KUALA LUMPUR, June 19 — Speaker Tan Sri Pandikar Amin Mulia today said he agreed with Putrajaya’s grounds for declaring Malaysia a non-secular state, as he rejected a motion to censure a senior minister for allegedly misleading the House.
The Speaker said he found no issue with the explanation provided by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom to justify the government’s position, saying that it was a matter of interpretation of the Federal Constitution.
“When I studied all the facts before me, I found that there is no prima facie case,” he told the House when rejecting the motion filed by DAP’s Sibu MP Oscar Ling Chai Yew.
Responding to Ling’s request for clarification on his ruling, Pandikar said that no institution in the country has so far determined that Malaysia is a secular state.
He stressed that a 1988 Supreme Court ruling, which is routinely cited by proponents of declaring Malaysia a secular state, only ruled that the laws of the country, and not the country, are secular.
Pandikar added that the entire argument must be viewed within the context of the meaning of the word secular, which he said was described as “not connected with religious or spiritual matters” in the Oxford English dictionary.
He explained that unlike countries like the United States, India and Turkey, which specifically state in their constitutions that they are secular states, Malaysia clearly places Islam as the religion of the federation.
“If I refer to the Oxford definition of secular, it means ‘not connected with’, but in Malaysia it is ‘connected with’,” he said referring to the link between religion and state.
Pandikar, however, noted that his view is only applicable in the Dewan Rakyat and cannot be taken as an authority for reference outside of Parliament, as he is not a judge.
On Tuesday, Ling tabled a motion to censure Jamil Khir for allegedly using a wrong description of Malaysia’s formation as the basis for the latter’s claim that Malaysia is not a secular state.
Ling argued that it was only the federation of Malaya that was formed based on the Islamic administration of the Malay Sultanates and that the Malay Sultans were heads of Islam in their respective states.
The Sarawak lawmaker stressed that three of the four signatories of the Malaysia Agreement — Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak — did not have a state religion and this was further reinforced by the 18-point and 20-point agreements drawn up by Sarawak and Sabah respectively.
Jamil Khir on Monday declared that Malaysia is not a secular state, amid the ongoing debate on the possible introduction of hudud into the nation’s legal system.
The minister in charge of Islamic affairs said that this position was reinforced by several constitutional provisions, which includes Article 3 which places Islam as the religion of the federation.
Jamil Khir’s assertion works against a key argument against the implementation of Islamic criminal law here, although he stopped short of declaring that Malaysia is an Islamic state.
The hudud issue resurfaced earlier this year, following talk that a few PAS lawmakers had intended to table a private member’s bill in Parliament to debate the implementation of Islamic criminal law.
The Kelantan state assembly passed a bill to implement hudud in the state in 1993, but it has been put on hold until now as was considered to be in conflict with the Federal Constitution.
