COMMENT There must be much relief in quarters wanting to see Pakatan Rakyat survive intact until the next general election following the announcement by Kota Baru PAS that they have nominated a candidate to challenge incumbent Abdul Hadi Awang for the post of president in party polls in June.

Although there is no indication that the nominee, Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man, who is presently one of three vice-presidents of PAS, will accept the nomination, the ball has started rolling towards the goal of seeing the post contested.

Hadi has not been challenged for the post since he was uncontested for it after becoming acting president of the party upon predecessor Fadzil Noor’s ( right ) death in June 2002.

Recent bouts of illness and a past year of error-prone leadership by the 67-year-old ulama have not had the effect of conveying to the president that the writing is on the wall and that, perhaps, he should retire.

An escalating division in the Islamic party between conservatives, who back Hadi, and progressives, who want him to quit, has instead emboldened him to stay put.

This divergence would not have been too troubling if not for the reality that the conservatives, while wanting to stay in the opposition grouping, Pakatan Rakyat, pay only lip service to the need for intra-coalition collaboration.

In contrast, the progressives are all for not only persisting with Pakatan but also for de-emphasising issues that trail coalition division in their wake.

Hadi has embodied the conservatives’ ambivalence towards Pakatan, which is why supporters of the coalition are keen to see him shift out of the PAS driving seat.

That prospect, wafting on scattered calls within the party that Hadi should make way, quickly receded last week when secretary-general Mustafa Ali predicted a no-contest for the top post in the June polls and contests for all other posts.

This was a startling prediction from a seasoned veteran of the party, coming as it did at a time when there has been no year in PAS like the past one in which the frail and erratic leadership displayed by the president was as transparent and, as a consequence, so distressing.

If political leadership is a pattern of creative responses to the challenges thrown up by society’s problems and crises and the niggling issues periodically posed by adversaries and allies alike, Hadi showed little sign of admirable mettle in dealing with them in the past year.

‘One idea explains the world’

Unwilling to grapple with the ever-changing nature of problems, he fell back on the unchanging nature of doctrinaire solutions which is the easy recourse of the monist for whom one idea explains the world.

Thus he had a ready prescription when Anwar Ibrahim lost his sodomy appeal in the Federal Court last month: Hadi’s was that the PKR de facto leader would have had justice meted out to him if he had been tried under Islamic tenets.

Never mind that groups ranging from Boko Haram to Al Shabaab, to Islamic State and the Taliban are renowned for their commendation of the same panacea for their societies’ ills - at no apparent diminution to the ability of others, based on the conduct of these militant exponents, to belie in the viability of the commended solution.

No doubt Hadi ( right ) and his ilk believe that the PAS version of this panacea would be pristinely prescriptive, but in the absence of a centralised interpretive authority in Islam, how are others to know which version of Shariah is the true and efficacious one?

The tunnel vision of doctrinaires is proverbial, which is why the decision of one PAS division in Kelantan to nominate a contender for the party presidency is a small but encouraging sign that doctrinaires are not going to be monarchs of all they survey within PAS.

Though Tuan Ibrahim as an ulama is predisposed to the doctrinaire, he has shown a greater awareness of complexity and a higher mistrust of simple answers to hypothetical questions.

He is also keen on holding the factions in PAS together, whereas Hadi appears more interested in extruding those who disagree with him.

Just as one swallow does not make a summer, one nomination does not make a contest, more so when we don’t yet know if the candidate will accept the nomination.

Still, the nomination has opened the path towards a contest for the presidency of PAS.

It is hoped more nominations would follow so that the forces that want to keep PAS within Pakatan are encouraged to persevere in the endeavour.

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.