Mydin's Wholesale Emporium in Kota Bharu is a good place to buy shoe polish, a handbag, a cheap clock or a wheel wrench. But after selecting such items, the buyer must be careful to choose the right checkout counter to pay for them. If a man, he must go to counter 1, 2, 7 or 8, where youths in blue jackets attend the tills; if a woman, she has to pay at counter 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 or 12, where the attendants are all women, dressed from head to toe in blue robes which leave only the face visible.
Kota Bharu is in Kelantan, the only one of Malaysia's 13 states to be ruled by an opposition party and traditionally known as the "annexe to Mecca" because of a strong Muslim tradition going back to the 12th century.
Thus the supermarket tills are segregated, according to Islamic law on separation of the sexes. All Muslim females must wear the veil, even schoolgirls, who fill the streets after school like flocks of miniature nuns. The rule is applied even to public advertisements. Near Mydin's Emporium, I came across an Odeon cinema billboard promoting the popular film Bara which displayed prominently the face of the female lead, Nasha Aziz.
The morals police of Kota Bharu had gone to the trouble of pasting an oval strip of white paper round her head to make it look as if she was wearing a veil. The state parliament has passed a law allowing the stoning of adulterers and the severing of limbs, practices which flourished in Kelantan 100 years ago under the rule of Imams and Ulamas, but it was overruled by the federal government in Kuala Lumpur.
However, the state has been able to ban alcohol in restaurants, hotels and night clubs, to close public swimming pools and snooker halls, and to outlaw gambling. Public intimacy is definitely out. The nearby "Beach of Passionate Love" has been renamed "Moonlight Beach" to make sure people get the message. Malaysians are beginning to pay close attention to what is going on in Kota Bharu because its ruling party, Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or Pas, is getting stronger by the day and its leaders believe they are on the brink of nation-wide power.
Pas is benefiting from a resurgence in Islam, and from the political turmoil of the past year from which it has emerged as the foremost proponent of reform and clean government. Membership has soared and its newspaper, Harakah, which champions poor Muslims against the doings of the government, the Chinese community and Jewish bankers, is breaking new circulation records.
The Pas leader, Fadz il Mohd Noor (62), a friend of the jailed pro-reform politician Anwar Ibrahim, declares that "an Islamic state is our objective", and he forecasts that Pas will win four or five states and become the lead party in a pro-Islamic coalition government after the next general election in Malaysia.
So what would this mean in a country where the mostly Muslim Malays make up 56 per cent of the electorate and the non-Muslim Chinese 34 per cent? I called at Pas headquarters in Kota Bharu, located above a circumcision surgery, and put this question to Shamsuddin Bin Mat Daud.
A slight figure in white cap and gown with a wisp of chin hair who is secretary of the Kelantan State Assembly, Mr Shamsuddin appeared keen to project an image of moderation. Pas is after all looking for support from moderate Malays and from outside its Muslim constituency as the price of power.
"We have a multi-racial people so we should have tolerance," he said, explaining that the rules of Islam must be obeyed only by Muslims.
The supermarkets were segregated because according to Islamic law, men and women cannot mix, he said. Chinese or other non-Muslim women were not subject to the rules about wearing veils. . . If a Muslim woman transgressed, she would be fined by her kampung, or local community, not by the state.
It was their policy that women should not work, but for now it was permissible, as long as they did not work at night. Alcohol was banned but was in fact permitted in some "out-of-sight" places frequented mainly by Chinese. As for foreign women in scanty attire, they should feel shame, he said, but local police would not do anything about it.
"We don't want to bother them. We would give a bad impression of Malaysia." The party leader also favours a moderate, if undefined, image of Malaysia as an Islamic state. He refuses to be pinned down on whether he wants Malaysia to become like Iran or Sudan. "An Islamic state cannot be created overnight," he said recently, adding that people know "it will be fair to everyone".
"We are not really worried," said a Malay woman executive in Kuala Lumpur who does not wear the veil. "To get power Pas will need the support of people like me, which means they will not be able to turn Malaysia into a Kelantan - at least I hope not."