PAS-style cronyism
How to take another wife illegally in Islamic Kelantan and get away with it? Ask PAS. MGG Pillai.
June 4, 2002

Umno Kelantan is up in arms at the PAS speaker of the Kelantan state assembly for crossing the border into Thailand to take himself another wife. PAS is embarrassed but he is too important a state apparatchik to be cast aside.

There is a law in most states that if a Muslim wants to take another wife, he needs the permission of his first wife and satisfy bureaucratic ideals before he is allowed to.

It is cheerfully ignored when the men are important in their political parties, in government or opposition.

And proof, if proof be needed, that whatever the law might say, polygamy is a desirable attribute for a Muslim to adhere to.

What the Kelantan speaker did, is what a former mentri besar (chief minister) of Selangor did when he wanted to marry the daughter of the late Sultan of Selangor without seeking permission from his wife and her father.

PAS then kept quiet for it is allowed, as one PAS leader told me then, for men to have up to four wives. Umno and its president, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, ignored this indiscretion.

He was removed from his post not for this defiance of state law but for having on him more than RM2 million in his briefcase while on holiday in Australia.

But it did him no harm. He is an Umno vice-president, a man who could, if the Gods smile his way, even be prime minister. As no doubt the Kelantan speaker if the conditions were reversed.

But straying from the marital bed is seen by some Malaysian Malays as a perk of power of a male Muslim.

While they would happily ignore the more desirable tenets of Islam, they hold on to the Prophetic injunction to take four wives. There are codicils attached, but they are cheerfully ignored.

So it is fitting that Umno Kelantan bleats pathetically to raise an issue few in Umno or PAS would follow.

No doubt those who want the Kelantan speaker punished for what he did would avail themselves of the opportunity in more powerful circumstances.

Women victims

As usual, the debate is centred around inessentials. Umno Kelantan is worked up over this. But it kept quiet when Kelantan and Trengganu hudud (Islamic criminal ) laws made women the victims for offences committed against them over which they had no control; the consequences of rape, for instance.

A woman impregnated in a rape, in some Muslim societies, face the ultimate punishment of being half-buried and stoned to death.

It is a legitimate fear of women in Muslim societies. There are enough examples of this - in Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Pakistan, Nigeria, to name four - to concern us all.

But where the women's group campaign goes wrong is its implied acceptance that hudud laws are in consonance with Malaysian society. When the principle is ignored and attention focused on the details, the larger battle is lost.

It is not polygamy and rape that should concern Malaysian Muslims and Malays.

It should be the larger issue of an Islamic state. This is wished away in offhanded remarks of the prime minister and in the political agenda of PAS.

Discussion is not allowed on the basics, and the specifics are debated as a fait accompli, seeking an amelioration of the harsh punishments than on the principle if that punishment is constitutional or should be imposed on the body politic.

One hopes in vain for Muslim pressure groups to explain to Malaysians, especially the non-Muslims, what an Islamic state is, and encourage a free flowing discussion.

It seems to me the Islamic agenda is forced down the Malaysian throat to show what Malay power can do to keep the non-Malays in line and in perpetual bondage.

This is the price the non-Malays has to pay for the privilege of living in an Islamic paradise.

But is that why the non-Malays joined hands with the Malays to negotiate for independence from Britain in 1957?

But in a nation of laws that Malaysia prides itself in, these religious attributes should become law only after reasoned and impassioned debate. Especially amongst Muslim and Islamic groups.

Any debate with them is spurious and impossible for their argument is on the theory and the fear amongst the non-Malays and, increasingly, the Malays, how it works in practice.

The Islamists will never rise above the ideal and the theoretical, and draw inferences of what that implies, without addressing the more basic and crass political considerations that hijacks it to the peoples' disadvantage.

Second-class citizens

This is compounded by the non-Malay parties in the governing Barisan Nasional coalition keeping quiet while the laws are made progressively Islamic in their name.

They behave as Umno Kelantan and Muslim women pressure groups to attack the inessentials and ignore the dramatic change in character of the nation to make them second-class citizens.

What makes it so frightening is that Islamic law is imposed not as a consequence of a religious tradition or a desire from the ground but as a deliberate act of political policy in which both try to convince the Malays and Muslims but not the non-Malays that it must be imposed on them as they live in an Islamic state.

Instead of looking as a political ideology and policy, it then imposes on the body politic the punishments ordained in a theocratic Islamic state.

There is much confusion between an Islamic state in which Islam predominates, not as religious law but as an Islamic society in which the tenets of Islam predominates, and in a theocratic Islamic state.

However theocratic Pakistan may be, it is within the context of a civil society. It has a problem with Muslim fundamentalists who want to turn it into a theocratic state but it is a long way from that.

But that is possible only with informed debate. There is none of that here.

So this march to an Islamic state is with the non-Malays and non-Muslims impotence to stop it and the Muslims egging it on not as a religious duty but as a desirable political agenda.

No Muslim would dare challenge a call for an Islamic state. The Islamic state means different things to different people.

It is like democracy. Everyone is for it, but the individual perception of it is so diverse that no one would object to the ideal.

No Muslim, in religious conscience, could reject an Islamic state.

But no two Muslims could agree on what it stands for. Which is why the non-Malay and non-Muslim is nervous when the idea of an Islamic state is broached.
(MGG PILLAI is a freelance columnist. He also runs the Sangkancil
discussion group.)