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:

An example to follow

If you're beginning to think there may be something in this Ubunti Linux thing, you might like to take a note of this recent convert (and this was why). The blog promises to log further learning over time.

Today I upgraded to Ubuntu. While my daughter napped I downloaded version 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" and burned it to CD. I was nervous but I put the CD in and rebooted. I chose the default installation that automatically partitions the drive and keeps Windows available should you want to return to it.

Useful to me to know that the CD for the latest version seems to do a good job of partitioning with Windoze already on the system as my new job will mean that I will probably want to convert the computer that comes with the job to a dual boot system.
Adios Microsoft! | FON Blog

Lina Joy and Religious Freedom in Malaysia

I'd always thought that Malaysia was relatively liberal as Islamic states went. But ...

Formerly called Azlina Jailani, she is an ethnic Malay who converted from Islam to Christianity in 1990, but since then has been unable to have the word Islam deleted from her identity card. As a result of her conversion she has already suffered imprisonment in a drug rehabilitation centre for men, where on one occasion she was caned on her back, in an effort to force her to return to Islam. Lina Joy began her legal battle to change her official status in 2001 in a civil court. She tried to avoid having the matter handled by a Syariah court, arguing that Article 11 of the constitution guarantees the right of all citizens of Malaysia to choose their own religion. Islamic law (Syariah law) specifies the death sentence and other punishments for apostasy from Islam. However, a lower court ruled that civil law cannot have precedence over Syariah law in this case. A Syariah court would prohibit her from officially leaving Islam. Now she is waiting for the ruling of the Federal Court, which is the highest court in Malaysia.

PS update on this story at this posting.
� 23/08/2006 - The Lina Joy Case and Religious Freedom in Malaysia - Barnabas Fund:
Filed in: Islam, shariah, Malaysia, religion, freedom, conversion, Christian

How many Muslims become Christians

It's hard to believe these figures ... 'The Internet site aljazeera.net published an interview with Ahmad Al Qataani allegedly an important Islamic cleric who is suppposed to have said: “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Ever year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity." '

Now, a Google search show up Ummah.com with an apparent interview with the guy where the polemical intent seems to be to scare muslims into action against 'Christianisation', so hyperbole may well be the order of the day. Especially when we see the exact same conversation on another message board which seems to bespeak a planted message; as I say with polemical intent at arousing muslim action, most likely. Now it's supposed to have been on Aljazeera but I can't read Arabic so it's beyond me at source but it's still suspicious to see it reproduced as if apparently a real debate in two BB's. It is interesting to note that perhaps we really do need to check the figures and facts if we can because there is clearly a lot of mythmaking -as this page seems to illustrate [though it's provenance needs checking too -not one I'd be over happy at recommending but the figures look as if they check out]. I know that there are converts to Christianity from Islam and I know that they can't really speak out about it because of the sanction Islam gives for violence against those who do turn from Islam ... certainly worth remembering when Muslims high-profile converts to Islam: at least they have that freedom.