COMMENT The other day PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man was heard to complain it was not just DAP’s opposition to hudud that led the secular party to a severance of ties with its Islamist partner.

Tuan Ibrahim offered his speculation that DAP were not just opposed to the Islamic penal code but to the whole idea of PAS leading the opposition.

Judging from the stuff that emanates from the PAS No 2, it’s not just DAP that would be opposed to PAS heading the opposition; many others who won’t vote for Umno-BN will be similarly opposed to PAS.

It must be said that Tuan Ibrahim is just about the only senior PAS leader from whom one can expect some consistency on the issues facing the country and a measure of aversion to the propositions of the ruling Umno-BN coalition.

Based on what by way of policy-formulation has emerged from party president Abdul Hadi Awang and spiritual leader Dr Haron Din, the PAS stance on the issues has been a blur.

This is because both leaders appear to enjoy a personal chemistry with the Umno president that has affected their ability to state what the PAS position is on issues besetting the country.

Not Tuan Ibrahim. In him there not infrequently is a visceral distaste for Umno that expresses itself in his saying something or taking up a position that can contradict what Hadi or Haron might have said or done in the days prior to Tuan Ibrahim sounding off.

Suffice to say, Tuan Ibrahim is more comfortable with the opposition than his seniors in PAS are, but that is not exactly reassuring.

Take the suggestion Tuan Ibrahim aired yesterday - that the country be governed by technocrats - and one could deduce that the man is not just simplistic in his intuition about the real reasons for DAP's opposition to PAS, he is naive about the calling of politics.

With nary a thought about the seeming contradiction, Tuan Ibrahim has proposed an idea that his party threw out with a vengeance last June at its polls.

Tuan Ibrahim seems to have forgotten it was at his party’s elective muktamar in Kuala Selangor seven months ago that PAS chose to put to a rout the set of professionals that Hadi’s predecessor as president, Fadzil Nor, had painstakingly nurtured as a ulama-technocrat combine to steer the Islamist party into a new era of politics.

In 1983, in imitation of the Iranian revolution, PAS chose to place its ulama wing in the driver’s seat of the party.

A decade and a half later, when ulama Fadzil Noor was established as party president, he chose to engage professionals in a collaborative effort between theologians and technocrats to steer the party into a new phase of politics.

This initiative by Fadzil drew many professionals to join the party such that by the start of the reformasi era in Malaysian politics, PAS was no longer the party of those educated in the religious pondoks; it had morphed into a movement for educated urban middle class Muslims.

Abrupt end for promising era of collaboration

That promising era of collaboration between ulama and professionals came to an abrupt end at the party’s elective assembly last June.

The professionals, who were chiefly people trained in the secular disciplines (in sum, technocrats), were beaten by the conservatives, composed mainly of ulama, in an acrimonious contest for positions at the party polls.

The defeat of the professionals was so sweeping the losers left to form Parti Amanah Negara which is largely steered by the people trained in the disciplines that Tuan Ibrahim now says ought to be enlisted to lead the country out of the grave economic and social problems besetting it.

It would seem, judging from Tuan Ibrahim’s proposition, that the defeated professionals, formerly of PAS, may have lost the battle within their party but they have won the war to convey their ideas.

For the PAS No 2 now says it is expertise such as this class of people educated and trained in the secular disciplines possesses that is needed to rescue the country from the depredations of Umno-BN rule.

Observers of PAS politics who were aghast at the way the group of professionals/technocrats in the party were excoriated in the polls campaign and then ejected at the ballot must find Tuan Ibrahim’s suggestion amusing.

Does he realise there is a disjunct between what his party did to its professionals last June and what he is now proposing as a solution to the country’s problems?

It is said the besettting weakness of those who take a strictly ideological view of politics is their tendency to substitute models for reality, artificial constructs for descriptions of the real world.

To religious inebriates like Tuan Ibrahim, essence takes priority over existence, ideology over reality.

In politics, this tendency undermines the reality principle and makes the apparently sincere like Tuan Ibrahim the contra logicians they are.

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.