Deepa Subramaniam would not let go of her son, clinging to five-year-old Mithran’s leg even as the car into which he had been bundled began to accelerate.
The 30-year-old, a Hindu in Muslim-majority Malaysia, says she was dragged along the stone-strewn road outside her house until she dropped to the ground, scratched and sobbing, as her ex-husband drove off.
The alleged abduction on April 9, detailed by Subramaniam in a police report and witnessed by a neighbour, was a painful loss for the mother-of-two, who has not seen Mithran since and fears her ex-spouse’s conversion to Islam will win him custody.
The case has become a focal point of tensions over the widening role of Islam, which critics say is threatening Malaysia’s secular core and exacerbating fraught relations between ethnic Malays, who are Muslims, and minority Chinese and Indians.
Subramaniam’s estranged spouse converted from Hinduism to Islam in 2012, after their nine-year marriage broke down, taking the name Izwan Abdullah. He then converted Mithran and their now eight-year-old daughter to Islam, giving him a strong case under Islamic law, or shariah, to take over their custody - which a shariah court granted him five months later.
“In five minutes, the children read some verses and were converted,” said Subramaniam. “In 10 years, he never gave us money, he enjoyed his life and abandoned me countless times. Under what characteristic are they giving my children to him?”
Subramaniam fought back, last year obtaining a court protection order based on her accounts of domestic violence and in April winning a high court ruling that dissolved their marriage and gave her custody of the children.
Secular or islamic?
In Subramaniam’s custody battle, and another similar case, Malaysia’s national police chief, Khalid Abu Bakar, has declined to act on judges’ orders for children to be returned to their mothers, citing competing orders from the civil courts and state shariah courts. His stance has been backed by the home minister.
Legal experts say that is an unprecedented challenge to the secular courts’ authority. Politicians and activists pushing for Islam to play a bigger role in society have been on the advance since a May 2013 election that further polarised the nation and left the government more reliant on Malay and Islamic conservatives.
Prime Minister Najib Razak, who casts himself globally as a leader of Islamic moderation, is accused by critics of failing to take a stand against emboldened Islamic officials and courts as he seeks to shore up his party’s core Malay vote.
Shariah courts operate at the state level and have been limited to Muslim family matters. Law experts say they had been recognised as subordinate to civil courts, but the legal lines have become blurred as shariah courts have expanded their powers in recent years to areas such as homosexuality and gambling.
“The civil courts have totally abdicated whenever there is a whiff of an Islamic issue,” said Shad Faruqi, a law professor at Malaysian university UiTM. “We are witnessing a situation where a silent re-writing of the constitution is taking place.”
