While the UMNO-led BN looks to the Chinese for electoral support, it must look over its shoulders at the plans of what the Opposition parties, PAS and Parti KeADILan Negara, has in mind. UMNO, in a bid to seize the Islamic ground, challenges PAS on its theocratic turf, leaving the moderate Muslims, its traditional strength, in UMNO confused and bewildered. KeADILan, strengthened with its merger with the well-focused Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM), is the party to watch if it can gets its act together, for its multiracial credentials attract the disaffected and dissatisfied in BN to switch to it. The UMNO leaders are more frightened of KeADILan than PAS, for if the moderates desert UMNO, it would cease to exist. It cannot best PAS in the theocratic debate for PAS, not UMNO, determines that. The BN's electoral confidence is the Opposition's - in PAS, KeADILan, DAP - utter confusion over a common platform for the coming polls. But Pak Lah, to secure his perch, must also ensure he does not lose more ground in the Malay heartland. An outright more than two-thirds majority in Parliament alone is not enough: he must also ensure the Malay heartland is not wholly lost, with signs it returns to UMNO. He cannot afford a BN-run state to fall into PAS.

IS THERE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM in Malaysia? Yes. There is no doubt about it. But as in all societies - including the US: try building a mosque or a Hindu temple in the middle of a Christian community; or wear a Muslim headscarf to school in France or at work in a supermarket in Denmark - it is not absolute. It cannot be. The United States, like Malaysia, is fond of lists. They create one for every conceivable occasion and statistic. It is a powerful weapon to browbeat those it believes it can, and use these lists on various issues to shame the governments to believe they are unfit to be in the globalised world of nations it dominates. These lists are at best of doubful truth. The US, in these lists, would be among the top. But we saw what happened to Muslims there after 11 September 2001. The Guantanamo detention camp was for Muslims from the uncivilised world. If the Muslims were from Britain or Australia or other "civilised" nations, different rules apply. But if you from the "uncivilised" Muslim world, like Pakistan, Indonesia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, death is too good for them. Washington is critical of Malaysia's execrable detention laws, but keeps its silence when it enacts tougher laws to punish the Muslims for their temerity to challenge Christian civilisation in this, in President George W. Bush's memorable phrase, crusade.

This should frighten Washington. In its war on terror, after passenger planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001, it targetted Muslims worldwide. And chillingly promised to ignore the rule of law and treat the Muslims it captured as it likes as in Guantanamo Bay. As the rhetoric and war unfolded, the Muslim responded, and supported any move to challenge Washington and its allies. Friendly countries became enemies, forcing the United States into a security purdah worldwide. Muslims in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan - US allies - join hands with Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Indonesia, Malaysia to support the resistance in Iraq. The governments in these countries cannot prevent it. Nor could the United States. The Muslims as a community is aroused, and there is little Washington could do about it. Nor when it makes fundamental mistakes in Iraq. It does not understand Arabic, especially in its Iraqi sophistication, the culture, and uses the gun to prove his presence by force. It holds only the cities, the roads are unsafe, the countryside is in the hands of the resistance, and shows is frustration and anger by alienating the Iraqis in the cities with every move.

Muslims in Malaysia once were subjected to Islamic personal law - marriage, divorce, inheritance and the like - but over the years the shariah came to be introduced, with the non-Malay and non-Muslim parties in BN not objecting to it. As UMNO's hold on to the Malay community became uncertain, it decided to challenge PAS in how Islam should be introduced in Malaysia. The Malay political direction changed irrevocably. The Malay constituency has been a conflict between the cultural Malay and the Islamic Malay. The cultural Malay believed in the dominance of the Malay, to whom Islam is an important element of his being; the Islamic Malay insisted on the removal of non-Islamic influences in his culture and work for the dominance of Islam. UMNO represented one and PAS the other. But UMNO could not hold on to its natural constituency, and now tries to woo it back by trying to outdo PAS in implementing Islam.

This pro-Sabah view could also put the non-Sabah BN parties at risk. Some leaders in Keadilan and DAP seriously consider standing as candidates for a locally based parties. They have the same difficulty with Kuala Lumpur as Sabah UMNO have. Kuala Lumpur wants to run their lives, and regard Sabah as an offshoot of their nationwide strategy, and any help from Kuala Lumpur would only come if it fits into their grand strategy. All it has done is to strengthen Sabah nationalism. Lest Sabah BN forget, the Muslims in Sabah feel they are taken for a ride as the Kadazan-Dusin communities feel. If Kuala Lumpur is not careful, the result would be what it fears most.

I do not deny that there does exist Muslim groups out to create mayhem. But there are also Christian groups, Hindu groups, Buddhist groups with similar aims. But they are ignored because the current order of the day is to target Muslims. It is this that led President Bush to wage war on Iraq. There was no reason why he should - there is no evidence to back up his justification - but he went along any way. And now pays the price. The British seriously consider a law which would allow them to attack any country that does not follow its rules of good governance. It is colonialism by another name. In the past, European armies would march in at the behest of traders, priests, and, as in Iraq, on a whim. No one stopped them. Rapacity, greed, self-interest and the desire for empire were all that was needed.

Sabah is in ferment. The Muslim and non-Muslim bumiputras are so far apart that decisions in UMNO is arrived at by alignments that change from one day to the next. All this is not reported, but the often contradicatory decisions taken by the same cabinet minister on different occasions indicates it. This is to be expected. The Kadazans are not Muslims; they are more often Catholic or animist. But UMNO insists on turning the state into an Islamic stronghold. It underestimated Tun Mustapha's damage in that direction in the 1970s, which alienated the largely Roman Catholic bumiputras from the Muslim, when it embarked on this Islamic policy. That divide continues.

But Dato' Seri Adnan said something on tape which must disturb all non-Muslims. He stated clearly and categorically that there must be gambling centres for non-Muslims. As the New Straits Times reports: "He added that while neither the Federal nor State governments encouraged gambling, thre was a need for such [... (gambling) ...] centres for non Muslims." He must explain this racist stereotyping when he meets the Press in Bentong tomorrow (16 May) and how he got the idea that non-Muslims need gambling centres. He should also explain why gambling centres need only be in Pahang, when more non-Muslims live in other states. If you take this argument a step further, there must be at least two or more casinos in each state to succour the non-Muslims. He must explain if this plan for casinos for non-Muslims is official National Front (BN) policy. Or BN must contradict him.

If the US aim was to help Israel by destroying its most potent military threat, Iraq, it cannot now be sure. For what the Iraq invasion has done is to unite the Muslims in the Middle East, Shia and Sunni, that Israel and the United States would face opposition from them for a long time to come. The US cannot leave Iraq except in defeat, and the Muslims would unite to that end. It would not happen today, but I fear the longer the US remains in Iraq, the more nebulous the gains it had hoped for in deciding to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime. It could well be Israel that would rue the day the Anglo-American force marched into Iraq. There is, if what is talked of in the Arab street is true, a surfeit of Muslim gallants prepared to sacrifice themselves, in the name of Islam, to rid the Middle East of the likes of the United States. Suddenly, the United States has opened up more fronts than it can deal with.

Because of the wide disparity between the four Sunni and one Shia schools, what is acceptable in one is not in another. The recent syariah conviction of a Nigerian woman whose pregnancy outside marriage was proof of her adultery, and ordered her stoned to death, is allowed in the Maliki school but not in the other three Sunni schools -- Hambali, Hanafi and Shafiee -- and the Shia schools. The Ottoman codified its civil law, the Mejelle, but for all its completeness, it refers to the practice of the Hanafi school. There is, in other words, no common body of syariah laws that can be applied uniformly to all Muslims.

Islamic polygamy in Malaysia is sustained, especially amongst the high and mighty, by such subterfuges. When Islamic law is discussed in Malaysia between Muslims and non-Muslims, the clinging argument, invariably, is the right of a man to marry four wives, and how one's non-Muslim wife can easily be divorced if one converted to Islam. For under the law, a Muslim is not allowed a non-Muslim wife. The non-Muslim wife is, on divorce, not even allowed to ask for alimony, and the children stranded unless they too converted. There are enough examples of actual cases in which families are broken up, and the party refusing to convert, usually the wife, is left stranded. But it is not only the non-Muslim wife of a Muslim who suffers. Muslim wives suffer too. When a cabinet minister divorced his wife a decade ago, she sought for alimony for her and their children. The syariah court, after great deliberation and argument, gave her just that: RM22 a month for herself, and RM11 for each of her three children. During this time, he was living in happy khalwat with a lady now his wife.

So it did not surprise that even before the huge bomb blast in Bali on 12 October 2002, which killed and wounded 500, mostly Australian, tourists and destroyed the area, it was quickly decided it was the Al Qaida through its alleged local offshoot, the Jemaah Islamiyah. Singapore quickly found local Malay Muslims planning to blow up the US embassy and local government establishments. It even found some of those it arrested to have had links with Al Qaida before it was established. Several had visited Afghanistan and visited Muslim groups there, including one led by Osama bin Laden, at a time when the CIA and other US government agencies funded them to force the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. In Malaysia, the government has arrested several who had studied in Pakistani madrasas. All are linked to the opposition Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS). It has not admitted that the governent, no less, encouraged this study at Pakistan madrasahs to reduce the dependence on those who went to the Middle East to study.

But in Australia, it is taken as truth what the newspapers, politicians and government propagandists say. Southeast Asia, in this view, is a nest of Islamic terrorists, and mined for all it is worth. It diverts attention from domestic problems of the economy and unemployment, and unites the country in a mobilised hysteria that targets Muslims at home and abroad. It is into this climate Mr Howard picked his fight. He said Australia would hot hesitate, if it must, to defy international law and the UN charter and order pre-emptive strikes against the terrorists in foreign countries.

The one unmentioned link to terror in this global madness is Islam. It is Muslim terror groups that Washington and Australia want to bomb. These Muslim terror groups could well have a link with Al Qaeda or other international groups, but their aims are local. The Muslim terrorist groups want to bring the region under Islam, not because it is Mr Osama who wants, but that they want it. They were there, some for decades before, Mr Osama and other fundamentalist Muslims like the Taliban were recruited by the United States government to expel the reformist-minded Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. When you repackage them to fit into your focus, all hell breaks loose. Now these very groups hit back at Washington's modernising agenda in its global agenda. And they strike back in vengeance. They were recruited for their fundamental beliefs and enmity of modernity. But this touched a sympathetic chord that made it easy for Mr Osama bin Laden to gather them together under a broad loose coalition of like-minded groups all linked to Islam. They do not confirm to Washington's view that Al Qaeda is set to destroy it and all it stands for. They do not have a worldview as Washington and its satraps have of wanting to Islamize the world.

She told an UMNO meeting in Kuala Pilah two days ago that she would not, as a Muslim, allow her hand luggage sniffed at by police dogs. Is it her contention that Muslims should not allow their hand luggage through metal detectors? For it is then the airport police dogs were brought in. More to the point, what did she have in her hand luggage that could not pass muster? Contraband or banned substances that could cause another bilateral problem between Kuala Lumpur and Canberra? Or wads of cash or other baubles that could raise eyebrows in Sydney, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere?

Islam does not forbid Muslims from handling or touching dogs. It is, like alcohol, discouraged, not forbidden as pork is; Najis not Haram nor Dosa. In other words, the lowest level of prohibition. All a Muslim needs to do if he were to touch a dog to wash himself seven times and cleanse himself with sand. The Prophet had issued that injunction because in His time, people died of rabies, and He cautioned care in handling dogs. In Malaysia, Islam is reduced to iron-clad bureaucratic rules that allows Muslim cabinet ministers like Datin Seri Rafidah Azis to throw her weight around in foreign countries. The authorities in Malaysia bend over backwards to punish minor doctrinal violations in Islam, and codify rules and regulations that imposes a licencing regime, for money in the till. Islam is not allowed to develop as it should. Curiously, PAS, which should be horrified if Datin Seri Rafidah is right in her Islamic assertions, that at Rantau Panjang, on the border with Thailand, a police dog unit is stationed permanently. Almost every one who used that crossing is a Muslim. PAS would have screamed bloody murder to disband the unit years ago. So would UMNO.

He came in without a clear plan of what he wanted to do, and moved to put his own men, at inflated salaries, in key positions. He persuaded one professional to leave her firm to join him, and within months declared her redundant. Having burnt her bridges with her former employer, and with no where to go, she is suing for wrongful and unfair dismissal. This is the first of many more to come. LTH officials keep mum when asked about this, and few bother to return calls. But they admit LTH faces a crisis of confidence. The LTH was set up so Malaysian Muslims could save with it to perform the Haj. For decades it had done a decent job, and its professionalism for this was beyond dispute. But it grow into too many subsidiaries and companies, and too many time-serving politicians to head it that over the years it acquired businesses that could not possibly make money. When professional management is subject to political extravagance, disaster must follow.

The annual season of fasting and gluttony is at hand. It is the month of Ramadhan, the month the Prophet Mohammad had set aside for fasting and self-renewal, to praise the Almighty for His munifiscence, and suffer the pangs of hunger and deprivation that many suffer daily. Fasting is important in every religion. Christians have Lent, celebrated and marked as Muslims and Jews do; As do Hindus and Buddhist. In Islam, it is compulsory as it still is in many religions. But, with the good times, wealth and arrogance in us all, it is turned into a form, in which the reasons why the Prophet Mohamed ordained fasting is forgotten, and gluttony follows the 14-hour fasts.

The Australian Government this month raided two homes, in Sydney and Perth, searching for Muslim terrorists linked to an organisation it once supported and backed, the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah. The Malaysian prime minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, to burnish his questionable credentials as a Muslim leader, cries foul, and accuses Canberra of being anti-Islam as President Bush, in Washington, calls Muslims anti-semetic. Canberra and Kuala Lumpur agree with Washington that JI is a terrorist organisation, hoping none would remember that all three once supported, and backed with funds, JI and other now-damned radical Islamic groups including Osama bin Laden'a Al Qaedah. New enemies are capriciously created in this ubiquitous war on terror, that even Muslim nations -- Malaysia is not a Muslim nation but Dr Mahathir insists it is, so let us take that as read -- are in hot soup over it.

No one asks why the Bali bombings happened. But all are quick to link it with the global enemy of choice: Osama and his ubiquitous Al Qaeda. But people are arrested today for their involvement with Osama bin Laden and his network at a time when they were bankrolled by Washington and the CIA. As recently as 1999, the State Department, in a Congressional hearing, described the Taliban not as fundamentalist Muslims but as conservative Muslims it could deal with. Yet two years later they had to be destroyed as Washington perfected its 'regime change' model. In the 1980s, the US backed Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist crusade so they could be unleashed on the Russians in Afghanistan. When he and his organisation turned their fundamentalism on the US, they became the ultimate evil. But as you sow, so you reap. Suddenly, the officially-encouraged activities that led many a Malaysian Muslim to cavort with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan at the time when Washington approved it, to detention under the Internal Security Act when they became the enemy. As others elsewhere in the region.

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