COMMENT Ustaz Ahmad Awang, the ulama who is challenging incumbent Abdul Hadi Awang for PAS president at the party’s pivotal muktamar in early June, yesterday returned from an international Islamic conference in Beirut with his stature greatly enhanced.

This rise in his stature will be played to beneficent effect in his campaign to keep the Islamic party from sundering into a vacuously triumphant conservative faction at odds with a professional coterie that has been run ragged by the ulama in the lead-up divisional polls and is staring at ostracism once the electoral finale is completed in Kuala Selangor over the first weekend next month.

Matters in the electoral static between incumbent Hadi and challenger Ahmad sharpened yesterday when both contestants struck characteristically contrasting stances - Hadi in his maladroit and divisive way and Ahmad, in the flush of an impressive showing in Beirut, giving off vibes that were inclusive and emollient.

Social media began to cackle with images of Ahmad ( photo ) being sought for interviews in Beirut by the electronic press from Muslim countries where his breadth of vision was displayed to stature-enhancing effect which should stand him in good stead against  the parochialism of Hadi and his ill-judged fulminations against the party’s professionals.

Yesterday, Hadi was quoted as saying that he saw the party election as an exercise to cleanse it of “secularists”, a ghastly thing to avow because in the understanding of Islamists, a secularist is tantamount to an apostate.

Applying viscerally repugnant terms to fellow Muslims is considered bad form in Islam.

In contrast, Ahmad, pressed for comments on the presidential election upon his return from Beirut, confined himself to saying he was seeking to unify the party and strengthen its cooperation with its allies in the opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat, themes that he has been emphasising since he shaped up to be a contender for the presidency six weeks ago.

With a fortnight to go to the party’s polls, Ahmad Awang sounds endearingly presidential while the other Awang sounds discordantly partisan and what’s more, pharisiacal.

Some 1,300 delegates to the muktamar would have noted the difference but whether they, most of whom have been chosen to vote at the elective assembly by the divisional polls-winning ulama, would vote their judgment instead of their factional preference remains to be seen.

PAS is a democratic party with a monolithic superstructure: the apparent asymmetry is self-inflicted, attributable to the religion’s emphasis that leadership should be exercised by those who are alim (learned), the term from which the label of respect - ulama - is derived.

Alim no longer confined to theologians?

But alim has come to acquire an elasticity whose application is no longer confinable to the faith’s theologians only.

An economist like the party’s well-regarded vice-president, Husam Musa, could also fall under the ambit of the term which was what the revered and late spiritual adviser, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, had tried to convey to the PAS faithful when favourably citing Husam’s qualifications to lead.

An ulama like Ahmad Awang, with his appreciation for the role the professionals play in the party and his willingness to co-opt them for leadership roles as he did when selecting engineer Nizar Jamaluddin ( photo ) for the post of Pakatan menteri besar of Perak in March 2008, is now seen as the man to unite both the party’s theological and professional wings.

Husam similarly struck the theme of inclusiveness when accepting nominations to defend his vice-presidential post in the upcoming election.

Hadi, with his parochialism and partisanship and his backing for Umno’s Najib Abdul Razak to continue in the post of prime minister of the country, is increasingly seen as the square peg in the round hole of PAS’ search for integrating the imperatives of their faith with the the devices of politics in a multiracial and multireligious polity.               

The conference in Beirut that Ahmad attended was organised by an Islamic NGO keen to draw the attention of the world’s Muslims to the problems besetting the ummah in war-torn countries, the plight of Islamic refugees from oppression such as the Rohingyas, and the fate of Islamic prisoners of conscience such as former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi ( photo ).

What had taken Hadi, 68, who is a vice-president of the global body for Muslim theologians, decades to acquire, Ahmad, whose career at 79 was in recessional, has re-emerged in the last six weeks as a Muslim intellectual of stature in keeping with the universalist claims of the religion.

To be sure, Ahmad had enjoyed a modicum of that stature in his younger days when he attended international Islamic conferences where his fluent Arabic, competent English and universalist

orientation gained him stature in circles where a renaissance in Muslim consciousness following the quadrupling in oil prices in 1973 and the consequent flow of petrodollars into Muslim education posed for the ummah challenges in how pious Muslims could try to bring together the imperatives of faith and the devices of politics.

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.