There is a particular rhythm to Abdul Hadi Awang’s public declarations. They arrive at intervals, sketch a vision of government that reserves its highest deliberative functions for Muslims, and then recede into the ambient noise of Malaysian political life \u2014 until the next congress, the next statement, the next provocation. The latest iteration came on September 5, when the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) president addressed his party’s annual congress in Kelantan and said that non-Muslims could serve as ministers under a PAS-led government, but only in portfolios concerned with the execution of policy rather than its formulation. The distinction sounds technical. It is not.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Hadi cited the Works Ministry as an example of a portfolio suitable for non-Muslim leadership, and \u2014 in a factual slip that itself reveals something about the proposal’s texture \u2014 also mentioned a forestry ministry that does not exist in Malaysia’s current governmental structure. Ministries governing Islamic Affairs and the implementation of syariah law, he said, must remain in Muslim hands. The architecture he described is not merely administrative preference; it encodes a constitutional hierarchy of citizenship, positioning non-Muslims as executors of a state whose values and direction they would have no formal role in shaping. This is the third time in recent years Hadi has sketched this vision publicly. In 2013, he made comparable remarks about the Works portfolio and the necessity of Muslim leadership over policy. In 2017, he suggested only Malay-Muslims could join Cabinet, a position subsequently softened by the party’s then-information chief. In 2018, he floated the idea of two parallel Cabinets \u2014 one for policy, one for implementation \u2014 with non-Muslims confined to the latter. The pattern is deliberate and cumulative.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The response this time has been swift and pointed. Ramkarpal Singh, the Democratic Action Party’s deputy secretary-general and legal bureau chairman, described Hadi’s proposal as divisive and unconstitutional, arguing that Malaysia’s federal Constitution contains no provision for distributing Cabinet positions along racial or religious lines. Singh’s argument is not merely procedural. He invoked the principle of equality before the law and the multiracial composition of every Malaysian Cabinet since independence, framing these as settled constitutional facts rather than negotiable political customs. His statement pointedly called on non-Muslim component parties within the opposition Perikatan Nasional coalition \u2014 of which PAS is the largest single member, holding 43 of 222 parliamentary seats \u2014 to publicly declare their positions. He also pressed the Barisan Nasional coalition, including UMNO, to clarify whether recent electoral cooperation with PAS implies ideological alignment on questions of this magnitude.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism moved further, framing Hadi’s remarks not as isolated commentary but as evidence of a coherent institutional ambition. The council drew a direct line from his 2018 dual-Cabinet proposal through to his September 2024 congress speech, arguing that the cumulative record demonstrates PAS’s intent to establish a theocratic Islamic state \u2014 a form of governance the council characterises as fundamentally incompatible with the federal Constitution’s guarantee of equality and equal protection for all citizens. The council’s invocation of the 2024 Federal Court ruling is particularly sharp in its implication: that ruling struck down sixteen provisions in Kelantan’s syariah criminal law on the grounds that the state legislature lacked the constitutional authority to enact them. Kelantan has been under PAS governance since 1990. The council’s observation that “even when there is no theocratic state, PAS was found wanting” is not rhetoric. It is a citation of judicial fact.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Within PAS, the response has been characteristically layered. Hadi’s political aide Syahir Sulaiman declined to specify which ministries the party considers appropriate for non-Muslim leadership, telling Malaysiakini that interpretation was a matter for individuals. The PAS Non-Muslim Supporters Wing, known as DHPP, offered explicit endorsement of Hadi’s position. Its chief, BK Kumaresan, told Malaysiakini that Malaysia is a Muslim-majority country and that DHPP had no objection to the framework Hadi described, expressing confidence that a PAS-led government would be fair to all races. The endorsement is notable less for its content than for its function: it provides PAS with a non-Muslim voice that can absorb criticism of the proposal without requiring the party itself to moderate its position.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Separately, Hadi issued a statement on September 9 calling for the abolition of what he described as colonial-legacy laws that constrain the implementation of syariah in Malaysia. He named the Syariah Courts (Criminal Jurisdiction) Act 1965, which caps syariah court sentencing at three years’ imprisonment, a RM5,000 fine, and six strokes of whipping, as well as the constitutional division of legislative powers between federal and state governments. Much of the statement was directed at DAP, which Hadi accused of obstructing Islamisation of Malaysia’s legal system \u2014 a framing that positions the party’s constitutional objections as ideological hostility rather than principled legal disagreement. Hadi reportedly said PAS regards these matters as questions of religious principle rather than ordinary politics, and has severed political cooperation with parties it considers to challenge Islam’s constitutional standing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
What makes this moment worth examining with care is not the novelty of Hadi’s proposals \u2014 they are not new \u2014 but the institutional context in which they recur. PAS is not a fringe party. It is Malaysia’s largest single parliamentary bloc, a governing force in Kelantan for three and a half decades, and a coalition partner that has recently demonstrated its capacity to inflict electoral damage on Anwar Ibrahim’s Pakatan Harapan coalition in the Johor and Negeri Sembilan state elections. The question is not whether Hadi’s vision is constitutionally defensible \u2014 multiple legal voices have concluded it is not \u2014 but whether Malaysia’s political architecture can continue to absorb these proposals as rhetorical provocations rather than policy signals. Each repetition normalises the framework slightly further. Each cycle of criticism and partial retraction allows the idea to persist without resolution. The constitutional settlement Ramkarpal Singh and the interfaith council are defending is not under immediate threat. But the pressure is structural, incremental, and \u2014 on the evidence of three decades of Kelantan governance \u2014 patient.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a particular rhythm to Abdul Hadi Awang’s public declarations. They arrive at intervals, sketch a vision of government that reserves its highest deliberative functions for Muslims, and then recede into the ambient noise of Malaysian political life \u2014 until the next congress, the next statement, the next provocation. The latest iteration came on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","stackable_optimized_css":"","stackable_optimized_css_raw":"a:0:{}","blocksy_post_meta_options":"a:1:{s:17:\"styles_descriptor\";a:3:{s:6:\"styles\";a:3:{s:7:\"desktop\";s:0:\"\";s:6:\"tablet\";s:0:\"\";s:6:\"mobile\";s:0:\"\";}s:12:\"google_fonts\";a:0:{}s:7:\"version\";i:8;}}"},"categories":[23,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-popular","category-singapore"],"custom_fields":{"stackable_optimized_css":"","stackable_optimized_css_raw":[],"blocksy_post_meta_options":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}}},"yoast_head":"\n