So who is under attack now?

By admin-s Last updated Jun 20, 2014

The majority was not, is not, and will never be under attack in Malaysia here. It’s the minority groups.

Boo Su-Lynn, MMO

If you are a Christian, you probably fear that the authorities may come knocking on your door one day demanding to seize and destroy your copy of the Al-Kitab, simply because it contains the word “Allah.”

If you are a Hindu woman, you may be paranoid that the man you marry may convert to Islam years later, convert your children without your consent, and take them away while the police sit back and refuse to enforce any custody order that you win from the civil courts.

If you are an atheist, you may worry that the government’s repeated statements that Malaysia is not a secular country will lead to the growing institutionalisation of Islam.

So, this is not a good time to be a non-Muslim in Malaysia.

Recently, Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said the police would not take action in interfaith child custody tussles, despite the civil courts ordering the police to return to two Hindu women their children who had been taken by their Muslim convert fathers in two separate cases.

Instead of putting his foot down and instructing the police to obey the High Courts, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak just said the Federal Court should be allowed to decide on the issue.

Then, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom said Malaysia is not a secular country and that it’s now permissible to convert your child to Islam without obtaining the other parent’s consent.

This directly contradicts the Cabinet ruling in 2009 that had prohibited unilateral child conversions and said that an estranged couple’s children should remain in the religion of the parents at the time of their marriage.

Meanwhile, the Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) insists on destroying the 321 Malay- and Iban-language bibles that the state’s religious authorities had seized from the Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM) in January, despite the Attorney-General deciding not to press charges against the Christian group.

We must remember that Malaysia’s founding fathers had never envisioned the country to be an Islamic state.

Malaysia’s first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman stressed this in 1958, less than a year after independence, when he told Parliament: “I would like to make clear that this country is not an Islamic State as it is generally understood, we merely provided that Islam shall be the official religion of the State.”

Yet, the government seems to have forgotten this decades later and now seem to be afraid of offending the Islamic authorities.