Hudud law should be first tried on the country’s elites and royals, Muslim activist Zainah Anwar suggested today as a way to prove that the Islamic penal code will be applied fairly before it is introduced to the rest of Malaysia.
The director of Musawah and former Sisters in Islam chief argued the controversial hudud law is vulnerable to abuse, pointing to evidence of injustice in countries where the law is in effect.
“If you really want to implement the hudud laws, let’s do a test run and I think it should only apply to the Cabinet ministers, members of parliament, to the state assemblymen, to the mentri besars, and to the royal families.
“Let’s test on them first because you know they are not going to be prosecuted, you know it’s going to be people like you and I here,” she said at the forum entitled “What is hudud” at the MCA headquarters.
Zainah said the debate on implementing hudud is distracting the society from more important matters such as corruption, urban poverty and the goods and services tax (GST) that will be implemented next year.
She also insisted that hudud law could not be applied in Malaysia, adding that the continued push for its implementation was feeding existing “Islamophobia”.
“There is more to Islam than laws. There is more to Islamic laws than hudud.”
THEMALAYMAIL