COMMENT Despite the alacrity with which Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man had rejected Kota Baru PAS’ nomination of him for the post of president at polls to be held in June, the battle to signal incumbent Abdul Hadi Awang that he should step aside or be contested is far from over.

This is in spite of the apparent endorsement he has received from the new murshidul am (spiritual leader) of PAS, Haron Din.

Barely had the announcement earlier this week of Haron’s elevation to the position, long occupied by the late Nik Aziz Nik Mat, had time to sink in than the new man let the PAS faithful know where he stood on the contest in PAS between its theological wing and the professionals.

Not that there were any surprises in the stance adopted by the newfangled spiritual leader; Haron has not only been a keen exponent of the cause of the ulama in the party, he is partial to the notion of cooperation with Umno.

No surprise, then, that Umno president and Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was quick to congratulate Haron, who was the PAS deputy murshidul am under Nik Aziz, on his promotion.

One remembers to what end Haron used the opportunity Lim Guan Eng myopically presented Pakatan Rakyat’s detractors on the ‘Allah’ issue over Christmas 2012.

The Penang chief minister, in a Christmas message that year, urged the government to allow Christians to use the term ‘Allah’ in their rituals of worship and faith education.

Prior to that occasion, the Pakatan stance had been that Christians and Jews could use ‘Allah’ but they must avoid any abuse of the term that’s sacrosanct to Muslims.

It was a tenuous stance, its fragility deriving from the reality that peninsula Malay-Muslims, probably as a consequence of insularity, had long felt the term to be exclusive to Muslims.

Never mind that the rest of the world, including large swathes of the Islamic one, felt that such exclusivity was a joke, the fact that substantial numbers of peninsula Malay-Muslims regarded the faux exclusivity as important to them was something the more travelled and informed among this demographic was loath to contradict.

Haron was quoted as saying that he would “never” come round to accepting that non-Muslims could use the term.

Guan Eng’s remark caused a public furore. It was stoked by Umno, seeing as it did that the PAS stance on the matter was equivocal and, by extension, the Pakatan position was rendered shaky.

Depicting Pakatan’s position as incoherent

With his high profile in PAS, Haron’s gyrations on the issue were conspicuous in depicting the Pakatan position as hopelessly incoherent - and this with just weeks to go to the general election.

Pakatan supporters could only wring their hands in frustration at Guan Eng’s faux pas and its ready exploitation by Umno, with generous helpings from from PAS’ two Harons - Haron Din, the deputy spiritual leader, and the late Harun Taib, the head of PAS’ ulama wing.

So Haron Din’s stance on the issue of a contest for the PAS presidency - a post uncontested in all the party’s 63-year history - is not only unsurprising, it will likely galvanise Hadi Awang’s critics into concerted efforts to press  an ulama whom this group favours to throw his hat into the presidential ring.

The aim is probably not so much to trigger a contest for the post but to pressure Hadi into withdrawing from contesting.

If one, or better still two, credible ulama are nominated and show interest to contest, that fact alone will generate pressure on Hadi to concede the necessity that the post remain uncontested and somebody like Tuan Ibrahim can then be ushered in as president.

Tuan Ibrahim ( left ) is not averse to being nominated for the deputy president’s post and will likely not only be nominated but may well prise it away from the incumbent, Mohamad Sabu.

Pushing Tuan Ibrahim upstairs is one way of keeping Mat Sabu safe at No 2.

Thus the nomination process is turning out to be an elaborate game of sending up smoke signals by contending factions which the party faithful will have to read and interpret against a desire to hold it together by a balancing of the competing forces.

Democrats will recognise this as the inexorable way of all democratising processes that push rivaling contenders to the middle, even as it allows them in the competitive prelude to display how far apart they actually are.

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.