PUTRAJAYA: The Court of Appeal has allowed the Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) and the state government to reinstate a 36-year-old woman's conversion to Islam.
The three-man panel of judges led by Datuk Yaakob Md Sam made the majority decision today.
Mais and the state government were appealing the High Court's decision on Dec 21, 2021 which nullified the woman's conversion to Islam by her Muslim-convert mother when she was four years old.
The woman, born in Selangor to a Hindu father and a Buddhist mother who later converted to Islam, filed an originating summons in the Shah Alam High Court on May 10 last year, seeking a declaration that she is not a Muslim and wanted the National Registration Department (NRD) to remove the word "Islam" from her identity card.
She claimed that her mother converted her to Islam in 1991 at the Selangor Islamic Religious Department. At the material time, her parents were in the midst of a divorce. After the divorce, her mother married a Muslim man in 1993 while her father died in an accident in 1996.
The woman said despite her conversion into Islam, she continued to profess the Hindu religion and that her mother and stepfather allowed her to practice Hinduism— the religion she was initially practiced.
In 2013, the woman filed an application at the Kuala Lumpur Shariah High Court seeking to renounce Islam but her application for renunciation was dismissed in 2017, and she was ordered to attend a series of counselling sessions. The Shariah Appeals Court also upheld the ruling.
The woman then filed the suit in the Shah Alam High Court (civil) in 2021 and succeeded in getting a declaration that she is not a Muslim.
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