May 27, 2009

Husam Musa – cometh the hour, cometh the man, Part 2
by Terence Netto @www.malaysiakini.com

A bookish Husam Musa had from his days as a boy in Salor, on the outskirts of Kota Baru, argued with his friends after religious classes on questions concerning the physical world and the spiritual.

“My friends used to say that the world was flat and I would try to explain to them that it was not,” he recalled of his early battles with a mindset skeptical of worldly knowledge.

“They would laugh at me for trying to argue with them as if the worlds of faith and physical reason were opposed,” he elaborated.

Though descended on both sides of his family from religious scholars, Husam inclined early towards the empirical and the analytical.

Perhaps it was from his father, Musa Yahya – an ulama who used to write out his sermons before delivering them and was able to calculate the Islamic calendar with precision – that Husam inherited his respect for science, but combined that with a watchful sense of its limitations.

It seems his father, Musa, had ingrained in him a desire to marry the worlds of faith and reason. That would have explained his choice of economics as his subject while a student at University of Malaya in the early 1980s.   “I wanted to show that you could be a good Muslim and be comfortable in the worlds of science and rational inquiry,” offered Husam about his undergraduate days where he was quickly tagged ‘PAS Commissioner for University of Malaya’.

In that putative capacity, he attended the PAS congress at Dewan Bahasa and Pustaka in late 1982 which was a momentous occasion as it saw the resignation of the long-reigning Datuk Asri Muda, the party’s nationalist leader, and the enthronement of the concept of ulama leadership.

Husam was in sympathy with that development in PAS and after graduation, he went to work for the party in Kelantan and was paid out of the monthly contributions of his fellow graduate friends who saw in him the necessary empirically-minded complement to the party’s new found thrust in ulama-guided leadership.

When PAS took control of the Kelantan state government in 1990, Husam gained the opportunity of honing his aptitude for administration and financial planning in the upper echelons of a government that placed Tok Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat as its fountainhead.

By most accounts, a rapidly maturing Husam got along very well with the other worldly religious teacher-cum-menteri besar, who had been marinated in the argumentative traditions of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence (most Malay Muslims are of the Shafii sect) in Deoband in Northern India in the 1950s – an experience that must have slowed the Tok Guru’s religious PASsion for truth from congealing into the ideologue’s PASsion for dogma.

His grasp of economics evident

When in 1999, PAS captured 27 seats in Parliament on the back of a wave of Malay/Muslim resentment against the treatment meted out to felled deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, Husam, representing Kubang Kerian in Kelantan, proceeded to distinguish himself among the new slate of MPs with speeches that were carefully reasoned and analytically cogent, his grasp of economics abundantly evident.

His parliamentary performance and his earlier record in the Kelantan state administration were embellishments to a career that began attracting compliments not only from within PAS, but also from UMNO leaders as diverse as Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah. (In 2003, Husam was named Malaysiakini’s Newsmaker of the Year).

Razaleigh, in particular, found Husam to be a Muslim gentleman with admirable panache in economic and administrative matters, not usually a strong suit of PAS leaders. In the 2004 general election, Husam gave up his parliamentary seat to concentrate on state administration, representing the constituency of Salor where he grew up as a boy. His stellar performance and the influence he gained from it propelled him to one of three vice-president’s posts in the party.

He was responsible for such innovations as the decision of the party to locate its administrative headquarters from Gombak to Jalan Raja Laut, a risqué part of Kuala Lumpur. He was instrumental in convincing the Tok Guru that having popular singer Mawi perform in carefully choreographed concerts in Kelantan would help soften PAS’ puritanical image and smooth the way to winning over young voters, who are apt to be put off by a conception of Islamic rectitude that precludes music and song.

Also, executive councillor Husam’s handling of the welfare portfolio saw to it that efforts to reduce hardcore poverty, whose incidence is high in Kelantan, gained traction.

Not having had an inclination to sport since youth, Husam nevertheless saw the potential in promoting football in soccer-loving Kelantan through his welfare portfolio by encouraging idle teenagers to go to the playing fields if they would not to the mosques.

Part 3 to follow