aduh duhhhh ini macam pun adakah....sebab LIm Goh Tong kaya atau mmg dia masuk Islam...
(KUANTAN, Friday) The Syariah Court today has today declared that the late Tan Sri Lim Goh Tong was a Muslim more than 10 years ago when he passed away, in 2007. The Syariah Court also ruled that since no non-Muslim is allowed to inherit any part of a Muslim’s assets or wealth, the inheritance of Lim’s property by his non-Muslim children are invalid and unlawful.
“Therefore, the assets should be immediately returned to Tan Sri Lim’s name, and then redistributed to his Muslim heirs (if any) according to Syariah law. If he has no Muslim heir, then the assets shall be given to the Islamic authorities and they can do whatever they wish. The non-Muslim children are disinherited.” The Syariah Court ruled.
Dato’ Zakaria Lim Abdullah, 35, the late Tan Sri Lim’s only Muslim child and the 20th of his 20 offsprings, is now poised to become the Chairman of Genting Group, 1 of Southeast Asia’s richest companies worth RM2 trillion as at press time. (He would have inherited only 1/20 of Tan Sri Lim’s assets if Tan Sri Lim was not declared a Muslim.) However, he refused to confirm whether he would stop the gambling business of Genting even though it is haram under Islamic law.
“Are you saying that our Hadhari government should refuse to collect taxes from gambling, alcohol, pork and other haram businesses?” Dato’ Zakaria replied, perhaps rhetorically.
Dato’ Zakaria has also said that his shall honor his pledge to donate 1/10 of his newly inherited fortune to Jabatan Agama Islam Pahang and UMNO in equal share if he won the case, made 3 days before the Syariah Court decision.
“Business Reasons”
“My late father wanted to keep his conversion secret because he was a gambling tycoon, and he did not want to jeopardize his gambling empire or make his shareholders lose confidence in Genting,” said Dato’ Zakaria during the hearing in Syariah Court. The Syariah Court felt that “this is most likely true because of the huge business implications. It is very normal for Chinese to do this. We can accept that.”
As to the testimonies of Tan Sri Lim’s 19 other offsprings in the Syariah Court, who unanimously disputed the alleged conversion, the Syariah Court said, “Even though it is 19 to 1, but because the non-Muslim witnesses refused to swear on the Qur’an before they testified in court, we could not consider their testimonies. In any event, even if they did swear on the Qur’an, the non-Muslims would still carry less weight when compared to the testimony of 2 Muslim men. It is not about the number, it is about quality of the witnesses.”
The other witness supporting Dato’ Zakaria’s claim to have witnessed Tan Sri Lim’s conversion is Ustaz Abdul Rahman Ganinah Abdullah, 23 year old.
The Ustaz would have been only 13 year old at that time of the conversion, but the Syariah Court said that,”Being a righteous, God-fearing Muslim, we have no reason to suspect that the Ustaz told any lie. In any event, he has reached the age of puberty at the time (of the conversion) so he was qualified to witness the conversion.”
“Answer To God” It Depends
The Syariah Court has also ruled that the overwhelming evidence of Tan Sri Lim drinking alcohol, praying to pagan idols, celebrating pagan religious festivals, eating pork and gambling in his own Genting Casino and generally behaving like a non-Muslim all his life until his death was irrelevant. “Once you have converted, you are a Muslim till you die, no matter what you did before your death. You will answer to God for all your sins.”
However, on the same kind of “answer to God” argument made by the non-Muslim children that:”By the same logic, the Deceased himself should answer to God for concealing his alleged ‘conversion’ from his family and resulting in him not being buried as a Muslim and his assets distributed among his non-Muslim children; it’s not up to the Islamic Authority to insist on his assets being inherited under Islamic law if he, KNOWING THAT HIS ASSETS WOULD BE DISTRIBUTED LIKE AN INFIDEL (AND HE MIGHT BURN IN HELL), still didn’t want to tell his family to bury him as a Muslim and distribute his assets like a Muslim.”
The Syariah Court said “you cannot say he must answer to God for everything. Sometimes he also has to answer to us, the Islamic Authority and Syariah Court. If we say he has to answer to us, then he has to. When it comes to God’s law, logic has nothing to do with it.
Why is it so difficult to understand?”
“New Conversion Policy” vs New Economic Policy
The case to declare one of the richest Chinese in the world (at his death) as a Muslim was started 2 years ago (8 years after his death), 1 month after another non-Muslim Malaysian tycoon’s Muslim son was able to exclusively inherit his father’s global business empire worth RM80 billion at that time by proving in Syariah Court that his father had “converted in secret,” resulting in his mother and all 9 other siblings losing the right to inherit any part of the tycoon’s wealth, leaving him the sole heir to the huge fortune.
There are currently at least 200 more cases of the same nature pending before the Syariah Courts nationwide involving deceased non-Muslims who were wealthy during their lifetime and left behind a huge personal fortune. Rough estimate suggests that 50% of them were started by 1 of the Muslim children of the deceased (99% of them newly converted as Muslims), and the rest by the Islamic Authorities seeking to disinherit all non-Muslim children.
If all of the cases succeed, it is estimated that the ratio of equity held by Muslims in Malaysia would jump from the meagre 19% as at 1 January 2018 to 76%, a whopping 3-fold increase.
The Perak Mufti, who applauded the Syariah Court’s ruling, said that this wave of after-death declarations of conversions is the new approach taken by the Islamic Authority to speed up the Islamicization of Malaysia, butis also designed to achieve the government’s goal to redistribute wealth among the races which the government could no longer do (and failed repeatedly to do) under the now abolished National Economic Policy
“By creating real economic incentives for the dhimmis to become a real citizen of the Islamic state, we expect more of them to embrace the true path, and this will mean that we no longer have to rely on the NEP to achieve such noble socio-economic goals of the government.
Besides, this is more effective because to take money away from living people will create a lot of noise, but a dead person will not make any noise, right?” He said.
However, it is not clear whether the non-Muslim children would still be able to keep their inheritance if they convert to Islam immediately. The Mufti of Perak, when consulted on this issue, said, “If that could bring them to Islam, then it would be good, so the Syariah Court should allow that. But then it might be unfair to those children who converted into Islam earlier perhaps we can still allow them to inherit only 30% of what an “early bird” Muslim heir would have been able to get, to provide some “early bird bonus incentives” for them to convert earlier. When we are dealing with Chinese, such bonus incentives are very important, if you know what I mean. Anyway, we’ll think about this in the next National Fatwa Council meeting. But rest assured that we shall continue to our struggle until the Kingdom comes (literally).”
Chinese Beginning to Be Concerned
The Chinese community has now taken this matter very seriously and are brainstorming on the options to overcome this problem. They have also called for an end to the practice of declaring a person’s status as a Muslim after his or her death, a radical change from their usual attitude to shy away from controversial political and religious issues.
Analysts believe that this is because this is threatening their economic interests.
Supporters of the now semi-defunct Malaysian Chinese Association, Gerakan and Malaysian Indian Congress, still part of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, have called on the top BN leadership to put forward a plan to resolve such controversial and provocative religious issues once and for all and in a manner which is fair to the non-Muslims. An MCA leader who declined to be named told our reporter:
“We fear a backlash. Most NGO and opposition leaders have called on the non-Muslims to boycott BN if no fair solution is put forward before the upcoming general election. These issues have been around since at least the Moorthy controversy in 2005 but still remained unresolved. The are now affecting the basic security and fundamental well-being of the non-Muslims.”
This is a very serious issue for all non-muslim Malaysians to think over since several recent cases have been unjust and unfair, and the basic constitutional RIGHTS been taken away from them. It’s no longer a safe country to live.
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