21 Sep 2003 01:42:38 GMT FEATURE-Islamists crave more say in post-Mahathir Malaysia
By Simon Cameron-Moore KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 21 (Reuters) - They distrust the United States, they abhor Israel, and they want to turn Malaysia into an ultra-conservative Islamic state complete with laws drawn from mediaeval Arabia. The hardline preachers who lead Malaysia's mainstream Islamist opposition can't win power any time soon, but they are threatening to sweep the rural, economically backward north -- in a country where one third of the population is non-Muslim. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad retires in October, after 22 years of leading a nation with Asia's third youngest population. He hopes he has done enough to create a modern multicultural state, with a Malay middle class capable of stopping the Islamists from ever fulfilling a dream that would be a nightmare for the economically powerful Chinese minority. Already ruling two northeast states, Kelantan and Terengganu, Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) wants two more -- Kedah and Pahang. Kedah's capture in elections widely expected early next year would be very sweet for PAS as it is Mahathir's home state.
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PAS, nevertheless, can hurt the chances of Mahathir's chosen successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, holding power for long if it takes more seats off the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) when the country next goes to the polls.
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In the two states that PAS rules, alcohol and dancing are banned, and men and women are segregated in supermarket checkout queues, let alone swimming pools. The party would have brought in strict sharia laws, with penalties such as amputations and stoning, but cannot as federal law takes priority. The government has its own chilling reference point for PAS, characterising the party as a local version of the Taliban, the vanquished rulers of Afghanistan. And the party's Islamic state agenda turned into political poison for its one-time ally, the mainly Chinese Democratic Action Party, which pulled out of the opposition front. PAS has since stated that its Islamic state ambitions only apply where Muslims have a big majority. The Islamists hope this concession will be enough to bring the Chinese and Indian parties aboard, should PAS succeed in displacing UMNO as the dominant Malay party. If that happens, analysts say, Mahathir should take some of the blame for two political miscalculations. First he began the Islamisation drive in the early 1980s, aided by Anwar Ibrahim, a student leader thrown up by the Islamic resurgence movement that swept the Muslim world in the 1970s. Mosques proliferated, Islamic universities sprang up, and Malay boys were sent off to madrassahs (religious schools) in Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where hardline Islam thrives. A one-upmanship contest between PAS and UMNO ensued to prove who was more theologically correct. "We are seeing the results of 20 years of Islamisation going out of control," commented Farish Noor, a Malaysian political scientist at Berlin's Centre for Modern Orient Studies.
PLENTY OF VOTES, FEW SEATS Mahathir's second mistake was promoting Anwar, who courted popularity with poorer Malay Muslims with promises of development, only then to sack and jail him on charges of sodomy and corruption that his former deputy says were cooked up.
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In the 1999 elections PAS, along with its electoral ally the Keadilan party led by Anwar's wife, won over half the Malay vote, giving UMNO its worst result since 1969. For all its advances, PAS holds just 26 seats and Keadilan five, compared with UMNO's 73, but it left the ruling coalition dependent on the Chinese vote for its two-thirds majority. With militancy threatening, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang warned of the risks inherent in shutting down democratic space. "Imagine if we are not there," the turbanned, bearded preacher told his followers in the packed assembly hall. "Surely only God knows how the dissatisfaction of the rakyat (people), and particularly of the over-zealous few, could be wrongly channelled into clandestine and militant opposition to the autocratic regime," he said in an implicit warning to Mahathir's successors to make Malaysian democracy fairer.
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