APRIL 2 — Thank you, Hadi, for letting the cat out of the bag.
In an interview with AFP, PAS president Datuk Seri Haji Abdul Hadi Awang said that the move to introduce Hudud was “meant largely as a gesture to his party’s Islamic base”. In layman’s language, this would mean to get the votes of the party’s grassroots.
He went on to say that the “hudud” penalties were largely symbolic and would be “almost impossible” to impose on law-breakers, even if implemented, due to strict limits on their use under Islamic law.
“Hudud’s value is more as a symbolic deterrent. The harshness of the law creates fear and will deter crime.”
So that’s it. Hudud is just a political game being played out to shore up the image of PAS.
Hadi must be in dreamland to believe (if he honestly does so) that Hudud is the panacea for the rising crime in Kelantan. Has he asked the PDRM to explain why the police find it so difficult to control crime in Kelantan and bring it down as the police claim to have done in other states?
And why is crime so rampant in Kelantan in the first place?
Has PAS studied the causes of crime and taken any action to deal with those causes? For example, one of the reasons often cited for crime is poverty.
The extent to which a few people are prepared to go down to to advance their personal agendas is unbelievable. To convince people that a very large number of Kelantanese want Hudud to be implemented, the results of a Kelantan state agency’s survey were presented at a recent forum at University Malaya showing that 91.7 per cent were in favour.
Dr Azhar Abdullah, who revealed this figure, said the survey was conducted via text messages to more than 156,000 residents in 24 out of 45 state constituencies. Only 9,654 replies were received, of which only 8,940 were accepted.
Now, let us look at the same figures with a different set of glasses: 8,940 out of 156,000 is just 5.73 per cent; 8,940 out of a population of say 500,000 adult Muslims is a tiny 1.79 per cent.
Those who conducted this survey and presented these figures claiming that 91.7 per cent of Kelantanese want Hudud to be implemented should be ashamed of themselves for the misrepresentation.
Now I can understand why the ulamas do not want anyone to question them but to just listen to them and do as they say. So they want the world to believe without question that 91.7 per cent of Kelantanese want Hudud when the figure is merely a paltry 1.79 per cent. Is pulling wool over people’s eyes in this way permitted in Islam?
* This is the view of the individual and does not necessarily represent the opinion of Malay Mail Online.
