COMMENT It’s now increasingly evident the second tier leaders of PAS have their work cut out for them.

Their job is rearguard action to provide defensive cover for an erratic president whose penchant to go out on a limb and take positions that erode the good work done by the party in the recent past has already split it and shrouded its image in the public eye.

It now remains to be seen how long the lesser lights of the party can stick with the unenviable task, whose effect is already beginning to tell on its support base.

A recent poll projects that up to 50 percent of PAS members would leave the party to join its splinter, Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah), 15 percent having already signed up for it and another 35 percent are waiting for the writ to run out on their tenure as appointees of PAS to various posts that are the spoils of an entity in power in Kelantan, and a partner of the ruling coalitions in Selangor and, to a lesser extent, Penang.

The claim by PAS leaders that their membership has actually increased since ructions in the party preceding and after its contentious internal polls in June led to the formation of Amanah.

PAS stalwarts have excoriated the splinter as renegades, conveniently forgetting that it was the progressives who left the party to form Amanah who had done much good work to popularise it outside of its traditional base in Kelantan, Terengganu and Kedah.

Hence the claims of an increase in PAS membership after Amanah’s formation are akin to the whistling of a man walking through a graveyard at midnight to keep up his courage.

Moral fibre of a different sort would be imperative on the part of leaders in the penultimate posts in PAS to stall the drift of support away from the party.

But the nature of this religious party is such that the top tier of its leadership sets down the direction it should take; the rest have to follow suit on the premise that the theologians who steer the party know best.

Hence PAS is locked-in by dint of its own ideological presuppositions, something that its splinter Amanah is trying to free itself from.

Prioritising higher objectives of shariah

Last week in Penang, Amanah’s leading lights participated in a discourse on the application of the maqasid shariah, a 12th century formulation of the Islamic thinker Al-Shatibi, the object of which to prioritise the higher objectives of the shariah over its rule-bound applications.

Anwar Ibrahim, jailed de facto leader of PKR, was the most prominent of local leaders to give the maqasid shariah a Jeffersonian lilt.

Thomas Jefferson was the author of the US Declaration of Independence that proclaimed “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the objectives of the nascent republic in the late 18th century.

Islamic thinkers have used Al-Shatibi’s formulation of the maqasid as envisioning something of Jeffersonian import although this is a convergence that’s difficult to bring off.

To argue that shariah can only be implemented when all the fundamentals of societal well-being - economic equity, social parity, and political equableness - are assured is to posit such a situation as attainable when it is more like English philosopher Thomas More’s notion of utopia: an ideal that ought to be quested after in a future that is inherently unattainable.

But this is something that is a putoff to Islamic fundalmentalists: they want their shariah-paved utopia here and now and are apt to view the maqasid-questing crowd as prevaricators and compromisers.

Whether the majority of the 1 million plus members of PAS would favour the maqasid-questing Amanah or the shariah utopians of the mother party will somewhat be decided at the next general election (GE14).

So much the pity because GE14 was on track to decde the more crucial question of whether finally a decisive majorty of Malaysian voters want the ruling BN retired and replaced by the oppositoon.

But the confusion-spawning gyrations of a Hadi-led PAS have prevented that question from crystallising with a clarity that the majority would find easy to deal with.

Needless to say, the ruling and decrepit Umno-BN would benefit by default.

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.