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Minister slams Islamic funeral decision

A Malaysian government minister says justice was not served when Islamic authorities buried a celebrated Mount Everest climber according to Muslim rites against his Hindu widow's wishes, a newspaper reported yesterday.

M. Moorthy, an ethnic Indian soldier who died on Dec. 20, was declared a Muslim by the Islamic Shariah Court after his army colleagues claimed he had verbally converted to Islam in October 2004.

"It is wrong for the Shariah Court to have assumed jurisdiction," Nazri Aziz, minister in the Prime Minister's Department, was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times daily.

Ignoring his widow's pleas that Moorthy practiced Hinduism until his death, the Islamic Affairs Department took his body from a hospital morgue and buried him in a Muslim grave on Wednesday.

The incident has sent shock waves through the minority Indian and Chinese communities of this predominantly Muslim nation that takes prides in its racial harmony and multiculturalism. The minorities are mostly Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs.

"The question in Moorthy's case was whether he was indeed a Muslim in the first place," Nazri, a Muslim, was quoted as saying. "If we let the Muslim court decide this, justice might not be served because it would decide in favor of Islam," he said.

The comments are likely to assuage the outraged minorities, who have expressed fears that they are under increasing threat from Islamic authorities.

"We are uneasy. We are uncomfortable. We are feeling threatened that eventually people may assume Shariah is the supreme law of the land," the Reverend Wong Kim Kong of the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship told reporters on Thursday.

Although 60 percent of Malaysia's 26 million people are ethnic Malay Muslims, the country's constitution is secular and guarantees freedom of religion for all. However, the religious affairs of Muslims are governed by the Shariah Court while the others are covered by civil courts.

But there is no clear-cut guidance on what to do when the jurisdictions overlap.

Moorthy's widow, Kaliammal Sinnasamy, had approached the civil High Court to have the Shariah Court ruling on her husband's religious identity overruled, but her appeal failed.

The High Court judge said he has no jurisdiction over Islamic jurisprudence, giving weight to concerns among minorities that their rights are secondary to Islamic laws.

Public interracial friction has largely been absent in Malaysia since 1969 when hundreds of Malays and Chinese died in riots. In 1998 Muslims attacked a Hindu temple in Penang state, rankled by loud bell-ringing. In March 2001, six people died in clashes between Indians and Malays in slum settlements near Kuala Lumpur.
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