Mujahid Yusof Rawa has got the benign air and rotund looks of a man come to play conjuring tricks at a children’s party.

Over the last few weeks, the amiable PAS MP for Parit Buntar and point man on matters to do with national unity has parlayed that winsome facade to ground-breaking effect.

NONE Mujahid, 46, has been to four Catholic churches in the northwest of the Peninsula to explain his party’s position on the ‘Allah’ issue.

In the process, he appears to be gaining for them a new understanding from Christians hitherto cool towards PAS for reason of its theocratic bent.

Mujahid had an early hint of the surprise he was causing when the priest at one of the churches he was to visit expressed astonishment that a PAS politician would call to request that he be allowed to explain his party’s stance on the ‘Allah’ issue.

“He could not believe when I called that it was a PAS politician on the line,” said Mujahid, smiling at the recollection of the effect his overtures have had.

Word spread fast about the reception his talks received in the churches at Parit Buntar in Perak and in Penang island such that Mujahid is now invited to hold forth on the subject as different to seeking invitations to do so.

Another talk, the fifth in the series and this time at a church in Bukit Mertajam, is scheduled for March 21.

The growing number of invitations and their geographical spread indicate that Mujahid’s programme of outreach to Christians is resonating among the faithful.

No small irony clings to the gesture and the person making it.  

For by name (Mujahid means ‘fighter’ in Arabic) and by linage (he is the youngest of 11 children of Yusof Rawa, PAS president between 1982 and 89), Mujahid ought to be the least ecumenical leader from among the PAS crowd.

Of course, names given at birth ought not to be taken literally, but there are reasons other than Mujahid’s vaunted ecumenism to suggest that his is a misnomer.

There is not about Mujahid the slightest hint of the astringent seriousness and apocalyptic vision of the Islamic chiliast.

A ‘Save Gaza’ poster, visible on a window of his sports utility vehicle, is the only indication of pan-Islamic fervour in its owner.  

Otherwise, both deportment and discourse make Mujahid one of the freshest voices in the growing PAS obeisance to inter-religious and inter-racial harmony and understanding in Malaysia, a stance associated with their spiritual leader, Kelantan Menteri Besar Nik Aziz Nik Mat.  

In his father’s footsteps

The irony of Mujahid’s present stance of ecumenism is no less striking on account of linage.  

It was Rawa senior - he passed away in 2000 at the age of 79 - who once claimed there were 6,000 Malay converts to Christianity, an assertion that made him an early alarmist about the ghost of Muslim apostasy.  

Furthermore, Yusof Rawa used his first presidential policy address to PAS in 1983 to warn against what he claimed were furtive attempts to ‘Christianize’ Indonesia, thereby underlining the pan-Islamic vision for the Nusantara of the new ulama leadership PAS had opted for after it forced out nationalist president Asri Muda in 1982.

pas chinese supporter club dinner 070906 mujahid yusof rawa So by name and heredity, Mujahid was set to continue in his father’s steps, especially after Rawa senior pointed the son, who was 19 then, to the Islamic texts stored in a special room in the family abode in Bukit Gelugor, Penang, with the admonition, “It’s for you to read and understand.”

Certainly when Yusof Rawa vested in his youngest progeny his hope of continuity of the family’s tradition of activism in the cause of Islam, he could not have foreseen where the actual thrust of that vocation would take the legatee.

This is not to suggest that Yusof Rawa would have disapproved of his son’s ecumenism; only that the father would have been unsurprised by the matrix from which it had emerged.

Mujahid was in Tehran in the mid-1970s when his father, then deputy president of PAS, was Malaysian ambassador to Iran.

PAS was then a member of the ruling BN coalition and the post of ambassador to the Shah’s court was a sop to Yusof for readiness to vacate the Kota Setar parliamentary seat in Kedah, where in the 1969 general election he had upset the Umno incumbent, Dr Mahathir Mohamed.

Mahathir regained the seat unopposed in the 1974 general election, the first one fought by the BN after it had become an enlarged version of its precursor, Alliance.

Part 2 on Thursday