A businesswoman born and raised as a Hindu has approached the civil appellate court to be declared a non-Muslim. The 45-year-old seeks the Court of Appeal to overturn a ruling on March 18 by the Seremban High Court that accepted the Negeri Sembilan Religious Council’s (Mains) application to dismiss her lawsuit.
S Karthigesan, the appellant’s counsel, confirmed to Malaysiakini that the appeal was filed following the verdict delivered by the lower court.
According to the lawyer, they would study all the grounds for the Supreme Court’s June 13 judgement.
For appeals to the Court of Appeal, the appellant must file the notice of appeal as well as the petition of appeal, which includes in writing the full grounds for the judgment with which the appellant disagrees.
Judicial Commissioner Mohamad Haldar Abdul Aziz on March 18 allowed Mains’ request to cancel the woman’s initial summons before a full trial on the merits of the matter could take place.
In addition to Mains, the other two defendants the lawsuit is directed against are the federal government and the National Registration Department (NRD).
Mains filed the abolition petition, arguing that the woman’s childhood conversion to Islam by her Muslim-convert father was valid under the state’s religious laws and that any petition for abjuration should have been filed in the state syariah courts.
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According to the ruling, Haldar said that the civil court had no jurisdiction to hear challenges to a person’s Islamic status and that only syariah courts had the power to do so.
According to the originating summons filed in the civil court in March 2023, the businesswoman claimed that her father converted her to Islam in 1982, when she was four years old.
The woman argued that she should be allowed to stand trial because she never recited the Kalimah Syahadah, the Islamic proclamation for non-Muslims to embrace the faith.
She maintained that she had never practised Islam in her life, she had never attended a mosque or celebrated related religious holidays.
She said that she was instead practising Hinduism, saying that she was born as Hindu in 1978 and that she was raised as one by a relative from the age of four and that she attended temples to worship.
Married to non-Muslim
She married a non-Muslim in Shah Alam, Selangor, in 1997 and from their marriage two children were born in 1999 and 2005.
However, when NRD issued the birth certificates of the two children, it turned out that the woman’s religion was registered as Islam.
The Selangor Syariah High Court in 2017 rejected the woman’s application to renounce Islam because she was a registered resident of Negeri Sembilan and that only that state’s religious court had jurisdiction in the matter.
One of the issues raised in Haldar’s ruling is whether the woman ever went to the Negeri Sembilan Syariah Court to renounce her faith before going to the civil court.
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