I wonder if God would agree with Norlinda when she argued that " If you love your partner, you'll convert ".

She agreed that love is the sole raison d'etre of marriage. ("Marriage is solely for couples totally in love with each other").

If that is her starting position, her logical conclusion should be - therefore, no other restrictions or obstacles should be placed in the way to prevent two persons marrying each other, such as religion (eg, whether you are a Muslim or not) or race (eg, whether you are a Malay or

not).

The couple should be allowed to live together as husband and wife even though they are not of the same religion because if they can love each other so deeply despite coming from different religious backgrounds, and can live with each other despite that difference, then love is all that matters. It's not up to the government or the clerics to tell them what should be the 'pre-conditions' of their love.

But Norlinda went on to contradict herself by saying, "If you are not willing to convert to your spouses' religion, then you do not love that person enough. As for being a hypocrite and converting, you can cheat everyone but not God. You will answer for it one day."

If the wife converts because she "loves her husband enough" but not because she believes in her husband's God, is that not hypocrisy?

Not only that - she is basically saying that her husband's God is not important enough compared to her husband. If she could convert for the sake of her husband (but not for God), she could also do the opposite for her husband later.

To me, that is a grave insult to God, because it trivialises the supremacy of God by basically saying that God is less important than a person. Yet, our Islamic religious authorities seem to be oblivious to this, and never asked themselves these imperative questions:

By mandating marital conversion (with the objective of shoring up the 'majority'), are they basically giving people a chance to trivialise Islam?

Would God have wanted these forced, hypocritical converts (even though it is actually the religious authorities, not God, who 'needed' these hypocrites to hang on to power)?

Isn't this mandated conversion policy the surest way of polluting the Muslim population with hypocritical elements?

Finally, to answer Norlinda's contention of "If you are not willing to convert to your spouses' religion, then you do not love that person enough," why not ask the same question in the exact same way to the Muslim spouse? If the Muslim spouse is not willing to convert to his spouse's Christian/Jewish/Hindu/Buddhist/Taoist religion, doesn't that also show that the Muslim spouse "does not love that person enough"?

Therefore, Norlinda's self-centred contention is, with all due respect, grossly unfair and deeply hurtful. Just because one of the couple refuses to make herself a hypocrite, Norlinda has refused to acknowledge the full depth and genuineness her love, and deemed her not worthy of being called a good enough lover.

Such egocentric questions always end up unnecessarily destroying the most precious thing in this world (though not necessarily in the hereafter) - LOVE.

"Marriage is solely for couples totally in love with each other"? Sadly, not in Malaysia. Well, at least not for inter-religious marriages, I guess.