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Revathi Massosai wants to be united with her husband. For 180 days, this young mother of a 1-year-old baby has endured unbearable mental and emotional suffering. The Malaysian authorities have forcefully separated the husband and wife because the woman dared to become an apostate.
Massosai was born of Indian parents who had converted to Islam. But, brought up as a Hindu by her grandparents, she decided to be a Hindu and married a Hindu. As her legal papers stated she was a Muslim, she wished to change this. When she approached the legal authorities, she was told she must go to the Islamic Department. She was advised by the Malacca Islamic Religious Department to make an application at the Malacca Shariah High Court to confirm her status as a Hindu. Then the nightmare started.
Massosai did as she was told. But she was shocked to find that instead of granting her wish, the Shariah Court ordered her detained in a rehabilitation center in Ulu Yam, Selangor, under Melaka's Shariah criminal laws for 100 days. To her utter horror the detention was further extended in her absence for another 80 days because she did not "repent."
Meanwhile, Massosai's Muslim mother obtained a Shariah Court order granting her custody of her daughter's 15-month-old-baby. This order was enforced on the father's Hindu family with the assistance of the police. Thus the family was torn apart -- with the mother in detention, the child with the grandparents and the father alone, having lost both his wife and his infant daughter to the fundamentalism of a state.
Meanwhile Massosai, who is still undergoing 'rehabilitation,' has been released and consigned to her Islamic parents in a further move to ward off her husband's legal efforts to be united with his lawfully wed wife.
Massosai has revealed the pressures she faced during her confinement with the Islamic law enforcers. She said she suffered mental torture, being told her daughter would be sent to a welfare home if she did not accept Islam. She was asked to wear a headscarf and was served beef, which as a Hindu she could not eat.
As she was going through these ordeals, Malaysians cutting across religion and race organized a prayer vigil for the young wife and mother, fighting for her freedom, her child and her right to family life. On June 19 in Kuala Lumpur a nighttime prayer vigil was held to draw public attention to the case. Participants were from such varied groups as the Malaysian Consultative Council on Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism, the Women's Action Society and Sisters in Islam.
This hapless family has been cunningly separated by the fundamentalist authorities. In this era of global vision and humanism, a family has been divided by sectarianism. That this sectarian partition of the family has been abetted by the state machinery is a shame. It diminishes the humanity of all of us.
May everyone who reads this -- Tamil or Malay, Hindu or Muslim, male or female -- everyone who considers himself or herself a global citizen belonging to the planet, protest to the Malaysian Embassy. An online petition is available at: http://www.petitiononline.com/2007Diva/petition.html)
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz.")
