Two Courts, One Country: Conversion and the Sharia Boundary

Malaysia runs civil and Sharia courts in parallel, and the friction between them produces the country's hardest religious cases. Article 121(1A), added in 1988, bars civil courts from matters within Sharia jurisdiction, which sounds like a clean division until a case has a Muslim and a non Muslim on either side. Lina Joy, born Muslim, sought to have Islam removed from her identity card in order to marry a Christian; the Federal Court held in 2007 that the question was for the Sharia court, which meant a person could not leave Islam through the civil system and would have to apply to a religious one that does not generally grant it. In conversion cases involving children, a parent who converts to Islam has at times been able to convert the children unilaterally and litigate custody in a forum the other parent cannot enter, a pattern the Federal Court limited in Indira Gandhi in 2018 by holding that the consent of both parents is required.

Two further disputes recur. The word Allah, used by Malay speaking Christians in Sabah and Sarawak for centuries and in the Malay Bible, was prohibited to non Muslims in a 2013 Court of Appeal ruling that was itself set aside for a Christian applicant in 2021, leaving the position unsettled. And the state Islamic authorities' powers over Muslims, including detention for religious rehabilitation and prosecution for offences that have no civil equivalent, apply to a category a person cannot in practice leave.