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Plea to curb Shariat courts' powers in Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur: The dispute over the religious identity of a dead ethnic Indian has prompted a Malaysian inter-faith group to demand that the Constitution be amended to give the High Court the power to decide if a person has become a Muslim convert, overriding the Islamic courts.

M. Moorthy, who was born a Hindu, was buried on Wednesday according to Islamic rites against the wishes of his wife after the High Court rejected her petition saying that it had no jurisdiction to review a Shariat court decision that the deceased had converted to Islam and should be buried as a Muslim.

The Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism said it was wrong for the Shariat court to have "assumed jurisdiction over persons who do not profess Islam and where its orders directly affect the rights of the family members of a person, all of whom do not profess Islam," The New Straits Times reported on Thursday.

Moorthy, 36, who was part of the Malaysian team that scaled Mount Everest in 1997, was paralysed chest down after an army training accident in 1998. He died on December 20.

However, when Moorthy's widow Kaliammal Sinnasmy came to take the body for cremation she was told by his colleagues that her husband had converted to Islam in 2004. None of Moorthy's family attended his burial except his brother, Mohd. Hussin Abdullah, who had converted to Islam many years ago. — PTI

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