www.wansaiful.com

I would like to invite you to an open dialogue, details as follows:

Main speaker: Khalid Samad MP

Date: Saturday 11 July 2009

Time: 2pm, for 2.30pm start to 4.30pm.

Venue: Hyde Park Suite, Holiday Villa Hotel, 37 Leinster Gardens, London W2 3AN (click here for map)

Chair: Wan Saiful Wan Jan, Director General, Malaysia Think Tank

In this moderated dialogue, Khalid Samad MP will elaborate his ideas and thoughts on PAS, Pakatan Rakyat, and the future of Malaysian politics.

Khalid Samad is PAS Member of Parliament for Shah Alam. He was recently appointed as a member of the Opposition’s Cabinet Committee monitoring the Prime Minister’s Department and the Ministry of Transport. Khalid created controversy recently when PAS Shah Alam, of which he is head, proposed that the group Sisters in Islam should be banned, which he later clarified as a mistake. Khalid was also one of the 10 PAS MPs who signed the open letter rejecting ‘unity government’ proposition.

On 27 March 2008, Khalid became the first elected Muslim Member of Parliament to step into the Roman Catholic Church of the Divine Mercy, Shah Alam, since it was completed in 2005. He spoke about his ideas and Islamic principles. The congregation gave him a standing ovation.

When studying at Leeds University in the 1970s, Khalid was active in the group Suara Al-Islam. Seeing that PAS under Dato Asri was heavily influenced by Malay nationalism, members of Suara Al-Islam tried to register Parti Negara Islam (Islamic State Party) upon their return to Malaysia, but their application was rejected in 1981. Khalid joined PAS in 1983, after the party committed itself to the concept of “leadership by ulama” (kepimpinan ulama)

Light refreshments will be served. We encourage a donation of at least £5.00 per person (optional only) to help cover costs, which will be collected at the door.

For further information, please contact Wan Saiful Wan Jan (wansaiful@gmail.com / 07920 132233) or Khalid Samad’s office via blog@khalidsamad.com.

See also: www.khalidsamad.com

Scroll to minute 2.20 onwards and look at the frustration and anger.

Apa buat sampah ni? Takdak moral!

PAS is obviously not homogenous. There are more than one school of thought in the party. The two most obvious schools are the conservatives and the “more-liberals”. I hesitate to call the latter “liberals” as many of them stop short of believing in classical liberal ideas. But they are definitely more liberal than the conservatives.

And I also hesitate to use the term “ulama group”. There are those who are not religiously educated but still hold to a conservative worldview. In reality, some of the ulama are just a subset of the conservatives, and not all ulama are conservatives.

Anyone who denies the existence of ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’ in PAS is, to put it bluntly, either ignorant or lying. ‘Jamaah dalam jamaah’ exists in PAS. Fullstop.

It is not just the conservatives and the more-liberals. If we take a step back we will find that there also those labelled as “ex-IRC” (Islamic Representative Council) or “ex-JIM” (Jamaah Islah Malaysia), those who came from ABIM, the Jamaat Tabligh, the Sufis and followers of individual leaders.

But the concept of ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’ is something that the conservatives have tried to curb for so long. They say that the existence of ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’ is wrong, un-Islamic, and dangerous for the party. Of course the arguments are peppered with religious logic. This concerted effort to curb the spread of ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’ have been so successful such that, among some people in the party, being accused of participating in a ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’ becomes a big hurdle for their political career progression. Just ask those who were formerly with JIM.

(Please forgive me for repeatedly using the term ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’. Here I am discussing a very specific concept in PAS such that if I were to translate it into English – i.e.: “groups within the party” – the message I am trying to convey may be lost in translation)

Conservatives’ success

Without doubt the most established ‘jamaah dalam jamaah’ is that of the conservatives. They successfully institutionalised their group within the party, forming the Majlis Syura Ulama and the Dewan Ulama. Even the Dewan Pemuda now looks more like a youthful Dewan Ulama, after conservatives won many top posts.

The conservatives jealously guard their power base. Take the recent party elections. The conservatives conducted what could have been one of the most two-faced campaigns in the history of any political party in the world.

Read more at WauBebas.org