This is a story about Peter. Peter converted to Islam to marry, later divorced, and complied with every step required to return to his original faith. Nine years on, he is in another round of state assessment, with no decision in sight.
A quiet man, waiting to live out his faith
Peter is probably like someone you know. He has never sought attention. He works, sees his family, keeps a quiet life. He has spent the last nine years trying to undo a single decision he made in 2014, and he has tried to undo it in exactly the way the law told him to.
In 2013, Peter fell in love. He was raised a Christian, in a Christian family. The woman he loved was Muslim. They wanted to marry. Even though the woman herself did not really practise Islam, both of them understood that under Malaysian law, only one practical path was open to them: he had to convert.
So he did. In early 2014, at the Majlis Agama Islam Selangor, Peter quietly embraced Islam, without his family’s knowledge. He uttered the shahadah, signed the documents, received the certificate. Five months later, they married.
Peter eventually opened up to his family about what that conversion really was. As he later put it in his filings before the Syariah Court, it was “semata-mata untuk perkahwinan dan atas dokumen sahaja” – for the marriage, and on paper only. Neither he nor his wife practised Islam. He continued to attend church; at times, his wife would come with him. Three years later, the marriage ended. They divorced at the end of 2017. That is when Peter began trying to formally return to the faith he had never really left internally.
The path he was told to take
Shortly after his divorce, on the advice of a syariah lawyer, he filed his first application at the Syariah High Court of Perak. He paid a few thousand ringgit to the lawyer, only for that lawyer to stop taking his calls, stop answering his messages, and – in Peter’s view – fail to represent him in his best interest. In early 2022, the Syariah Court concluded the case by ordering him to undergo sesi istitabah – sessions in which religious officers attempt to persuade an applicant to remain in Islam.
Peter attended ten such sessions with the Jabatan Mufti Negeri Perak. He cooperated, listened, answered. He simply continued to say what he had said from the beginning: that he did not believe in Islam, that he wished to formally return to his previous faith, that he didn’t want the label “ISLAM” on his Identity Card, and to live openly as a Christian. The sessions concluded at the end of 2022. At the end of it, all he received was a copy of the session report. There was no order from the court, no declaration, nothing that resolved his status. But he kept looking for a way forward.
By January 2025, he had become aware of recent Federal Court decisions – Rosliza Bt Ibrahim [2021] and Dahlia Dhaima Abdullah [2024] – which he thought suggested that a proper procedure was now in place for situations like his. The Federal Court had held that once a person is administratively recorded as Muslim, any application to be declared no longer Muslim falls within Syariah Court jurisdiction – regardless of whether the person practises the religion or believes in it. So long as the record says “Islam”, only the Syariah Court can change it.
About seven years after his first attempt, Peter filed another application, hoping the path was now clearer. He filed his affidavit, his written submissions, and complied as carefully as he could.
The courts decision
Within four months of filing, the Syariah High Court of Perak dismissed the application.
The court framed three issues:
- whether Peter was a Muslim in the eyes of the law and hukum syarak;
- whether he had proven his conversion took place in circumstances casting doubt on its validity; and
- whether the application should be allowed.
On the first, the court applied Section 2 of the Enakmen Pentadbiran Agama Islam (Perak) 2004, which defines a Muslim (orang Islam) as including a person who has embraced Islam under Section 96 of the same enactment, and a person who has declared themselves Muslim under legal compulsion. Because the official documentation showed both, the court held Peter remained, in law, a Muslim.
On the second, the court held that Peter had not discharged the burden of proving that his conversion was made in circumstances casting doubt on its validity – the public conversion record, the ikrar of shahadah, and his own admission that the conversion was for marriage were, in the court’s view, evidence that he had knowingly converted, not evidence that the conversion was invalid.
The third issue followed: the application was dismissed. He was given fourteen days to appeal.
The appeal that was not an appeal
In January 2026, a three-member panel of the Syariah Court of Appeal in Perak sat to hear his case, with the full record before them.
The panel did not decide his appeal.
Instead, invoking Section 139 of the Enakmen Tatacara Mal Mahkamah Syariah (Perak) 2004, the panel ordered unanimously that Peter be sent back into the process. He was to undergo sesi penilaian akidah – assessment of creed/faith – for three months under the Jabatan Mufti Negeri Perak. Attendance was compulsory; if he failed to attend, the court reserved the power to extend the three-month period even after it had run. The Jabatan Mufti was further ordered to investigate his “cara hidup dan amalan beragama” – his way of living and his religious practices. Only once that report and a recommendation were delivered would the court fix a date for its decision.
In March 2026, the Jabatan Mufti issued the formal summons. He was ordered to attend in modest dress, alone, without representation or anyone accompanying him. At the time of writing, he has already undergone six sessions. The process is not yet over, and there are still more sessions to come. There is, in addition, a question of legal basis. Section 139 of the Enakmen Tatacara Mal Mahkamah Syariah (Perak) 2004 governs the procedure for filing a notice of appeal. It is not a provision that, on any plain reading, authorises an appellate court to remit an applicant for months of further faith assessment by a separate body. Yet that is the work it has been made to do here. The order offers no explanation for the gap between what the section says and what it has been used to do. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions about why.
What the law asked, and what it kept asking
Peter has done everything in accordance with the law. He attempted to leave Islam in accordance with the law. He has now sat through sixteen counselling sessions, and the count is rising. Nine years on, he is still inside the system.
The appeal order contains no point at which Peter can demand an answer. The three-month period can be extended. The decision date is contingent on a report from another body. The constitutional arguments – the supremacy of the Constitution under Article 4 and freedom of religion under Article 11 – were not addressed on the merits. They were, at first instance, denied; on appeal, they were simply postponed by procedure.
What this case shows, however, is that routing such applications exclusively to the Syariah Court does not, in practice, uphold the constitutional right. The forum is empowered to apply state enactments and to weigh an applicant’s beliefs through its own religious lens – but not, on this record, to deliver a timely answer on the constitutional question itself.
Most Malaysians never see this part of the system. Most people assume that if you do not believe in a religion, the law will not insist that you do; that if you cooperate fully with every required process, the process will eventually resolve your situation; that the right to appeal includes the right to a decision.
When Peter first attempted to return to his previous faith in 2017, there was no clear procedure. By 2025, decisions of the Federal Court appeared to have settled the question of forum. Nine years and sixteen counselling sessions later, the procedure remains, in substance, the same – and there is still no clear route to an answer. It is fair to ask, looking at this record, whether the laws in place are even consistent with the Federal Constitution.
The question we ought to be asking
There are people who will say Peter should not have converted in the first place. That is fair in retrospect. But it quietly accepts the underlying problem: a young person in love was required to make a religious declaration he did not believe in, in order to marry, and then found that the declaration is treated as permanent regardless of what he actually believes – and that no court, trial or appellate, has yet been willing to look at that question on its merits.
There are people who will say the Syariah Court is doing what the law requires. That, too, is true – though there are real questions about whether every step in this case has been correctly taken, and whether the statutes invoked in fact bear the weight they have been made to carry. The judges are not the architects of this system, but they are the ones operating it. The real problem is a framework that, as designed, can take a person who has followed every procedure for nine years and produce, instead of an answer, another set of procedures. What an applicant like Peter is asking is, at its heart, a constitutional question: whether the State can hold a citizen to a religion he does not profess. By treating that question as a Syariah matter from the outset, the system has produced a forum in which the constitutional question is unlikely ever to be answered on its merits – and, in Peter’s case, a procedure that has not been able to produce an answer of any kind for nine years.
None of this is an argument against Islam, or against the Syariah Court, or against anyone’s sincere faith. It is an argument about whether the procedure – or more accurately, the lack of it – as it presently exists is capable of doing the job the Constitution requires it to do. Peter’s case suggests that, for people like him, it is not.
We do not need to agree on every aspect of religion to agree on this much: when the law tells a citizen to follow a path, that path ought to be fair, proportionate, and capable of resolving the very question the citizen has come to it with. The law owes him a real answer at the end. Not a deferral. Not another round of assessment. A real answer.
Peter is still waiting – hoping and praying for his right to profess his faith.
This piece is written in the hope that more Malaysians, of every faith, will look honestly at what is being done — and not done — in their name.
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