AUg 11 — The language of “Malay-Muslim unity” sounds reassuring. 

It invokes solidarity, communal protection and the political consolidation of the Malay-Muslim majority. Yet beneath this apparently benign vocabulary lies a fundamental question: unity under whose leadership, according to whose ideological definition, and ultimately for whose political benefit?

This is where a Hadi-led PAS presents both Barisan Nasional (BN) and Perikatan Nasional (PN) with a strategic problem.

Malay-Muslim unity can easily become a political bogeyman: the perpetual warning that Malays are divided, Islam is threatened and political consolidation is therefore necessary. 

Once this proposition is accepted, almost every disagreement among Malay parties can be portrayed as dangerous fragmentation.

The logical destination is not necessarily Malay unity. It could instead be PAS predominance.

Under Abdul Hadi Awang, PAS has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to work with political organisations whose philosophies differ substantially from its own. It cooperated with PKR and DAP through Pakatan Rakyat. 

It later embraced UMNO through Muafakat Nasional. It subsequently became a central component of PN alongside Bersatu.

These arrangements changed. PAS endured.

This is why BN should examine the present political arithmetic with particular care.

BN may believe cooperation with PN can prevent three-cornered contests and consolidate Malay votes. Electorally, that proposition has obvious attractions. 

If Malay votes are divided between UMNO, Bersatu and PAS while PH retains a relatively consolidated support base elsewhere, cooperation appears rational.

But electoral arithmetic is not the same thing as political strategy.

Every time BN depends increasingly on PAS voters, campaign machinery and ideological narratives to remain competitive, PAS potentially acquires greater bargaining power over BN.

The danger therefore runs in the opposite direction from the one commonly imagined.

BN may think it is borrowing PAS’s strength.

PAS may ultimately be absorbing BN’s political space.

The same dilemma confronts PN. Bersatu was originally supposed to provide PN with a broad Malay-nationalist leadership structure while PAS supplied its enormous grassroots organisation. But organisational endurance matters. 

PAS possesses decades of political experience, religious networks, activists, institutions and deeply embedded constituencies, particularly across the northern and eastern Malay belt.

If Bersatu weakens while PAS remains intact, PN could increasingly become PAS by another name.

The controversy over whether Bersatu remains within PN illustrates why institutional clarity matters enormously. 

When different senior PN leaders can offer apparently conflicting interpretations of Bersatu’s status, the deeper question becomes unavoidable: who ultimately defines PN?

If PAS increasingly answers that question, PN ceases to be an alliance in which PAS participates and risks becoming a political vehicle through which PAS expands.

BN faces an even greater historical irony.

UMNO once regarded PAS as its principal competitor for Malay-Muslim political leadership. Their rivalry stretched across generations. 

They competed not merely for constituencies but for the authority to define Malay politics and the relationship between Islam, government and Malaysian nationhood.

Malay-Muslim unity can blur this distinction.

Once every electoral contest is reduced to the proposition that Malay parties must unite against a supposedly threatening political “other”, UMNO loses one of its strongest historical arguments for existing independently of PAS.

Why should Malay voters choose UMNO if PAS can claim to represent Malay interests more uncompromisingly and Islamic politics more authentically?

That is the trap.

PAS does not necessarily have to destroy BN. It merely has to make BN progressively dependent on an electoral ecosystem whose ideological centre of gravity PAS controls.

Nor does PAS have to formally consume Bersatu. It merely has to become indispensable to PN.

This produces what might be called the anaconda strategy of Malaysian coalition politics. The prey need not be swallowed immediately. 

It can first be surrounded, constrained and gradually deprived of independent political room.

Malay-Muslim unity becomes particularly useful in this process because it is almost impossible to satisfy permanently.

There will always be another alleged threat requiring greater unity. Another election requiring fewer three-cornered contests. Another disagreement that supposedly weakens the Malays. 

Another controversy that can be transformed into evidence that Islam requires stronger political consolidation.

Thus the destination keeps moving. First cooperation. Then electoral coordination.

Then seat negotiations.

Then common narratives.

Then ideological convergence.

Eventually the question becomes whether BN and PN still possess political identities independent of PAS.

This is why BN should be exceptionally careful about interpreting short-term electoral cooperation as long-term strategic compatibility.

UMNO historically represented a broad Malay nationalist tradition operating within Malaysia’s multiracial constitutional framework. 

MCA and MIC remain components of BN precisely because BN was constructed as a coalition capable of negotiating differences among communities.

PAS comes from a different political genealogy.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about PAS seeking greater political power democratically. 

If Malaysians vote for PAS, that democratic choice must be respected. The problem arises when the language of communal survival is used to make political consolidation appear inevitable.

Malay-Muslim voters are not a monolithic political bloc. They differ according to class, geography, generation, education, occupation and interpretations of Islam itself. 

Malays can disagree politically without weakening Islam. Muslims can belong to different parties without compromising the ummah.

Indeed, democratic disagreement is not Malay disunity.

It is democracy.

BN and PN should therefore ask themselves a brutally simple question before travelling too far down the road of Malay-Muslim political consolidation:

Are they cooperating with PAS—or gradually creating the conditions under which PAS no longer needs them?

Hadi-led PAS has survived alliances with remarkably different partners because PAS understands something fundamental about coalition politics: alliances are instruments, not necessarily destinations.

For BN especially, the danger is believing that it can ride the PAS tiger indefinitely.

The tiger may eventually decide where the journey ends.

Malay-Muslim unity should consequently never become a bogeyman used to frighten voters into accepting an ever narrower political order. 

Malaysia certainly needs Malay confidence. It needs Islamic integrity. It needs political stability.

But none of these requires the permanent supremacy of any single party.

If BN and PN forget that distinction, they may eventually discover that the greatest beneficiary of Malay-Muslim unity was neither Malay unity nor Muslim unity.

It was PAS.

* Phar Kim Beng is a professor of Asean Studies and a director at the Institute of International and Asean Studies, International Islamic University Malaysia.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.