Shariah police arrested for gang rape in Aceh

The Shariah police in Aceh who enforce Islamic law in Aceh gang-raped a 20 year-old undergraduate but are exempted from Islamic law because the sentence is deemed too “harsh.” It took this incident for authorities to question the legitimacy of the Shariah police. The travesty revealed the hypocrisy of the system.

In September, Aceh’s provincial parliament passed a law saying adulterers can be sentenced to death by stoning. The measure, which still must be approved by the governor, has outraged human rights groups here who say it will unfairly target women.

The suspects allegedly stopped a couple by the road near a plantation. In an interview, the victim’s father said his daughter’s friend was beaten and the two were taken to a Sharia police station.

The men later returned while off-duty and raped the woman, investigators say.

“She was treated like an animal, they suffocated and raped her,” said the victim’s father. “She’s in deep trauma.”

Marzuki Abdullah, head of the 1,500-member Shariah police force, said the case was not linked to the patrols because the officers were off-duty at the time of the alleged crimes.

Black magic in Islamic court

The Selangor Mufti has called for black magic to be included in Shariah law in Malaysia. Problem is, it’s hard to prove black magic in court. While mot would agree that ‘shirik’ is a sin, I suspect the question as to what constitutes “black magic” in the first place is a trickier problem. What would the evidence be?
One supporter proposed that black magic practitioners be charged under the Takzir law where the punishment for an offence would be up to a judge’s discretion. He believed that black magic practitioners usually have special rooms and use specific tools like an animal skull, rosary beads, incense, old weapons like parang, kris, sword, and yellow or blue cloth and these could be used as evidence by the prosecutors to charge them in court. He said a charge under Takzir is easier as it only needs direct and indirect evidence compared with Hudud which needs proof without any doubt.
I think it’s very interesting to see how the practise of “black magic”, a notion so vague and abstract, could be regulated. I wonder if there are any parallels examples elsewhere in the world.

Attempt by Hindu woman to reverse conversion in Malaysia

More details of the case of the 27 year-old Malaysian woman have been revealed. Banggarma Subramaniam, also known as Siti Hasnah Vangarama Abdullah is not only trying to prove that she’s not a Muslim, but that she’s never been Muslim, so as not to be charged with apostasy considered an an offense in the state. But since she’s classified as a Muslim, her case is tried a Shariah court, who has apparently chosen to disregard her verbal profession of faith to another religion. According to a conversion certificate in 1989, she supposedly converted when she was a child of seven, which is actually impossible because she had not reached the age of puberty yet at the time.
I do wonder what argument the Shariah court is going to present to counter this. Her lawyer states that under Penang Islamic laws, minors below 18 cannot be converted to Islam without the consent of their parents. Since she was an orphan, it seems that she’s virtually unprotected by a proper guardian or laws. In this way, non-Muslim orphans are therefore susceptible to similar treatment, if the system is left unchecked.
Evidently, she has not even been able to register her marriage to her Hindu husband, or even list him as the father of her two children, as the state doesn’t allow marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims.
I was struck by one line in the article.

“In interfaith disputes involving Islam, the Shariah courts typically get the last word, which has upset non-Muslims who fear they cannot get justice in such courts.”

What is the rationale behind this for people who professed to be non-Muslims?
I find the case fascinating because of the ways the Shariah court in Malaysia could impose its own particular view of religious identity, as the case unfolds.

Hindu woman not allowed to practice her faith in Malaysia

Banggarma Subramaniam’s Malaysian identity card states that she’s a Muslim although she asserts she’s a Hindu. She refutes claims that she “converted” when she was adopted as a child by a Muslim family. Her supposed conversion was indeed no possible, since she had not reached the age of majority at the time.  Although she consistently identifies herself as a Hindu, she is currently being asked to prove her case in Shariah court, which implies that she’s still regarded as a Muslim, and therefore could possibly be charge with apostasy, an offense against the religion. This article criticizes the application of Islamic law on non-Muslim citizens.

This case seems to turn on the question of evidence of faith. What does proof of faith look like? How should Ms. Subramaniam present her case in court to convince the authorities, because clearly her verbal profession of faith seems to be insufficient in their eyes, which is surprising, since it is an Islamic court that should take oral announcements as binding?