MAY 26 — Politics is instinct: doing what you think is right based on your convictions or, all too often, expedience.
Wherever those convictions come from, they are the stock of beliefs that guide those who make political decisions. When that conceptual matrix is derived from religion, one has to be careful about applying its prescriptions to solve problems.
Religious ideology may be a good guide for individual morality; it is not nearly as good when it comes to deciding questions of national polity, such as law and jurisprudence. This does not mean one has to discard religious ideology entirely when it comes to issues of national polity; it’s merely that while taking due note of its essence, you refrain from borrowing lock, stock and barrel from it, throwing out the older system’s baby with the bathwater in the process.
The world of politics has often to grapple with the changing nature of problems which is why good politicians always have their feet on the ground and ear to the wind.
Good politicians are usually contemptuous of ideology. They leverage on it on the way up the greasy pole of political leadership but once ensconced in office, they are apt to throw the stuff — if they find it impedes practical purposes — out the window.
This way, they do not easily get blown off by whatever breaks across their bows, just as they are not easily taken in by the newfangled and the arty-farty.
Good politicians are always mulling over why things are the way they are. What will work and what will not and for what reason?
These are questions shrewd politicians constantly ask themselves and from the answers, they forge the solutions to problems their societies face.
That is why it is said that politics is the art of the possible. The best politicians are practical people and regard any problem, however formidable, as amenable to solution or, at least, amelioration, provided the parties involved do not come to the table with this attitude — “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.”
Worse than this uncompromising attitude is the one that claims what’s in one’s holy book overrides all other considerations. When it comes to implementation of divine imperatives, every scruple or obstacle of rationality must yield to what’s been divinely ordained.
This is a recipe for revolt by the masses, if not in the immediate period after implementation, then years, even decades down the road from the new order’s inauguration.
Ask the Bolsheviks — in October 1917, they implemented a wholly new programme of rejuvenation for the hapless humankind under their control that closely followed the manuals, authored by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, urging this scheme for the creation of the “new man”.
The manuals enjoyed a reverence that was as close to what some religious texts enjoy among believers, except that they were devised by two of the most atheistic — Marx and Lenin regarded religion as an opiate — thinkers to mull over the question of human betterment through political action.
Those prescriptions brought murder, misery and mayhem to several hundred million people in something like two score countries in the world until pragmatists Deng Xiao Peng and Mikhail Gorbachev decided to call the whole thing off in their respective countries — China and the Soviet Union.
At least 10 years before Deng and Gorbachev could formally lower the ghost of their religion-like ideology into the graves they deserved in the very countries where their enthronements, in 1917 and 1949 respectively, heralded its supposed inevitability, there came to power in Teheran a coterie of mullahs intent on empowering another totalistic ideology — political Islam.
Exponents of political Islam will, with some justification, resent the comparison of their ideology with Marxism-Leninism, but both share the same granite confidence that their system is the wave of the future and its triumph inevitable. Both ideologies, upon enthronement in their respective countries, were violent irruptions on the body politic of each nation.
Once their countries were safely in the control of exponents of the ideology, they doubled their efforts at spreading it abroad, with the result that — in Iran’s case, at least — the country is a prolific source of instability in its region.
If one looks at what happened to Pakistan when religion was fused with politics by the dictator Zia ul-Haq from 1978, the pattern is clear that once that blend is harnessed to state power, the potential for conflict and instability at home and to neighbouring countries is great.
Nobody is saying such a blend of religion and politics will be in the saddle in Kelantan when and if the PAS-controlled government obtains the federal warrants to introducing hudud in the state. But the move will be a big irruption in the state’s body politic and will impact such vital areas as the rights of non-Muslims and tourist arrivals.
Enough time and effort have been expended to get the hudud-supporting leaders of PAS to refrain from going ahead with this measure which will reach a decisive stage when the party’s president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang introduces a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament’s current meeting.
The Bill seeks to amend a 1965 law which concerns limits on penalties in Shariah ordinances.
But the PAS leader is determined to go ahead. If he does, it will signal a clear break between PAS and its coalition partners in the Opposition, PKR and DAP, who oppose the measure.
A rubicon will have been crossed in Malaysian politics, with consequences no one can adequately predict, save that liberal Muslims like Marina Mahathir may migrate elsewhere.
PAS must know that in fusing religion with politics, they are inviting the troubles that have plagued other Muslim countries such as Iran and Pakistan.
As the philosopher George Santayana said, those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
