He noted that DAP and Amanah were the only political parties that had objected to the ban, and he congratulated Amanah for being the first to do so.

“However, there was nothing from PAS, nothing from PPBM, and nothing from PKR,” he said at a forum billed as “Books: A Source of Wisdom or a Threat to Harmony”.

Farouk said he did not expect much from PPBM, but he found PKR’s silence “totally unacceptable” because, with “a person such as Anwar Ibrahim at its helm”, there should have been “intellectualism within the party”.

Farouk emphasised his disappointment by quoting Martin Luther King Jr: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

The home ministry announced the ban early this month, prompting Amanah vice-president Mujahid Yusof Rawa to issue a statement condemning the action as a stumbling block to intellectual discourse and activism.

The ministry said the five books banned, all of which have Islamic content, were likely to be “prejudicial to public order” and “alarm public opinion”.

Two of the books were written by Farouk. Another is an international bestseller written by Turkish author Mustafa Akyol and another is a Malay translation of it.

The fifth book banned is a novel by Faisal Tehrani. Four of Faisal’s books sufffered the same fate in May 2015.