Destroying The Past One Life At A Time

MALAYSIA: COURT REJECTS HINDU WIDOW'S CLAIM TO BODY

Kuala Lumpur, 28 Dec. (AKI) - A Indian Malaysian man, M. Moorthy, a mountaineering hero in his country, has been buried under Islamic rites after his Hindu widow lost a court battle on Wednesday about his religious identity. A High Court in Malaysia ruled that it could not override the Islamic or Shariah courts in matters of religious conversion. Moorthy's widow S. Kaliammal has been involved in a tug-of-war with the religious authorities over who should bury her husband, who died last Tuesday after seven years of paralysis.

M. Moorthy, 36, was a Hindu when he became Malaysia's mountaineering hero in 1997 after he completed a climb up Mount Everest together with the first Malaysian expedition to attempt the feat.

He was paralysed during army training in 1998 and slipped into a coma last month, at which time his former colleagues told Kaliammal that her husband converted to Islam in October 2004.

When he died last week, the state's Islamic officials and his family's supporters fought over the body and a Shariah court upheld the claim by Moorthy's army colleagues that he had become a Muslim last year.

His family was not allowed to appear before the Shariah court to dispute the conversion because they are not Muslims. So they turned to a civil High Court who eventually agreed with the government lawyers that the civil court had no jurisdiction over the case.

According to a report in the Malaysian daily The Star, Lawyer S. Kanesalingam, who appeared for the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism, argued that the Shariah Court had no power to make an order on the case because Moorthy was not a Muslim. He cited Kaliammal's affidavit in which she said that her husband was not professing Islam; that he had carried the palkudam (milk pot) during the Hindu festival of Thaipusam this year and that he was consuming alcohol and non-halal food.

Does this sound like a sincere convert Muslim to you, dear reader?

I'll tell you what it sounds like to me: That he was "converted" to Islam at his death. He was a national hero in a Muslim-majority nation; a man lauded for an indisputible act of skill and daring. In the Muslim mind, a non-Muslim cannot possibly be capable of such deeds.

And so M. Moorthy joins a long list of names that includes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus and Mary--people who had to be made into Muslims by Muslims because of Islam's utter incapacity to produce people who impress by being the first, the best or, most tellingly, inspire men by their moral rectitude, sacrifice, and service to others to conduct their lives in a like manner.

And speaking of the carpenter from Nazareth, Meryl Yourish isolated another strain of the same disease in a Christmas Day post on this story:

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