KUALA LUMPUR, March 22 — Umno may benefit from its political rival PAS’ push for hudud to be enforced in Kelantan as it will be viewed as the more “moderate” party of the two, US academic Prof Jeffrey Kenney said.

Citing the dynamics of how Islam and Muslim politics work in Malaysia, Kenney said Umno would likely be seen as “rather balanced and moderate” in comparison to PAS, which is striving now to remove legal roadblocks to its decades-old aim of implementing the strict Islamic penal code.

“I think Umno is definitely going to benefit from this to the extent that they can be seen as more mainstream than PAS,” the Professor of Religious Studies from Indiana’s Depauw University told Malay Mail Online when met after a forum yesterday.

He explained that Islam has its “own political flavour” in Malaysia, noting the way different groups benefit from the use and pitching of different versions of Islam against each other.

Kenney said that those who are against hudud may see PAS’ brand of Islam as a form of “extremism”, but added that at the same time, it was difficult to view it that way as the party was still pushing to enforce the Islamic criminal justice system through the democratic system.

“They are not doing it extra political, it’s not outside of the system; it’s within the system they are pushing for this, which means that people can push back in the same political manner and challenge them, which they are going to be challenged.

“It’s not clear that it’s going to pass Parliament,” he said.

PAS-ruled Kelantan passed key amendments to its Shariah Criminal Code II 1993 on Thursday in a move to enable the eventual implementation of hudud in the Malay-majority east coast state.

All 12 Umno state lawmakers voted for the amendments but the ruling party’s national leadership has yet to declare if the same support would be given to PAS’ hudud ambition at the federal level.

Next week, all Barisan Nasional component parties including Umno will issue a joint statement to declare its position on the controversial issue.

The statement will come ahead of PAS’ plan to table two private members’ bills in Parliament for the enforcement of hudud in Kelantan. The bills, one of which the lower House has already received notice on, will seek to enhance the powers of the Shariah courts to impose punishments such as amputation for theft and to also allow punishments to be meted out under hudud for crimes that are already covered in the civil Penal Code.

But the outcome of the bid to get parliamentary approval for hudud enforcement is uncertain as PAS only has 21 MPs and would need to rely on Muslim MPs from other parties to get a simple majority of 112 votes in support of the two bills.

Kenney also said political calculations could be part of the reason behind PAS’s push for hudud.

“It’s not clear to me how much they really want to impose Islamic law in its totality or whether this is more a symbolic gesture and political maneouver or some combination of the two. But it clearly has gotten everyone involved in politics and it has gotten minority religious groups, ethnic groups all concerned,” he said.

While saying that the push for hudud was clearly part of Islamisation, he said that Umno itself had in the past done the same with an eye on using it for political gains.

“But the government has done the same thing, the whole history of Islamic reform that Umno has been involved in. That’s also Islamisation.

“And it’s Islamisation not just for religious purposes, but also political purposes. It had a religious flavour in the sense of upping people’s level of religious practice but one might argue that the greater intent was to be able to use Islam as political instrument to gain votes,” he said of Umno.

Other observers have in the past cited the influence of the federal government - largely headed by the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition’s mainstay party Umno - in elevating Islam’s role in the country.

Last April, Singapore-based academic Dr Maznah Mohamad spoke of Malaysia’s former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s backing for centralised administration of Islam - which led to the creation of the powerful Department of Islamic Development Malaysia.

Maznah, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, also cited another major structural change in the 1990s when a constitutional amendment created a parallel legal structure of civil courts and Shariah courts.