COMMENT During much of his 23-year tenure as Kelantan menteri besar, the late Nik Aziz Nik Mat exerted a simultaneous attraction/repulsion spell on non-Muslims: they found attractive the purity of his religious belief and were discomfited by aspects of its literalism.

Non-Muslims struggled to come to terms with the polarities of a persona they found engaging at most times and estranging at others.

Prior to Niz Aziz’s emergence as a national political figure in the 1990s there was virtually no leader of the Islamist party with appeal across sectarian lines.

Burhanudin al-Helmy, president of the party from the mid-1950s to his death in 1967, did appeal to non-Muslims but that was because he had associated with the multi-racial left wing cohort of the nationalist movement before and after the Second World War.

Hassan Adli, a PAS leader in Perak and near the top tier of his party’s hierarchy in the 1960s, was manifestly appealing to non-Muslims but did not endure long in the game, having met with an untimely death.

Not until Fadzil Noor (PAS president 1989-2002, right ) who took over from Yusof Rawa had a PAS bigwig been able to breach the Muslim/non-Muslim divide and that, too, because Fadzil allowed his affection for a physically abused and humiliated Anwar Ibrahim in 1998 to prompt him to head Gerak, the multi-denominational NGO formed to protest the abuse of human rights mirrored in the sacked deputy prime minister’s appalling treatment.

After Fadzil blazed the path, Nik Aziz steadily assumed centre stage as the PAS leader in possession of a magnetism that drew even non-Muslims into its orbit.

The exemplary simplicity of his lifestyle as MB (1990-2013) and resolute indifference to the material trappings of power shone like a beacon at a time when lengthy tenures in the upper tier of our political power pyramid invariably meant the occupant waxed with wealth.

That Nik Aziz was not materially acquisitive in an age rife with leaders grown florid on the perquisites of power was more than a display of spartan simplicity; it sustained the ideal of incorrupt governance at a time when power was synonymous with wealth.

Pause to evaluate Najib Abdul Razak’s reference to “family inheritance” as explanation to a query by the New York Times on the prime minister’s wealth.

From that standpoint, Pakatan was glad to have in Nik Aziz an indisputable exemplar of probity.

Pakatan supporters hailed Nik Aziz’s resolute opposition to a section of his party’s desire for a ‘unity government’ with Umno in the aftermath of ruling party’s loss of its two-third majority in Parliament in the seminal March 2008 general election.

That opposition put paid to hopes of a unity government and allowed Malaysians the space to observe what a DAP-led Pakatan Rakyat government under Lim Guan Eng could do in Penang, the kinetic, albeit short span of a PAS-led government under Nizar Jamaluddin in Perak, and the financially well-managed tenure of Khalid Ibrahim in a PKR-led Pakatan administration in Selangor.

Breaching a psychological barrier

By thwarting the unity move, Nik Aziz allowed space and time for Pakatan to breach a psychological barrier among Malaysian voters - that the opposition in Malaysia are doomed to be backbenchers and not governors.

That and the panache of his visit to Penang during Thaipusam in early 2013 in the midst of public foreboding and tension caused by Perkasa chief Ibrahim Ali’s threat to burn Malay language Bibles over the use of the ‘Allah’ term raised Nik Aziz to the pantheon of national leaders intent on transcending divisions than solidifying them.

The not so elevating aspects of Nik Aziz’s  persona was his scriptural literalness that saw him dismiss the Muslim organiser and participants of a dog show as people with “worms in their heads”.

Ailing for several years, his death yesterday comes at time when Pakatan is without its most recognisable leader, Anwar, now serving out a tendentious jail term, and just when PAS is intent on introducing the Islamic penal code (hudud), in Kelantan, which Nik Aziz would have ardently supported, to the dismay of his non-Muslim admirers.

This attraction/aversion syndrome which characterised the Nik Aziz phenomenon is set to define PAS politics in the foreseeable future awhile skewering the Pakatan position to the point of incoherence.

It’s enough to drive one to distraction until you consider what the alternative is - interminable rule by an Umno-BN so decayed that the rising clamour to replace Najib as PM instantaneously elicits the expression “By whom?”

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.