Singapore has SIA and Changi. We have MAS and KLIA. Singapore has technocrats. We have Little Mullah Napoleons (LMNs). Malays living in Singapore are not classed ‘non-Chinese’. Our country’s non-Malays suffer the zealotry of the LMNs.

Next month, Muslim convert Tan Ean Huang who applied to the Syariah High Court to renounce Islam will be told if she is permitted her exit. This is another benchmark case following two seminal ones earlier – Lina Joy and M Revathi. These three women, interestingly enough belonging to three different ethnicities, have been state-recognised as Muslim against their personal religious convictions.

Malaysia has shown that it has zero tolerance for Malays to leave the faith, like Lina who are born into Islam, her race constitutionally defining her religion. This country does not have that much higher a level of tolerance either for apostasy in an ethnic Indian, like Revathi born to convert parents.

However mitigating circumstances attending Tan’s decision to disengage herself from Islam could somewhat militate against the ire of the usually vociferous anti-murtad brigade. The husband was a foreigner (Iranian) who walked out on her and their marriage short-lived, hence her living as a Muslim in name only just a brief spell.

Tan filed her apostasy application in May 2006. In November that year, a law lecturer at the International Islamic University, speaking at a convention mooted the use of ISA on apostates.

In his December ‘No Holds Barred’ column, Raja Petra Kamarudin famously chided Malaysia’s would-be converts: "Once the non-Muslims know this [i.e. a man can free himself by just reciting talak ‘I divorce thee’] but still insist on becoming a Muslim, then they would have only themselves to blame once their husband abandons them later and they are stuck as a Muslim without a husband for the rest of their life."

By her own admission, Tan never believed in the teachings but embraced Islam in order to marry. It appears to be deserted wives who are caught in such a bind; a male Muslim convert still legally can take spouses numbers 2, 3 and 4 should No 1 decide to bid him bye-bye.

Hotel California

Is it true that converts can ‘check out but never leave’? Raja Petra cautioned: "They might think that since it is so easy changing from another religion to becoming a Muslim then it must be as easy to leave Islam."

That over here it is difficult if not near impossible to leave Islam is thanks to the LMNs who hold sway in the many thickets of bureaucracy. And judges who allow their personal religious sympathies to overrule discharging their duties as an officer of the court in strict accordance and adherence to secular law.

A spate of court decisions on separation, child custody and bodysnatching cases have also seen civil court judges abdicating their duty by ceding jurisdiction to the ecclesiastical court when the non-Muslim plaintiffs have clearly elected not to submit to Syariah.

We’ve seen how the Majlis Agama, Welfare Department and police intervene to side with the Muslim complainants and consistently giving non-Muslims short shrift, not to mention stints in faith rehab centres.

Barely two months ago, Gan Eng Gor was buried as a Muslim by the state against his family’s wishes. The Gans’ application to the Civil Court for a declaration that the deceased died a Buddhist was dismissed in chambers. The family issued a statement saying "the High Court Seremban [judge] dismissed our application on the ground that he has no jurisdiction to hear this matter as the subject matter falls within the purview of the Syariah Court".

They provided medical evidence that their father at 74 had been unable to speak after suffering two strokes, and thus could not have declared the ‘kalimah syahadah’ or proclamation of faith. Furthermore, he was incapacitated, so how could he have signed the alleged conversion papers?

Yet the Abdullah administration failed to see any miscarriage of justice in this and the many other cases that Hindraf took up the cudgels for.

After the drubbing BN received in the recent general election, it has only just begun to sink in, somewhat, that the non-Muslims – among their other grievances – had cast protest votes against the inexorable Islamisation process. This encroachment into the country’s secular fabric was not only powered by the LMNs but even by august personages like Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz who had called for the abolition of the common law system and favouring its replacement by Islamic law system.

Was the decline and fall of the BN empire written in the stars much, much earlier than polling day? If so, local mainstream media (MSM) did not choose to read the portents in the skies but instead fiddled when Rome was smouldering.

Zaid’s remit

An article ‘ Disquiet over piquant polemics’ in theSun which appeared following the keris antics at the Umno General Assembly last year ably catalogued the many religious-tinged episodes of unrest – the mobbing of Article 11, scuppering of the Inter Faith Commission (IFC), besieging of the church in Ipoh – but resolutely absolved Abdullah of responsibility.

Instead in Oct 2007, the above op-ed concluded: "More importantly, we should ensure that the prime minister has the support he needs so that his vision for a tolerant and peaceful society is realised for the good of all Malaysians."

On March 8, half the populace sent an unmistakable message to the PM that Malaysians think ‘his vision for a tolerant and peaceful society’ is sheer bunkum.

Yet on March 24, theSun in lauding Zaid’s appointment to Cabinet was still employing the same old highfalutin words over substance, not having learned any lesson about the people losing their patience with MSM spin.

theSun editorial said: "… Abdullah [Ahmad Badawi] deserves to be commended for enabling the crucial recovery of our judicial independence at this juncture in the nation’s journey." And still spinning in the same groove, theSun proceeded: "More fundamentally, the time has come for us to enshrine the independence of the judiciary as a cornerstone of our democracy in order that it remains forever beyond the reach of the executive".

TheSun’s showy words of support for the establishment actually says little, and am I mistaken to think Zaid as Minister represents the executive branch of government? So what the paper’s in effect saying is ‘Oh, goody, Zaid’s Law Minister to do great things’ and in the same breath, huffing, ‘Keep the judiciary beyond his reach’. What a sunny-side-up view of the doctrine of the separation of powers.

In as much as I share the general optimism that Zaid is the silver lining behind an otherwise dark BN cloud, I don’t think he’s even warmed his seat enough yet for the free paper to be already spouting such slushy superlatives, especially as in the official protocol list gazetted, the CJ is placed higher than Cabinet Ministers, including the one over-seeing the law.

But there are indeed legitimate expectations on Zaid to restore the primacy of the Civil Courts which has been eroded of late with the Islamists steamrolling the supremacy of Syariah. It is possible that Zaid may attempt to roll back the inroads made by creeping Islamisation. After all, he was the lawyer who once mounted the challenges against Kelantan and Terenganu in connection with the Hudud Enactments in both states.

Zaid’s actions at least speak louder than MSM’s words .