COMMENT The PAS ulama-manufactured hubbub over DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang’s speech at a ceramah in Kota Baru on May 10 may well suggest that we do not these days just have a problem about a lack of proficiency in English, but also another difficulty that has to do with insufficient comprehension of Bahasa Malaysia.

Kit Siang spoke in colloquial Bahasa that would have been easily comprehended by the man in the street such that the DAP stalwart’s intent, as conveyed by the language he used, could not have been misconstrued by anyone who has stayed in school for the 11 years it takes to obtain a basic qualification in our system.

The main thrust of the speech was that in a country of our diversity (of races and faiths) it is inadvisable to impose the Islamic penal code.

Kit Siang spoke of his findings on a recent trip to countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Jordan, whose populations are predominantly Muslim.

The tour revealed that hudud is not enforced in these nations despite their dominantly Muslim milieu.

Further, he said he discovered in the course of his trip that Islamic scholars and theologians see hudud as only a small part of the overall concept of Shariah whose implementation was considered inadvisable if certain pre-conditions do not exist.

Kit Siang said these pre-conditions were the prevalence of economic security, the provision of basic health care and the guarantee of personal security.

He argued that the opposition Pakatan Rakyat had an unprecedented opportunity to end the reign of Umno-BN after 58 years of its rule.

He claimed that adherence by Pakatan to what had been agreed to as policies forging economic equity, social justice and political freedom were critical to securing voters’ confidence that the coalition would deliver on its promises.

He said dissension among Pakatan partners on major issues would weaken that confidence and deprive the Malaysian people of a long-deferred delivery from BN misrule.  

Kit Siang’s speech smacked of a plea to Kelantanese Muslims not to substitute models for reality, not to prefer abstractions to concreteness, and not to supplant the real world with artificial constructs.

In other words, he was pleading that they not commit what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” which happens whenever ideological inebriates withdraw problems from the stream of change and treat them in splendid abstraction.

‘Like tugging gently at a friend’s sleeve’

The speech was like someone tugging gently at the sleeve of a friend so that he does not do something he is intent on doing.

It cannot be considered a polemic against whatever it is its critics now say it reeked of being - anti-hudud, anti-Islam and sundry other antipathies.

It was more a persuasion than a diatribe, a counsel of scepticism than a stricture against ideological rigidity.

It had something of the wisdom of the Arabic proverb: “Your enemies tell you what you want to hear; your friends tell you the truth”: more than it had any aversion for the certitudes of faith of others.

To say that a speech like that cannot be uttered in what the Kelantanese like to think as ‘Serambi Mekkah’ (“Corridor to Heaven’) is to have a mind-set that abhors anything that savours of dissent.

It is good that a leader from Pakatan went to Kota Baru to say what that speech purported to say.

This is that the dominant party there does not proceed with a measure that is certain to delay the deliverance of the country from what a growing number of its voting-age citizens are edging closer to realising: that continued rule by Umno-BN is inviting a calamity from which retrieval would be very long and painful.

The speech was a counsel of realism against myopia and folly.

It was what a friend says to an ally whose collaboration is necessary to end a nation’s slide into debt and disaster.

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.