's residence as decapitation loomed for the Umno luminary Fadzil paddled his party to a commanding presence in the evolving coalition of opposition parties, the Barisan Alternatif (BA).
He did that by conjuring even if it turned out to be only a chimera a loosening of his party's moorings in theocratic Islam. Otherwise it would have been impossible to steer his essentially sectarian party to leadership of an informal coalition that included the avowedly secular DAP and the left-leaning PRM.
True, the arrest, battering and trial of Anwar Ibrahim in September 1998 occasioned the sort of frisson that could galvanise a discordant and diverse opposition into making common cause to fight the Barisan Nasional (BN), a coalition that at the end of its fourth decade in power had seemed to have lost something of its old solicitude for the grievances of the Malaysian electorate.
Anwar's excruciation provided the anvil on which to hammer an amorphous mass of oppositionists and social activists from the plethora of non-governmental organisations into a loose coalition; one, alas, that had enough centrifugal currents in it, stemming from deep ideological differences, to prevent it coalescing into a credible union.
Compelling ability
However, for three years from September 1998, the fact that the BA was a going concern among Malaysian oppositionists was due in no small part to the steering of Fadzil Noor, who in that transient period belied his mild-mannered public persona with compelling ability to resist the pitfalls of the theocratic mind: a preference for essence over existence, the historical over the empirical, religious models for multifarious reality.
Using the platform provided by Gerak, an informal coalition of NGOs and opposition parties to fight the ISA that Fadzil helped form and led, the PAS leader moved to foster the notion that this assembly could unite into a political force. Of course, the very public ordeal of Anwar Ibrahim helped provide the glue to hold this otherwise fissiparous union together.
But by allowing PAS' then bi-weekly organ,
Harakah
, to become a forum for the BA, Fadzil gave the evolving coalition a sustained claim to public attention. Circulation quintupled to 350,000 even as PAS party membership doubled to 800,000, gains undoubtedly stoked by public disaffection over the treatment of Anwar Ibrahim but kept alive by the Fadzil's astute positioning of Pas as a party with not just a theocratic agenda.
By the time the November 1999 general election arrived, PAS had the visibility and presence of a major contender for power on the national stage. The tripling of its parliamentary representation (27 seats) and the addition of Terengganu to its bastion of Kelantan as states controlled by PAS confirmed the party's attainment of critical mass.
After the election, Fadzil became parliamentary Opposition Leader, a role he did not assay with the deftness he had displayed as putative opposition leader. Parliamentary panache depends on mastery of rules and process, an arcane art a cleric may find remote. Though he increasingly found it difficult to sustain the image he so sedulously cultivated prior to the election that PAS was interested in the larger concerns of Malaysians who are not Muslim, he publicly at least stayed the course he charted from September 1998.
Finest hour
He had one good run in early 2001 when Prime Minister and Umno president Dr Mahathir Mohamed tried to entice PAS into talks about Malay unity. Fadzil feinted in the direction of acceptance only to pull away, citing that his party was more concerned with a national agenda rather than mere Malay unity. It was Fadzil Noor's finest hour, his credentials as a PAS leader in the mould of the more nationalist-than-Islamist Burhanuddin Helmy more visible than ever they were. But that moment was to be all too transient.
After that it was relentlessly downhill as Sept 11 was followed by Oct 7, the start of American bombing of Afghanistan. PAS' reaction of support for the Taliban and calls for jihad projected starkly its medieval moorings, something that Fadzil managed to screen through adroit manoeuvres over three years from September 1998.
With the Taliban about as palatable a political proposition as Le Pen was recently to the overall French public, PAS' doctrinaire support for the mullahs who destroyed the Bamiyan statues and sheltered Osama bin Laden confirmed that the party's recently urbane exterior was a veneer camouflaging an essentially medieval core. Also, the unyielding determination of PAS deputy president and Terengganu Menteri Besar Tuan Guru Abdul Hadi Awang to introduce Islamic law in the state has polarised political society across party lines into against hudud and for-hudud factions.
Fadzil, an Islamist politician of faintly liberal credentials, would have found that divide beyond his capacity to straddle. In that sense his death came not too soon.
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