By Sebastian Tong
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Five days after she declared
legally that she had converted from Islam to Christianity,
several officers from Malaysia’s state Islamic department
turned up at the woman’s office and arrested her.
She said they took her, then 21, to a drug rehabilitation
center for men, where a Muslim teacher counseled her on her
conversion and on one occasion, caned her back. After two
months, she found an unlocked door out of the compound and
escaped.
“What they did was wrong. They shouldn’t decide our beliefs
for us,” said the woman — who asked not to be named — of her
ordeal in 1999.
While Malaysia is one of the world’s most modern and
relaxed Muslim countries, its treatment of apostates, primarily
those who have given up the Muslim faith, has ignited a heated
debate.
Malaysia’s Federal Court could rule in the next few days on
whether Islamic courts — which have authority over the
country’s Muslims, accounting for more than 60 percent of the
population — have the sole right to judge apostates.
The ruling comes amid calls for capital punishment for
apostasy, and follows a spate of civil suits by Malaysians
seeking official recognition of their decision to leave Islam.
Half of Malaysia’s 26 million people are ethnic Malays, who
by law must be Muslim, while its Chinese and Indian minorities
include Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs.
Islamic law is selectively enforced by local officials in
each of Malaysia’s 13 federal states. Unmarried Muslim couples
caught in hotel rooms can be charged, while believers seen
eating in the daytime during the fasting month of Ramadan can
be fined.
Kelantan state, run by an Islamist party, has separate-sex
supermarket queues, but the national capital, Kuala Lumpur, is
more relaxed with plenty of dance clubs where men and women
mingle openly. Yet many say Malaysia’s secular status is being
eroded.
In December, Islamic authorities gave Malaysian
mountain-climber M. Moorthy a Muslim burial against the wishes
of his Hindu widow.
Officials said he had converted to Islam before his death,
despite assertions to the contrary by most of his family.
“Apostasy is not a new phenomenon but the issue has come to
the forefront because it underscores the growing Islamization
of a country that was intended to be secular,” civil activist
Haris Mohamed Ibrahim told Reuters.
Officials also destroyed a commune last July, arresting
members of the Sky Kingdom cult which preached a synthesis of
all religions and had a giant two-story teapot on its premises.
The government said the cult practiced a “deviant” form of
Islam.
BIG SIN
Malaysia’s civil courts have said they cannot recognize
conversions from Islam and refer apostates to the Islamic
courts, where sentences for various offenses range from caning
to jail.
Although such sentences are rarely carried out on
apostates, Malaysians who leave Islam can find themselves in a
legal limbo, unable to register their new religious affiliation
or to marry non-Muslims. Many keep quiet about their choice or
move abroad.
Rights activists say such barriers to conversion are at
odds with Malaysia’s status as a member of the United Nations
Human Rights Council and violate the nation’s constitutional
guarantee of freedom of worship.
Neighboring Indonesia, which has the world’s biggest Muslim
population, has no official sanctions against such converts and
recognizes civil marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims.
“Unfortunately, some people have fixed ideas about Islam
and see apostasy as a challenge to the religion,” said
Norhayati Kaprawi of the Muslim women’s group Sisters in Islam.
Some groups, including the opposition party Parti Islam
se-Malaysia (PAS), want apostasy to be punishable by death. One
government cleric said about 250,000 Malaysians had left Islam.
The Koran forbids Muslims to abandon their faith, but it
doesn’t specify the penalties, said Sohirin Solihin, professor
of Koranic studies at Malaysia’s International Islamic
University.
But traditional writings, or Hadith, associated with the
Prophet Mohammad proscribe death.
“The Koran is clear that there is no compulsion of religion
but the issue of religious freedom is different for Muslims and
non-Muslims. The Muslim understanding of this is different from
the Western one,” he said.
Earlier this year, the case of an Afghan man who faced the
death penalty after he converted to Christianity sparked an
international outcry. He was later granted asylum in Italy.
While efforts to make apostasy a crime punishable by death
in Malaysia are unlikely to succeed given the government’s
multiethnic coalition of Malay, Chinese and Indian parties,
many fear that obstacles to religious conversion will stay in
place.
The minister in the Prime Minister’s Department for
religious affairs, Abdullah Md Zin, declined to comment. His
spokesman referred questions to the government’s Department of
Islamic Development where officials declined comment.
But the department’s Web site recommends isolating and
counseling apostates and then jailing them if they fail to
repent.
“If the person remains an apostate, it is left to the
respective authorities to impose the fitting sentence that is
death,” the department said in its Malay-language “Frequently
Asked Questions” section.
(Additional reporting by Mohaini Ibrahim)
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