A small change of terminology in the Federal Constitution in 1976 allowed the government to claim religious legitimacy and confused the public, according to the human rights lawyer Aston Paiva.

The change involved swapping terms such as ‘Muslim law’ and ‘Muslim courts’ that has been in constitution since Independence, to terms such as ‘Islamic law’ and ‘syariah courts’, Aston said.

While the changes seemed superficial, Aston argued at a forum in Kuala Lumpur last night, the present terminologies have has different connotations to Muslims.

“I personally liked the term ‘Muslim law’ as well. It very clearly suggests that Muslims are the people who will decide what the law is for them, so it a very democratic language and I agree with that.

“But that was changed in 1976 to ‘Islamic law’. That means something completely different,” Aston told the Peace Symposium 2015.

He explained that he and some other lawyers had told their Muslim friends that they were about to argue in court that parts of the Malaysian syariah law are unconstitutional and their Muslim friends reacted with ‘utter shock and disbelief’.

The reaction was as though he and the lawyers were about to challenge God, he said, adding that he has since resorted to calling Malaysian syariah law as ‘state-enacted Islamic law’.

‘Politicians have confused the terms’

“What we really need to do is to change the language; to address the language and call it for what it is, rather than making things up and confusing the people.

“That’s exactly what the politicians have done in this country. We’re just confused,” he said.

Quoting the works of the Canadian scholar Tamir Moustafa, Aston said syariah law in Malaysia is a subversion of the Islamic legal tradition, even as it claims legitimacy through its fidelity to that tradition.

The changes came at the height of the dakwah movement, Moustafa reportedly said, when Umno was being criticised for not doing enough for Islam.

Aston quoted Moustafa as saying: “It is with the aid of such semantic shifts that the government presents the syariah court as a faithful rendering of the Islamic legal tradition, rather than as a subversion of that tradition. In this regard, a parallel may be drawn to nationalism.

“Just as nationalism requires a collective forgetting of the historical record in order to embrace a sense of nation, so too does the syariah court authority require a collective amnesia vis-a-vis the Islamic legal tradition.

“This semantic shift was likely an effort to endow Muslim family law and Muslim courts with a religious personality in order to brandish the government’s religious credentials.”

Aston said that by using the new terms, politicians were able to show how ‘Islamic’ they were, even when it is not true, and simultaneously discredit their opponents through their supposed lack of religious credentials.

He said Moustafa had also commissioned the pollster Merdeka Center to conduct a survey of Muslims in Malaysia in 2009, where among others, the respondents were asked whether they believed that each law and procedure applied by the Syariah Court is stated in the Quran.

He said that of the 1,043 respondents, 78.5 percent had replied in the affirmative.

“That is not true at all… It is such a very unfair statement, but it goes to show that the Malaysian public is confused,” Aston said.