Jan 30, 2008 8:21 PM
An ethnic Chinese battling Malaysian authorities who snatched
the body of his father after saying he had embraced Islam before he
died, said that non-Muslims were getting a raw deal in the
country.
"What choice do we have?" said Gan Hok Ming, a 46-year-old computer
technician mourning the loss of his father. "We are very
unsatisfied.
"There should be a more transparent system especially on Muslim
conversions," he said from his home in the south-western state of
Negeri Sembilan.
The row over the body of Gan Eng Gor, a 74-year-old ethnic
Chinese man who died on January 20, is the latest in a series of
disputes in mostly Muslim Malaysia that have upset non-Muslims, who
fear authorities are trampling on their religious rights.
It also highlighted resentment among the sizeable Chinese and
Indian minorities against the government in the run-up to general
elections, widely expected by March.
"Enough is enough," opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said in urging
the government to put a stop to the so-called "body-snatching"
cases to help preserve racial harmony.
In the latest case, the elder Gan had been buried as Muslim after
an Islamic sharia court in Negeri Sembilan ruled that the man
converted to Islam last year.
But his family insisted otherwise, arguing that Gan could not
have converted because he was senile and paralysed after suffering
two strokes.
They said Gan was also unable to speak after a stroke in 2006,
challenging a claim that Gan made an oral declaration in Arabic to
accept Islam.
His conversion papers were also flawed because they were not
signed, they said.
His family suffered a legal setback on Tuesday when a civil
court rejected their bid to declare Gan a Buddhist, saying it had
no jurisdiction over Islamic cases, a lawyer said.
"We are not Muslims, why should we go to sharia court?" the son
said. "The government should have a better system to deal with
conversions. Otherwise the people will suffer."
The spectacle of non-Muslims battling for funeral rights of
relatives is not new in Malaysia, where disputes over religious
conversions and complaints about demolitions of churches and Hindu
temples have fuelled fears of a surge in hardline Islam.
There have been exceptions.
In a 2006 case involving an ethnic Indian said to have converted to
Islam, Islamic religious authorities eventually climbed down and
allowed the family of van driver Rayappan Anthony, 71, to reclaim
his body for Christian burial.
Politically dominant Malay Muslims form about 60% of Malaysia's 26
million people, while ethnic Indian, Chinese, Sikh minorities
include Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.
Source: Reuters
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