Aarvidi’s Weblog

Man buried as Muslim amid conversion row

Jan 25, 08 4:53pm

An elderly ethnic Chinese man has been buried as a Muslim after his Buddhist family lost a battle with the Islamic authorities who said he had converted, his son said today.
Police seized the body of Gan Eng For, who died on Sunday aged 74, after his oldest son - himself a Muslim convert - said he had switched to the religion last year.
Other family members said Gan could not have converted because he was senile and paralysed after suffering two strokes.
“He could not even move his arms or talk,” his other son 42-year-old Gan Hock Sin told AFP.
“It is shocking that Islamic authorities say he recited some Islamic words when he was being converted last year,” he said.
Gov’t not being fair
The dispute, the latest in a series of conversion rows in Malaysia, came shortly after a court ordered a Christian woman’s body be returned to her family after Islamic authorities admitted she had not converted.
The cases have fed accusations over the growing “Islamisation” of Malaysia, where the population is dominated by Muslim Malays living alongside ethnic Chinese and Indian communities.
Gan criticised the conduct of the state Islamic authorities who buried his father in a Muslim cemetery yesterday on the orders of a religious court.
“They have been cruel to my mother and my family. We could not see his body before he was buried. This government is not fair,” he said.
“Before my father died, he had told my mother that he wished to be buried according to Chinese rituals.”

This is the report by Malaysiakini on the burial of a Chinese man as a Muslim and he is purported to have converted to Islam. The man was buried without the family being present. I am sure the wife would have preferred to see the body being buried but being denied this privilege, she is going to carry to her death the resentment the religious people were cruel. Consider her agony as a wife, would any wife demure in carrying out the last rites of her husband. The last rites are symbolic to her, it is the last rite to indicate she is now a widow. In practical sense, she becomes a widow once the husband dies, but to the world it signifies the breaking up of the husband-wife relationship as the body is lowered to the ground. In this case the man is buried as a vagrant and a nobody when by choice he has a wife, and a family to ensure he is buried according to his religious rights practiced by the family. Is she or the family ever going to be at peace the way the dead body has been disposed off and the other fear of the wrath of the Gods they pray to, for not ensuring their love one passed on graciously. Every religion has got its do and don’ts. It is universal.

At 74, and a paralytic after 2 strokes, his conduct and speech is suspect. He is not going to engage in a long conversation with anyone expect to indicate his needs and wants and this could have been a word(or grunt) here and there(but family claims he could not talk) accompanied by gestures. I have seen a lot of people who are paralysed and this is the norm. Your progress to senility is worsened by the stroke and since he could not even move his arms or talk. I assume most of his needs were met by gestures by eye and maybe a smile. Basically he is a vegetable and we are told he recited some Islamic words. The person who listened to this recital must have been a speech therapist to differentiate from a babble or a grunt which a 74 old sick man does normally and some quotation of words foreign to him. This to a man who finds it difficult as a result of strokes to articulate himself in his own mother tongue.

The old man was on his way to the other world, which I am sure the son and the religious authorities knew as the sun rises in the east. They had a year to play around, did it not strike them that the wife and family must be appraised of the situation. Would this not ensure the converted man carried out his new religious obligations like praying 5 times a day and not carry on as a Buddhist or follow the religious rites. Or does it suffice, he has been converted, and let him carry on the life he had done for 73 years. Who suffers, the religion, the new convert, the person or persons who converted the person or this is the way it happens.

This the religious authorities including those who performed the rites of death, and the son, a Muslim and surely who knows the obligations of a Muslim must answer. God is great in whatever religion.