COMMENT For some time now, the go-to man in PAS for what is their gut position on matters affecting the party's stand or relations to just about everything was Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man.

More so after his elevation to the post of deputy president in the Islamist party at their internal polls last June.

There was good reason for this because the Pahang-born theologian's ideological keel was steady in the face of the confusing flipflops of party president Abdul Hadi Awang.

True, in the party's pecking order Tuan Ibrahim did not rate as high as Hadi nor as lofty as spiritual leader Dr Haron Din.

But because he spoke with a consistency that observers could relate to stances the party had adopted in recent years, Tuan Ibrahim's was the more reassuring voice, by dint of its correlation with positions the party had assumed before.

Thus, with Hadi steadily secreting a mist of uncertainty over the PAS stand on a host of issues in recent times, it was to the PAS No 2 that party watchers accorded more respect as the voice of what appeared to be the essential party position.

And that voice tended to reflect positions that people recognised as more in line with the PAS position than were the versions of it that could be threaded from Hadi's not infrequent ramblings.

Hence, it is a disconcerting surprise that Tuan Ibrahim has spoken the way he has apparently done on the meeting between Umno president Najib Abdul Razak and Hadi at the gathering of Al-Azhar University alumni in Kuala Lumpur earlier this week.

A matter of pride

Tuan Ibrahim, in remarks that were uploaded on web news portal The Malaysian Insider , said it was a matter of pride for PAS that its president shared the same stage as his Umno counterpart on matters to do with Muslim unity.

In another time and context, a previous president of PAS would have prioritised national unity before Muslim unity.

Hadi's predecessor, Fadzil Noor (president 1989-2002), had in early 2002 responded to an Umno invitation to hold a muzakarah (dialogue) with PAS in the quest of Muslim unity by intimating that PAS was also interested to promote national unity in addition to Muslim unity.

The Umno invitation then, was issued at a time when thunderheads were boiling up on the national horizon, which incidentally are the times when concerns about Muslim unity are expressed, and calls for a muzakarah are issued.

Tuan Ibrahim's reception to the latest call is particularly noteworthy because he has only recently been quoted as saying that PAS would not want to “save” Umno from his current travails.

Apparently, Hadi's latest tete-a-tete with Najib at the Al-Azhar alumni gathering, where both leaders wore matching pink attire and sat next to each other, has laved their meeting in a beatific glow from which the two parties' past history of acrimony has been spruced up and wrinkled out.

No less than Jamil Khir Baharom, the minister in charge of religious affairs in the Prime Minister's Department, has disclosed that Najib has had meetings with Hadi in recent months so that the apparent conviviality of their encounter at the alumni gathering was not manufactured.

Tuan Ibrahim must have been briefed on its congeniality, otherwise he would not have launched into what looks like a repudiation of his earlier stance that PAS was not interested to “save” Umno.

Not that this matters very much save for what the newfound chumminess between Umno and PAS bodes for the Islamist party's ties with PKR, singular among opposition in wanting to keep PAS within the opposition fold.

All the recent while, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain the position that PAS will stay true to the course elected for it by Fadzil Noor and the late and revered spiritual leader, Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat.

Especially after Nik Aziz's death in February, Hadi and Haron have given plenty indication that under their baton, PAS is going to hew closer to Umno than to the opposition.

With Tuan Ibrahim now leaning to that stance, the PAS ship is surely headed for a docking with Umno's more than with the rest of the opposition.

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.