Last week saw a landmark case - the (first?) recognized deconversion from Islam. From AFP:

Apostasy, or renouncing the faith, is one of the gravest sins in Islam and a very sensitive issue in Malaysia where Islamic sharia courts have rarely allowed such renunciations and have also jailed apostates.

Penang Sharia Court judge Othman Ibrahim said he had no choice but to allow an application by cook Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah to renounce her faith and return to Buddhism.

“The court has no choice but to declare that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah is no longer a Muslim as she has never practised the teachings of Islam,” Othman told a packed courtroom.

“I order the conversion certificate to be nullified,” he added.

Siti Fatimah or Tan Ean Huang, 38, said she had never practised Islamic teachings since she converted in 1998 and only did so to enable her to marry Iranian Ferdoun Ashanian.

The couple married in 2004 and she filed for the renunciation after her husband left her.

Forgive me for being a bit crabby but OMFG it’s about time. The very idea that you can “prevent” a deconversion by Our relief would be tempered somewhat though by a depressing letter that featured on Malaysiakini last week as well, “JPN on the look-out for illegitimate Malay children”:

On the evening of April 7, a terribly upset young couple walked into my surgery. Earlier in the day, they had an altercation with the staff of the National Registration Department (JPN) at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital.

The woman was 18 years old and her husband 24 years old. On April 1, she delivered a baby girl weighing 1.4 kg. She was so tiny she had to be put in an incubator. On the day in question, they had gone to visit their baby with a couple of friends. After that the whole group went to the JPN office to register the baby’s birth.

The counter staff scrutinised their marriage certificate and after doing some arithmetic, publicly announced the baby was conceived out of wedlock. As such only the baby’s name and the mother’s name could be entered in the register.

In the space for father’s particulars shall be written ‘Information not Available’. In the baby’s MyKad identity card shall be entered baby’s name followed by ‘bin or binti Abdullah’.

The couple refused to register the baby. They were so upset and humiliated. The baby has since died of prematurity. She never had a birth certificate.

After enquiring from several JPN offices at various places, I learnt that the director-general of JPN had issued an internal circular on July 6, 2007 to the effect that JPN should ‘look out’ for illegitimate Malay children and that they be labelled, accordingly, ‘bin Abdullah’ or ‘binti Abdullah’.

From that day many babies do not have their father’s names on their birth certificates.

It was bad enough when they had upstarts from RELA tell us not to hold hands, but actually having people in hospitals slam this in people’s faces is just so…ARGH.

What conceivable good can come out of denying a father his name on the birth certificate out of spite and piousness? Surely the “solution” to premarital sex is not to oust the father and promote single mothers instead! If anything I’d actually congratulate the guy for sticking by the mother and taking the responsibility. Registration personnel should have better things to do than calculate when the baby was born!

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