Malaysia: Discrimination based on religion
July 7th, 2007 by ashish
Typically, it is the countries in the Middle East that are seen as discriminatory, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. However, it is not well know that there are other countries that are equally discriminatory. So, let me present one more country that is equally bad in this regard - Malaysia. In a post some weeks back, I talked about how a woman was unable to marry the person she loved because she was a Muslim and her boyfriend was a Christian. She was not allowed to convert, nor to marry a person outside her religion, and the court refused to hear her case because her case would be governed by a Sharia court.
Well, they are it again. There is this lady, whose family were Hindu, but who converted to Islam before she was born. They gave her a Muslim name, but she claims that she was raised as a Hindu. She later married another Hindu as per Hindu religious rites, but the marriage was never legally registered because her husband would have to convert to Islam first. Read this to see what happened next:
Revathi married Suresh Veerappan in 2004 according to Hindu rites and gave birth to a daughter in December 2005. But the marriage was not legally registered because under Malaysian law Suresh would have had to convert to Islam first. Islamic officials seized the couple’s 18-month-old daughter from her Hindu father in March and handed the child to Revathi’s Muslim mother.
A Muslim-born woman who was forced to spend six months in an Islamic rehabilitation center because she wants to live as a Hindu said Friday after her release that she will never return to her original faith. Revathi Masoosai, 29, said officials at the center tried to make her pray as a Muslim, wear a head scarf and eat beef, a practice sacrilege to Hindus.
Tuah Atan, a lawyer representing the Islamic department, said officials remain hopeful that Revathi might still return to Islam. “From the facts of the case, the authorities still strongly feel she can reform,” Tuah said.
This is ridiculous. How can a country in this world claim that a person cannot convert; cannot marry a person outside her religion; that if she wants to leave her religion, she needs counselling and needs to reform. Such cases will get highlighted more often with the media becoming more vigilant, and people objecting to this more often.
The other issue which remains common to all these cases is the dominant nature of Islam in all these cases. Wherever Islam is the dominant religion, the clergy will assume moral power, and make blasphemy, leaving religion, etc all as crimes. Such acts have no presence in our present times.
