Lina Joy remains officially Muslim

I reported the prequel to this last year. "Malaysia's best known Christian convert, Lina Joy, lost a six-year battle on Wednesday to have the word 'Islam' removed from her identity card, after the country's highest court rejected the change." And was alerted to the latest news, interestingly enough, by noting that all of a sudden the traffic to the above posting had gone way above a normal hit-rate. My posting seems to be showing up in the top ten of google searches including the name Lina Joy. The newspaper report underlying the title on this posting is in the top three at present.
It deserves some comment especially when we go on to read;

The court's ruling helps define religious freedoms in multi-racial Malaysia, whose constitution guarantees freedom of worship but deems all ethnic Malays like Joy to be Muslims, subject to Islamic laws that bar her conversion to another faith."You can't at whim and fancy convert from one religion to another," Federal Court Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim said"

I think that first bit should read "... helps define the limits to religious freedoms in Malaysia ..." However, was it ever going to go any other way. The three judges ruled 2:1 against her, the one being the only non-Muslim. To get a sense of the social and cultural uphill struggle read this blog comment from a Muslim Malaysian, and then read some of the comments for a really scary view of things. And yet they seem unaware of the problem. The legal 'fact' of her being Muslim doesn't change the spiritual reality of her allegiance. What they are assenting in creating is the equivalent of Messianic Jews: Musulman biMasih, or somesuch. That may turn out to be a shot in the foot.
However, let's not lose sight of the human cost.

She wants to marry her Christian boyfriend, a cook, but she cannot do so while her identity card declares her to me Muslim.

And of course, I imagine she would be happy to come away from the jurisdiction of "syariah" (sic) court. At least none of the commenters, as far as I read had called for the Shariah penalty for apostasy to be applied. Thank God for such mercies!
PS (written on 1/6/07) It could be that this is more a proceedural judgement about the proper way to handle a conversion officially in the Malaysian legal system. For a bit more detail note the comments on this blog entry. However, the proper route may be to apply to a shariah court to apostasize, perhaps this is not an attractive option as some may see it as applying to be hunted down and killed, in theory (again see the comments). I'm left wondering what protections there are for those who do that.
Malaysia's Lina Joy loses Islam conversion case�|�International News�|�Reuters.com: