COMMENT DAP is firmly against, PKR is for, and Parti Amanah Negara (PAN) is ambivalent on the idea of including PAS in a revised edition of Pakatan Rakyat that expired in June after an improbable seven-year existence.

The situation seemed tailor-made to create another round of wrangling within opposition ranks, reminiscent of the disputes over Khalid Ibrahim’s replacement as Selangor menteri besar and PAS’ determination, vigorously opposed by DAP, to implement hudud in Kelantan.

Oh no, not again, opposition supporters must have sighed when signs of dissonance among opposition ranks began to show on the issue of including PAS in a new alliance.

But relief has come from the PAS president himself: Abdul Hadi Awang is quoted on the website of an Islamic NGO to the effect that his party would not join a proposed Pakatan 2.0.

As rationalisation of the supposed PAS stance of not joining, Hadi said the new opposition entity is only interested in winning elections, which is not the Islamic party’s priority.

PAS’ overriding priority, reiterated Hadi, is to uphold Islam.

One has to use the qualifier ‘supposed’ in rendering Hadi’s stance as the definitive PAS position because his deputy, Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man, has given vent in recent weeks to views that were distinctly different to Hadi’s.

A principal instance of this was when Tuan Ibrahim said his party would support a no-confidence motion in Parliament against Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak because the latter’s rationalisations on the IMDB affair were mumbo-jumbo.

By contrast, Hadi, with PAS spiritual leader Dr Haron Din ( photo ), is on record as saying that Najib could continue in office and that it is not quite clear that the PM’s handling of the debt-plagued sovereign wealth fund is impugnable to the extent it justifies eviction from office.

That neither Tuan Ibrahim nor Hadi are in any hurry to clarify these divergences is a telling reflection of the way ulama deal with a situation when major differences on political issues arise: the lesser theological lights are apt to defer to their betters.

Count that as yet another demonstration of why one ought to be wary when men of the cloth go traipsing in matters that are better reserved to people of this world.

The other defect of the stance that there should be no dichotomy between religion and politics is in Hadi’s perception that PAS’ past participation in Pakatan Rakyat was because the coalition was there to uphold Islam.

Scratching their heads

The now defunct Pakatan Rakyat’s supporters must have been scratching their heads at this interpretation.

When was it a priority of the expired alliance to uphold Islam?

True, it was a cardinal tenet of Pakatan Rakyat to uphold justice which the alliance’s chief exponent, Anwar Ibrahim, in myriad speeches on the hustings before his recent incarceration, strove to make synonymous with Islam.

Conflating the struggle for justice in Malaysia with the effort to uphold Islam may have been a rhetorical device employed by Anwar all these years but both quests could not have been understood as conjoined, otherwise DAP, an ardent component of Pakatan, would not have been stoutly opposed to PAS’ plan to implement hudud in Kelantan.

All this is grist for the point that a common aversion to Umno-BN, which is shared by DAP, PKR, the newfangled PAN, and - if people like Tuan Ibrahim are to be believed - by PAS, is no longer a viable basis on which to build a coalition of opposition parties.

A more durable basis on which to build Pakatan 2.0 would be a joint declaration that the components pledge to uphold the 1957 Merdeka Constitution and the 1963 Malaysia Agreement, from both of which Umno-BN has diverged flagrantly and irretrievably.

Nothing in the wording of both documents suggest that Islam has to be upheld; it has to be respected.

A prospective Pakatan 2.0 ought to take note of the nuances and simply ignore those who may be unhappy with or unable to appreciate the distinction.

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.