COMMENT As things stand, the odds are stacked against the meeting of the Pakatan Rakyat presidential council this Sunday issuing in an outcome that would dampen the opposition coalition’s propensity for policy feuds.

Even at this late stage one cannot be sure that Sunday’s meeting would ‘proceed’ because DAP has maintained they won’t participate unless PAS is represented by its president, Abdul Hadi Awang.

His more than year-long ‘no-show’ at previous meetings has been a bone of contention because of his tendency to arrogate to himself the right of vetoing what his underlings may have agreed to in his absence.

It appeared that his deputies could attend but not represent him at Pakatan’s central leadership council meetings - they held no power of attorney.

Of course, this was a highly unsatisfactory state of coalition affairs, even if it could be said in extenuation that Hadi’s ( left ) absence was prompted by physical illness, and not as some quarters surmised - personal disenchantment with Pakatan.      

The past year Hadi’s retrospective veto - and PKR’s myopic insistence on Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail’s nomination to be menteri besar of Selangor - combined to bring the coalition to the brink of a break-up.

Pakatan survived this confidence-sapping phase of incoherence and disruption largely because its components understand very well that the Malaysian electorate wants political and economic change and are not getting that from the incumbents, Umno-BN, who after 58 years of rule are stuck in a rut it can’t shed.

It is only through the joint efforts of all three Pakatan components - DAP, PKR and PAS - that the incumbents can be brought down at the polls; severally and separately, each may dent but cannot deny Umno-BN of overall victory.

Also, Pakatan’s governance in the states it rules in Penang and Selangor continues to furnish evidence that the country could do well under a Pakatan dispensation.

That and the state of affairs in significant parts of the Islamic world have conduced to a juncture where it’s time for Pakatan, especially for its PKR component, to test another proposition that the Muslim parts of the local electorate may be willing to countenance:.

This is that it is possible to be a good Muslim in a state that is secular, the latter definition not comprising the ‘adverse to religion’ meaning the term has come to connote in the West.

PKR’s Muslims should expand on what Prof Tariq Ramadan ( right ) adumbrated last Sunday.

In a widely reported public lecture in Kuala Lumpur, the well-regarded Oxford don and grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that inner content is more important than the outer trappings of religiosity.

Question of Islam’s place in society

Ramadan merely said what, generally, the Indonesian political experience has been progressively trying to say over the past several decades during which its intelligentsia has debated the question of Islam’s place in society.

That question was seen to be tellingly resolved in May last year when, on receiving the Soekarno Prize for statesmanship, then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ( left ) held that Indonesia should maintain its founding president’s legacy of secularism.

In effect, the president espoused the line that Indonesian Muslims could maintain their rectitude without the state having to reinforce  it through imposition of Shariah law.

Within a few months of Susilo’s reiteration of what has become the consensus among Indonesians on Islam’s place in its society, its electorate elected a rank outsider, Joko Widodo, to its highest office.

In a hard-fought presidential campaign, a late blooming attempt to impugn Joko’s fealty to Islam fizzled into failure, leaving his election to the post the most powerful evidence yet that the country’s reformasi campaign, launched in 1998 with dictator Suharto’s removal, had arrived at a satisfying apotheosis.

Malaysia’s PKR-inspired reformasi campaign was also launched in 1998, but, unlike the Indonesian experience, is a long way from reaching its goal of wide ranging political and economic reform of the country.

That thrust for reform will enter an invigoratingly new phase when PKR tells its partner PAS at the Pakatan meeting on Sunday that the Islamist party’s planned tabling of a private member’s bill to pave the way for hudud law in Kelantan is a go-it-alone venture, with no support from PKR, regardless of the negative inferences as to its rectitude that such a refusal would involve.

This step will align PKR to the Indonesian consensus, a factor that has helped their reformasi campaign to arrive at a culmination at once emancipating and fulfilling.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.