One of your readers recently put an intellectually challenged poser — Which is more unjust: hudud or ISA?

This is akin to a ridiculous comparison of asking if a bad orange or a bad apple is more palatable.

Worse, if it is to try to persuade support for PAS in spite of its extremist move to enact hudud (Islamic penal code) as the lesser evil to Umno-led government's draconian Internal Security Act.

This is a false argument to advance deceptively an unacceptable cause. Just like PAS' present exclusion of non-Malays in its hudud law enactment.

It is a 'divide and rule' strategy to separate non-Muslims from Muslims in order to get non-Muslims to support PAS instead of Barisan Nasional and its iniquitous ISA.

By virtue of Muslims' support for PAS being split between the conservative and moderate, PAS strategises to use non-Muslims' support to tip the scale for it to win the elections.

Upon victory, PAS can then form the government and amend the Federal constitution to make Islamic law supreme, a condition necessary to make hudud's enforcement legal for application to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Terengganu Menteri Besar Abdul Hadi Awang hinted this when winding up the debate on the Terengganu Syariah bill, declaring that PAS would impose the hudud and qisas laws to even non-Muslims in the state "when every citizen understands them."

DAP chief Lim Kit Siang's media statement (July 10) confirmed what was said:

"The Star's front-page headline yesterday 'Terengganu says Islamic law will eventually cover non-Muslims' was confirmed by a senior aide to Hadi, Zahari Mohamad, who told the Associated Press writer, Jasbant Singh that Hadi's remarks were correctly reported and that the Islamic laws would be imposed on non-Muslims if PAS "topples Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's secular government in the next general election scheduled for 2004".

"Jasbant Singh quoted Zahari as saying: 'We cannot enforce Islamic laws as the supreme law of the country unless federal legislation is amended. We have to form the federal government to be able to do that."

Such a strategy smacks of deceit particularly on non-Muslims. Knowing that they oppose hudud, PAS excludes them initially in order only to get and use their votes to come to power so that it could amend the constitution to extend hudud on them. It is borrowing some else's own knife to stab him. Is this PAS' brand of Islamic justice?

Many Malaysians will rather tolerate as a lesser evil the occasional encroachment of civil liberties by a corrupt and authoritarian Umno-led BN than a squeaky clean, doctrinally "pure" totalitarian dictatorship of a PAS' theocratic order.

Coming back to the stupid comparison between Hudud and ISA, the following points may be noted.

  • ISA' detention in Kamunting without trial is preferred to a regime where punishment under Hudud (even subject to trial conviction) is cruel like that of corporal punishment (whipping) stoning, beheading, and disfigurement by amputation of hands and foot that by all international and civilised standards debases both the one being punished as well as the one who carries it out.

  • ISA may be abused by detention of a few dissidents representing a threat to the ruling clique. The rest of citizens can still go on with their lives. A PAS theocratic regime will however dictate every aspect of ordinary peoples' lives and punish ordinary human vices such as illicit sex. It demands a restraint of normal biological drive. Such restraint only causes the natural impulse to be vented in hiding, sublimated in other deviant forms, and otherwise protected by hypocrisy.

  • In imposing the death penalty on Muslim apostates, hudud forces religion upon those who by law are defined to profess it by killing them if they change their beliefs. This violates the fundamental human right to freedom of beliefs. Even in Islam it is questionable that PAS' apostasy stand is defensible. According to Sisters-in-Islam's Islam, Apostasy and PAS, "the Qur'an is completely silent on the death penalty for apostasy. In fact, freedom of religion is a fundamental tenet of Islam".

  • At least the ISA's net is non-discriminatory on gender and religious ground, unlike the hudud that victimises half the population of women and is intended to be forced upon even those who don't profess the Islamic faith.

  • As a matter of legal procedures, ISA is unleashed without requiring witnesses. Hudud is not much better in disqualifying women and non-Muslims, i.e. three-quarters of the population, from the right to be witnesses in sexual crimes.

  • Criticisms of violation of human rights by Amnesty International are equal for both detention without trial and hudud's practice.

  • However the main point scored by ISA over hudud then is that while hudud is advocated and implemented by religious extremists, ISA may be used against religious extremists.

    Stupid comments? Well, one always gets an answer that is equal to the level of the question that it addresses.