Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (37 page)

A key case concerning conversion was that of Soon Singh. On May 14, 1988, Soon Singh, then seventeen, converted to Islam from Sikhism without the knowledge of his parents. Four years later, on July 16, 1992, he wanted to return to Sikhism and went through a Sikh baptism ceremony at a temple in Alor Star. He subsequently tried and failed to change his legal status as a Muslim and declare himself a Sikh. Although the sharia courts’ jurisdiction was limited to specific itemized matters, not including apostasy, in 1999, the Federal Court, Malaysia’s highest court, ruled that where there are provisions granting sharia courts authority to adjudicate on conversion to Islam, then jurisdiction to deal with apostasy could be read as “necessarily implied.” The court also stated that Singh’s initial conversion was voluntary and genuine and that he had to abide by his decision.
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In one of the most famous of Malaysia’s conversion cases, in September 2005, the court of appeals, the federal middle-level appeals court, denied Lina Joy’s request to change the religion on her national identity card from Islam to Catholic. She had been born into a Muslim family and given the name Azlina binti Jailani, but in 1990, she began attending Catholic mass and, on May 11, 1998, was baptized into the Catholic Church. Soon after, she tried to marry a Catholic, but Malaysia’s Civil Registry of Marriages denied her request because the 1976 Law Reform Act stated that a registered Muslim could not marry a non-Muslim.
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She then applied to change the name and religion on her identity card, but, although her name change to Lina Joy was granted, she could not change her official religion without an order from the sharia court.
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Knowing that the sharia courts had never granted such a request, and protesting that, as a Catholic, she
was not under sharia court jurisdiction, she appealed to the civil courts. On April 18, 2001, the High Court ruled against her, saying that Malaysian Muslims were forbidden to renounce Islam. Although recognizing that Article 11 of the Federal Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, the court ruled that this freedom had to be construed harmoniously with other provisions, including the Islamic ban on apostasy.
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On September 15, 2005, the court of appeals also denied her request. Finally, on May 30, 2007, the Malaysian Federal Court upheld the two lower courts’ verdicts, with Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim reiterating that her request fell under the jurisdiction of the sharia court. Lina Joy was disowned by her family and fired from her sales job. She and her boyfriend, whom she is not allowed to marry, went into hiding out of fear of Muslim extremists who have threatened her.
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Some of the precedents established in Lina Joy’s case continue to create problems. Revathi Massosai, though born to Muslim convert parents and given the Muslim name Siti Fatimah Abdul Karim, was raised as a Hindu by her grandmother, who called her Revathi Massosai. Massosai considered herself a Hindu and in 2001 officially changed her name to Revathi Massosai. In 2004, she married Suresh Veerappan, a Hindu man, but, when the couple tried to get a birth certificate for their daughter, the authorities learned that her birth certificate identified her as Muslim. Since in Malaysia it is against sharia for her to marry a non-Muslim, the authorities refused to give their daughter a birth certificate or recognize the marriage.

In January 2007, Massosai went to the Malacca Syariah High Court to request a change in her religion, but she was seized by the Islamic Religious Department in Malacca state and sent to the Ulu Yam religious rehabilitation camp in Selangor state for six months. There she was forced to pray like a Muslim, wear a headscarf, and eat beef, in direct opposition to the Hindu belief that cows should not be slaughtered.
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The Islamic Religious Department also seized her fifteen-month old daughter from her husband and gave the child to Massosai’s Muslim mother. As might be expected, Massosai’s stint in religious rehabilitation had the opposite effect to that desired by the authorities. After her release, she told reporters, “Because of their behavior, I loathe Islam even more now. They say it’s a school, but it’s actually a prison.”
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She has been reunited with her daughter and husband, but the court required that she be placed in the custody of her Muslim parents and that she undergo weekly religious counseling.

Despite these doleful precedents, however, the later Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah case provides some hope for Malaysians attempting to change their religion from Islam. Siti Fatimah, originally Tan Ean Huang, converted to Islam in July 1998 in order to marry an Iranian Muslim, Ferdoun Ashanian. She testifies that she never practiced Islam and, in practice, continued to follow Buddhist teachings.
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Ferdoun later left her, and she petitioned to return officially to Buddhism. On May 8, 2008, the Islamic court of Penang, stressing her lack of genuine commitment to Islam, ruled that she was no longer a Muslim and allowed her to legally change her
religious status. This decision marked the first time in Malaysia’s recent history that an Islamic court has allowed a convert to leave Islam. In his ruling, Islamic high court judge Othman Ibrahim blamed the Penang Islamic Religious Council for not fulfilling its obligation to “ensure new converts understand and follow Islamic teachings…however, in this case nothing was done until the last moment when it was already too late.”
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Hizbut Tahrir Malaysia, an Islamic hard-line group, protested the ruling outside the court and declared, “In Islam, a person who insists on leaving the religion must be punished with death.”
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However, the sharia appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling.
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Apart from banning Muslim literature deemed heterodox, the Malaysian government has also repressed some fifty people and groups that it deems deviant—including Shias and Ahmadis. In May 2009, the Selangor Council of Islamic Religion, the highest Islamic authority in Selangor state apart from the Sultan, banned the Ahmadiyya community from praying at the Bait-us-Salem mosque since “Ahmadiyya is not an Islamic Religion.” Failure to comply could bring a fine and/or imprisonment up to one year.
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While sharia courts usually deal only with personal status law, they can also authorize government officials to arrest members of deviant sects. One notable and colorful example was the sect “The Sky Kingdom,” alternatively called the “Teapot Group.” Founded in the mid-1970s by the illiterate Ariffin Mohammed, known to his followers as Ayah Pin, “Father Pin,” the group’s 150 to 200 followers lived in a compound near Kampung Batu 13 village in the northeast of the country. The Sky Kingdom acquired its nickname because of their two-story-high teapot installed in 1998, which devotees said symbolized God’s pouring of blessings on humanity. Critics said Sky Kingdom members believed that Ayah Pin was divine, a reincarnation of Buddha, Jesus, Shiva, and Muhammad.

In the mid-1980s, the office of Islamic affairs declared that the Sky Kingdom was a deviant group, and, in 1992, an Islamic court convicted four members for participating in “deviant practices” and ordered them to attend a rehabilitation program. When they refused, the court ordered them jailed; they continued to plead their case.
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In 2001, Ayah Pin renounced Islam, and an Islamic court ordered him arrested and jailed for nine months, asserting that his views were corrupt, belittled Islam, and threatened public peace. When the authorities realized that the Sky Kingdom was attracting the attention of international media and converts from Islam, they went a step further. In May 2005, local authorities ordered the members to demolish the giant teapot and other structures, arguing that they were not allowed on agricultural land. The group refused, and, on July 20, 2005, the police raided the commune and arrested fifty-nine members.
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Six were subsequently released: five were underage, and one ethnic New Zealander was born a Christian. However, the others were charged with disobeying the fatwa declaring
Ayah Pin’s teachings deviant. In August 2005, by court order, state officials bulldozed all nonresidential buildings on the group’s main compound, including the teapot.
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One member, Kamariah, fifty-seven, was put on trial on March 2, 2008. She had originally claimed to be an apostate from the Sky Kingdom, in order to avoid charges for not obeying the fatwa against Ayah Pin. However, an Islamic high court ruled both that her apostasy was not sincere and that she had not truly abandoned all teachings contrary to Islam, so she was sentenced to two years in prison.
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Ayah Pin himself fled the country in 2005 before the commune was raided and remained in exile close to the border in Thailand.
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In recent years, political dissidents have also been accused of “insulting Islam.” At the start of this chapter, we described one of these, Raja Petra Kamaruddin. On March 22, 2010, following a spate of accusations by radical Muslim activists that Sisters in Islam was misinterpreting religious principles, a group called the Malaysian Assembly of Mosque Youths filed suit against SIS, trying to force it to drop “Islam” from its name. Sisters in Islam’s official name is SIS Forum (Malaysia), however it does use the phrase “Sisters in Islam” in its publications. Using its common and insulting assertion that Malaysian Muslims are very easily confused about their religion, the assembly’s leader, Mohammad Nawar Ariffin, said that SIS “issues statements that contradict what other Muslims believe. It causes confusion among Muslims who might think that the group represents Islam.”
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The Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean is perhaps best known as a tourist destination, thanks to its brilliant waters and atolls, and as the country most at risk from rising sea levels. But it is also one of the most religiously repressive countries in the world. Like only a few other states, it bans all religions other than Sunni Islam. With sharia as the basis of law, it has restrictions on blasphemy and heresy, and, according to the 2008 constitutional revision, non-Muslims may not even be granted citizenship.
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Article 36 of the constitution requires every citizen “to preserve and protect the State religion of Islam, culture, language and heritage of the country.” In addition, the 1994 Protection of Religious Unity Act has been used to quash dissent and shun those suspected of converting. In 2004, Maldivian legislators began revising their fifty-year-old penal code, and several proposed revisions seek to implement punishments based on the sharia, perhaps including killing apostates.
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Its apparent uniformity notwithstanding, the country is caught between Islamist hard-liners and reformists, with a 2009 transfer of presidential power—the first in thirty years—marking what many hoped would be a more moderate,
democratic era. Mohammad Nasheed, the new president, was formerly a political activist as well as a political prisoner who campaigned for democratic principles, including freedom of expression and protection of human rights.
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However, his choice for Minister of Islamic Affairs, Abdul Majeed Abdul Bari, is a member of the Islamic fundamentalist Adaalath Party who has called music
haram
, or “forbidden.” Control over Friday prayers and sermons has increased since Nasheed’s election. In early 2010, Parliament was discussing a bill that would make it illegal to build non-Muslim places of worship or publicly practice non-Muslim faiths, with penalties of up to five years in prison. Foreigners would be allowed to worship in their homes.
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In 2007, Aishath Aniya, formerly the Maldivian Democratic Party’s deputy secretary-general, was forced to resign and go into hiding after writing an article criticizing the notion that women must wear a veil lest men be tempted.
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In 1998, the government detained a number of men and women, perhaps up to fifty, for allegedly converting to Christianity, and questioned another twelve. Some reports say that that they were forced to pray Islamic prayers and read the Qur’an during their detention.
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On May 28, 2010, in a public meeting, thirty-seven-year-old Mohamed Nazim said he was no longer a Muslim. After some in the audience tried to attack him, police escorted him from the meeting and detained him. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs sent two scholars to counsel him while he was in custody, and, on June 1, Nazim offered a public apology on Television Maldives.
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Another example of the reformist-Islamist tension was the case of Hassan Saeed. Educated in Pakistan and Malaysia, in 2003, he became the attorney general at the age of thirty-three and embarked on a reformist agenda until his resignation in August 2007 because of differences with President Gayoom. In 2004, his book
Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam
, which he coauthored with his brother Abdullah Saeed (a contributor to this volume), was published.
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The book’s stated aim is “to show that the punishment of apostasy by death cannot be justified by an appeal to the Qur’an or the practice of the Prophet.” At first, the book was available in the Maldives, as elsewhere; but in 2008, it was banned by the Supreme Council on the grounds that it “contradicts principles of Islam that could mislead [the] common man.” This took place during the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Hassan Saeed himself was an early contender.
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Religious censorship has continued, and in November 2008, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs blocked a website—
www.sidahitun.com
—on the grounds that it promoted Christianity. In defense of the ministry’s action, prominent sheikh Ibrahim Fareed Ahmed stated of Maldivians, “If they have access to these websites, because their belief in Islam is weak, there might be a negative impact.”
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