MAJLIS AGAMA ISLAM SELANGOR

On the court record

Illustrates how the courts police the boundary between the civil and Syariah systems, review the exercise of religious-administrative power, and test State Syariah legislation against the Federal Constitution.

The Majlis Agama Islam Selangor (the Selangor Islamic Religious Council) appears in this corpus predominantly as a respondent, in litigation at the meeting point of administrative law, constitutional law and the jurisdictional boundary between the civil and Syariah courts. A significant group of Federal Court decisions concerns judicial review touching Islamic administration, including a challenge to the validity of a fatwa and the question whether that challenge lies within the jurisdiction of the civil courts, and the assessment of a person's religious status where it is asserted that the person was never a Muslim or is no longer a Muslim. These cases engage the leading authorities on the interaction between civil and Syariah jurisdiction and the reach of the constitutional guarantees. A further constitutional strand concerns the validity of provisions of State Syariah criminal legislation, including whether a particular section of the Syariah Criminal Offences (Selangor) enactment was within the legislative competence of the State, tested against the division of powers in the Federal Constitution. The corpus also reaches originating-summons proceedings on conversion to Islam and its renunciation and the forum in which such questions are determined. Because the Council administers Islamic religious matters within the State, it is characteristically named as the authority whose decision, fatwa or jurisdiction is in issue. The matters are decided across the High Court, the Court of Appeal and, notably, the Federal Court, where several questions of constitutional and jurisdictional principle have been resolved. Collectively the decisions in which the Selangor Islamic Religious Council is a party illustrate how the courts police the boundary between the civil and Syariah systems, review the exercise of religious-administrative power, and test State Syariah legislation against the Federal Constitution. Several of the reported matters also concern the correct forum for a dispute touching religious status, and whether a particular question falls to be decided by the civil courts or the Syariah courts, so that the decisions turn as much on jurisdiction as on the substantive religious or constitutional issue. Across these matters the Council appears as the authority whose decisions and jurisdiction the courts must locate within the constitutional framework.