COMMENT The PAS faithful like to say the trait that distinguishes them from Umno is that contenders for posts in their party do not defame each other as they do in Umno.

This perception has taken a beating in the lead-up to the PAS muktamar beginning on Thursday in Kuala Selangor which pundits describe as probably the most crucial in the party’s 63-year history.

Elections are being held, with contests all the way down from the president’s post.

In practically all of the contests, the rival candidates owe allegiance to one or the other faction in the party - the ulama or the professionals - a feature that has made the polls the most-watched in the party’s history because of what the results portend for the future.

PAS is at a crossroads: their theological (ulama) wing and the professional faction each want to the take the party in different directions.

The ulama faction, led by incumbent president Abdul Hadi Awang, want to stay in the opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition but at several removes from their secular partner DAP.

The professionals, on the other hand, want closer cooperation with their Pakatan partners whom they view as vital for unseating the ruling BN coalition.     

The intense jousting between both factions has seen an unprecedented outpouring of bile that has prompted observers to surmise that the propriety of previous contests was more veneer than ethical ideal.

The vitriol unleashed in the course of the prelude of divisional elections and in the concluding run-up to Thursday’s muktamar have created doubts about the piety of those involved in the mud-slinging.

PAS is a religious party. It behooves those with an imperative to piety to demonstrate that theirs is not a pretense but an ethical ideal.

If anything the cauldron of antagonism and mudslinging that has marked this electioneering in PAS proves that outer observance of pietistic ritual is no guarantee of its penetration of inner consciousness and conduct.

“Between the conception and the creation falls the shadow,” the poet TS Eliot reminds us.

Human fallibility

The “shadow” here is human  fallibility and no matter what the proponents of the Islamic penal code in Kelantan say about them going about the grave matter of enforcing “God’s laws”, as if that invocation insures them against miscarriages of justice, the fact of the matter is that like all scions of Adam, the mullahs are as prone to error and fallibility as the next person.     

Take the latest twist in the contest for the president’s post.

Presidential challenger Ustaz Ahmad Awang has in the last few days been painted out to be a Shiite by bloggers and propagandists out to thwart his bid to unseat Hadi.

They have posted pictures of Ahmad in Teheran during an anniversary celebration of the Iranian Revolution as the basis for tarring him with the Shiite brush.

Ahmad ( photo ) was at the anniversary some years back at the invitation of his Iranian government hosts.

So was Ghani Shamsuddin, like Ahmad a former president of the Ulama Association of Malaysia (PUM), who, also like Ahmad, had been a significant player in PAS politics in the last few decades.

Ghani can be seen in the some of the posted photos of Ahmad at the Iranian festivities. Yet it is not said of Ghani that he is Shiite; only Ahmad, who is Sunni, is targeted for that label.

The division between Sunni and Shiite in Islam is not doctrinal; it’s a dispute over succession. So there's nothing pejorative about the term ‘Shiite’.

That it has come to be freighted with pejorative connotations is a commentary on the ineradicable exclusivism of human nature.

It was Umno vice-president Zahid Hamidi who fulminated against the Shiites when just before the Umno triennial party elections of 2013, he accused PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu of being a Shiite. Mohamad is suing Zahid for defamation.

Of course, Ahmad is not going to sue his detractors who have portrayed him in social media as Shiite, but he has already publicly lamented the emulation of Umno-like defamatory style of some campaigners in PAS.

All he can hope for is for the PAS delegates at the muktamar to sift the grain from the defamatory chaff and elect him president of a party that wants no truck with the faults and flaws of its rival for the Muslim vote in Malaysia.

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.