In 2004, Juliana signed a document she could not read, believing it was for her marriage. Since 2017, she has been trying to undo what it did, and has been sent from one State to the other and back again.

Juliana is not her real name. She has chosen to remain anonymous.

Born and raised in Sarawak

Juliana was born in Sarawak and raised a Christian. She grew up speaking her native tongue and Malay.

As an adult, she met a Muslim man from Terengganu and were in a relationship. In time, they planned to marry. Like many people, she knew little about the law. She did not know that Malaysian law makes no provision for a marriage between a Muslim and a non-Muslim, and that one of them would have to convert.

A form for the marriage

In 2004, her partner gave her a document to sign. It was printed in English and in Arabic script. She could neither read nor understand English or Arabic. He told her it was for the purpose of their marriage, and she signed it. He told her it was for the purpose of their marriage, and she signed it.

He then took her to the religious department. There, a woman officer asked her to recite some words in Arabic, repeating them after her. Juliana did as she was asked. No one told her what the words meant. She was told, again, that this was all for the marriage.

She left with two documents: a marriage certificate, and a green card, also printed in English and Arabic script.

Only when she showed the card to a friend who could read English did she learn what it was: a certificate of conversion to Islam. Her answer to her friend was simple. She had understood it was for the marriage.

Her belief never changed

Juliana never practised Islam. Most converts would go to the National Registration Department to update their identity card, which then carries the word “ISLAM”. Juliana never did. In her mind, she had never intended to convert. She had simply married.

The marriage lasted about a year. Her husband left while she was pregnant and never came back. Juliana returned to Sarawak, to her family, and raised her child there. Because of the conversion recorded in Terengganu, the National Registration Department registered her child as a Muslim, even though her own identity card has never shown Islam and she has never practised the religion.

She went on living as she always had: a Christian, in her hometown in Sarawak.

Across the sea, and back again

In 2017, Juliana went to the Syariah Court in Kuching and had her marriage dissolved by fasakh. She then turned to the question of her religious status.

An acquaintance who worked at the Baitulmal in Kuching told her that the application to be declared no longer a Muslim had to be made in Terengganu, where she had converted. So she saved up money, and later that year she travelled back across the South China Sea to Terengganu.

At the Syariah Court in Terengganu, she was told over the counter that because she lived in Sarawak, the application had to be made in Sarawak. She did not know what else to do, so she came home.

The procedure she waited for

Not long after she returned, the Sarawak government announced that a procedure would be put in place for people in her position. So she waited.

She consulted Syariah lawyers, but their fees were far beyond what she could pay. The pandemic followed, and her family came first. In 2023 she began again, looking for a lawyer and asking others how the procedure worked. The answers conflicted. Some told her she could apply in Sarawak; others said she could not.

Then she heard of someone who had represented themselves at the Syariah Court in Kuching: another person who had converted to marry, whose marriage had not lasted, and whose application to be declared no longer a Muslim was before the court. If they could do it, perhaps she could too.

In 2025, Juliana filed her own application in Kuching. At the mention, the case was struck out: kes dibuang. She was told, orally, that because she had converted in Terengganu, the court had no jurisdiction to hear it. She received no written reasons.

The procedure she had waited for arrived at the end of 2018, as the Syariah Civil Procedure (Declaration of Islamic Religious Status) Rules 2018. Rule 3(1)(a) provides:

a Plaintiff who was born and is residing in the State of Sarawak. However, this provision is not applicable to a person who has converted to Islam outside Sarawak;

Juliana did not know it while she waited, but the procedure had been written in a way that left her out. I discussed the Rules, and where their authority comes from, in Part 3 of my Religious Freedom in Malaysia: Developments of a person’s freedom to change their religion series.

What Terengganu’s own law requires

The law in force at the time of Juliana’s conversion was the Administration of Islamic Religious Affairs (Terengganu) Enactment 2001. Section 91 set out three requirements for a valid conversion (my translation):

(a) the person must utter the two clauses of the Affirmation of Faith in Arabic, reasonably clearly;
(b) at the time of uttering them, the person must be aware that they mean “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and I bear witness that the Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. is the Messenger of Allah” ; and
(c) the utterance must be made of the person’s own free will.

Section 92 then provided that a person becomes a Muslim as soon as she finishes uttering the Affirmation, provided that the requirements of section 91 are met.

Take Juliana’s account as she gives it. She may well have met the first requirement: she repeated the words after the officer, presumably clearly enough. The second she did not meet at all. She did not know what the words meant; she believed she was completing a step towards her marriage. The officer who led her through the words was the one person in the room able to tell her what they meant.

The third requirement fails in any real sense too. Juliana recited the words willingly, but what she was willing to do was what she had been told it was: a marriage formality. A person cannot freely choose to do something she has not been told she is doing. The Malay text puts it more plainly than any translation: the utterance must be made with kerelaan hati, the willingness of the person’s own heart.

In my view, on her account, the condition in section 92 was never met. By the terms of Terengganu’s own law, Juliana did not become a Muslim that day. The green card records an event that, in law, did not take place.

The common law recognises something similar for documents. A person who signs a document fundamentally different from the one she believed she was signing may plead non est factum: it is not my deed. Juliana signed a form she could not read, in languages she did not know, on the assurance that it was for her marriage.

None of this is a criticism of Islam or of the shahadah. If anything, section 91 exists to protect the meaning of the declaration. A declaration of faith made by someone who does not know she is making it protects no one: not the person, and not the faith she is recorded as having entered.

If that is right, what Juliana should really be asking for is not a declaration that she is no longer a Muslim, but recognition that she never became one. The green card stands in the way. So long as it records a conversion, the only way past it is to have that conversion declared invalid, and the law that decides its validity is Terengganu’s. With no avenue open to her in Sarawak, that road, too, leads back across the sea.

The marriage could be annulled, but the conversion could not

The part of Juliana’s story that is hardest to explain is what happened in Kuching.

In 2017, the Syariah Court in Kuching dissolved a marriage that had been solemnised and registered in Terengganu. It could do so because Sarawak’s Islamic Family Law Ordinance 2001 applies to all Muslims living in the State, recognises Muslim marriages solemnised outside it, and allows the court to dissolve a marriage wherever either party lives in Sarawak when the application is made. The place of the marriage did not matter. Where Juliana lived did.

In 2025, the same court system told her that it could not hear her application about her religious status, because the conversion had taken place in Terengganu. Now the place of the conversion was everything, and where she lived counted for nothing.

The two positions are hard to reconcile. Under the Federal Constitution, the Syariah courts have jurisdiction only over persons professing the religion of Islam. When the Kuching court dissolved her marriage, it acted on the footing that Juliana was such a person, living in Sarawak and subject to Sarawak’s Islamic law. On that same footing she remains subject to Sarawak’s Syariah law in every other respect, including its Syariah criminal offences. For every duty Sarawak’s law places on a Muslim, she belongs to Sarawak. For the one remedy she needs, she does not.

There is also a question about where the exclusion comes from. In 2018, the Federal Court held that Sarawak’s Syariah Court has jurisdiction over applications to leave Islam, implied from provisions of the Majlis Islam Sarawak Ordinance 2001. Nothing in that reasoning, as reported, turned on where an applicant had converted. The exclusion came later, in rules made under a power to regulate the court’s procedure and practice. As I noted in Part 3, whether such a power can confer jurisdiction is a question the Rules do not address. The reverse question is just as hard: if the Syariah Court already has that jurisdiction, can a rule of procedure take it away from Muslims living in Sarawak simply because they converted in another State?

Elsewhere, the place of conversion has not closed the court’s door. A woman who converted in Penang in 1995 had her application heard by the Syariah courts of Selangor. Dahlia Dhaima, converted in Selangor, had hers heard and decided by the Syariah courts of the Federal Territory. Neither succeeded, and in Dahlia Dhaima Mary Lim FCJ questioned whether the Federal Territory courts could apply Selangor’s law at all. But neither applicant was turned away because she had converted somewhere else.

Should she have to move?

If Terengganu, in practice, will hear only those who live there, and Sarawak will hear only those who converted there, one route appears to remain: that Juliana leave her home, her family and her community, move to Terengganu, establish residence there, and only then begin the process, with its hearings, counselling sessions and adjournments. As other cases shows, that process can run for years.

Put plainly, it is hard to defend. A right that can be exercised only by relocating to another State for an indefinite period is not a right most people can exercise. It is a condition few could ever meet, and it falls hardest on the people most often in Juliana’s position: women from Sarawak who converted for a marriage elsewhere and came home when it ended.

Article 11(1) of the Federal Constitution guarantees every person the right to profess and practise his or her religion. It does not say “in the State where you converted”, or “if you can afford to move”.

This is what access to justice looks like for Juliana: the cost of a lawyer she cannot afford; a flight across the sea to be sent home from a counter; advice that changes with whoever she asks; an application, filed in good faith, that ends at its first mention. After all of it, no one has examined the one question she has asked a court to examine.