The World Briefly

February 19, 2024

A Step Too Far

Malaysia

Listen to Today's Edition

The top court of majority-Muslim Malaysia this month invalidated Islamic criminal laws enacted in a state run by the opposition for offenses including sodomy and incest, arguing that they overstepped the central government’s authority – a verdict decried by Islamists, the Associated Press reported.

The court voted 8-1 in favor of quashing a set of 16 laws introduced by the government of the northeastern state of Kelantan, which provided for sanctions drawn from Islam’s Shariah law for people found guilty of offenses that also included sexual harassment, cross-dressing, and destroying places of worship.

Shariah laws are based on the Quran, Islam’s central text, and hadith scriptures. They coexist in Malaysia alongside government laws, which are based on common law practices left from the United Kingdom’s colonization of the archipelago, in a dual-track system that covers private matters for Muslims, specifically.

Even so, the Federal Court said Kelantan’s laws could not replace federal legislation on the matters they were addressing.

The panel ruled in favor of the plaintiffs – lawyer Nik Elin Nik Abdul Rashid and her daughter, two Kelantan Muslim women – who said the decision upheld the supremacy of the Malaysian Constitution.

Despite Malaysia’s ethnic and religious diversity, with significant Chinese and Indian minorities, Islam is a political matter in the country. Two-thirds of its 33 million population are Malays, who are all considered Muslim by law.

Kelantan, a rural state that has a 97-percent Muslim population, has been led for 34 years by the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). The single largest party in the federal parliament, PAS is part of the opposition to the government, while it governs four of Malaysia’s 13 states. It advocates for the rigorous implementation of Islamic law. A previous initiative to enact a criminal code called “hudud,” which would have allowed amputations for theft and stoning for adultery, was also struck down by federal authorities.

PAS chief Takiyuddin Hassan said the court’s verdict was “a black Friday for Islamic Shariah laws” and a precedent for such laws to be invalidated elsewhere in Malaysia.

Meanwhile, the government denied the claims and said it did not intend to crack down on Shariah courts but rather to empower them. Amid criticism from Islamists, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said the ruling merely came down to a matter of state jurisdiction and should not be subject to politicization.

Anwar has struggled to win over the Malays since he took office in 2022.

This story originally appeared in the February 19, 2024 newsletter, Failing Grade.