No law to charge parents who register children as Muslims and scoot?
Zakiah Koya, Fz.com
With a number of Muslim converts in all their zealousness converting their young ones without the permission of their non-Muslim spouses, and then with a number of them even kidnapping young children from their non-Muslim mothers, one would have thought that there is a syariah law that they are afraid to cross should they be found not to have raised their offsprings as Muslims.
(Before I go any further, please remember that I am writing this as a lay Muslim mother and not as a scholar. These views are my thinking out aloud and I am not preaching to anyone.)
Syariah lawyers I have checked with say that there is no direct provision in the Malaysian syariah laws which can be used to charge Muslim parents who have failed to teach and raise their children as Muslims.
I only know the basics of Islam, but was wondering about the absence of such a law as it has become quite common for a number of marriages with either one of the spouses being a convert to merely register their children as Muslims, but then abandon them altogether at their convenience.
What we get is the waste of years and time and money for adults with Muslim names who have no belief in Islam trudging to the syariah courts day in and day out just to get a certificate declaring themselves out of Islam so that they can continue their lives.
What we get now is the Muslim named bride who married a Hindu at a temple, and she is just a sample of those we have in Malaysia today, even among those educated. It is not her fault that she was named as a Muslim, furthermore it is not her doing that she never knew Islam. In fact, it is my personal opinion that the main one at fault is her father who registered her and then abandoned her.
Yet, there is no law under which the father could be charged for that. The mother, according to the person concerned, was illiterate, and it is logical that she would have gone back to her own non-Muslim family when she was abandoned by her husband.
So, again, the onus falls on the father – but there is just no way he can be charged in court for getting the children into a confusing situation and being neglected and forcing them all those years to grow up with Muslim names, but raised as Hindus.
Every child a trust endowed to parents
The interesting thing is that although there is no man-made syariah law in Malaysia to charge the Muslim parents for neglect, the Qur’an clearly states that one will be asked of what one does with his or her child for every child is a trust endowed to the parents.
Even with my lay understanding of Islam, I know that in the hereafter, Muslims will be judged by what they did with their children. This is one of the reasons why the sanctity of family and raising of children is stressed much in the Quran.
Muslim scholars agree wholeheartedly that children, according to Islam, are entitled to various rights. The first and foremost of these rights is the right to be properly brought up, raised and educated.
All children must be given suitable, sufficient, sound and adequate religious, ethical and moral guidance. They should be endowed with true values, the meaning of right and wrong, true and false, correct and incorrect, appropriate and inappropriate and so on and so forth.
In many verses of the Quran, Muslims are warned of what awaits them should they have abandoned their family.
In the verse six of Chapter 66 of the Qur’an especially, it is stated:
“O ye who believe! Save yourselves and your families from a Fire whose fuel is Men and Stones…”
