I was reading a well-written article by Zainah Anwar in The Sunday Star yesterday on the inequalities of the laws in Malaysia with regard to the rights of the Muslim and non-Muslim women population.
I could sense her outrage in the article as she spelt out the various areas of discrimination and her appeal – well, I will call it an appeal – to the Government to right the discriminations and make the Islamic Family Law regarded once again as the most progressive personal status code in the Muslim world.
I wouldn’t want to delve totally into what she had written because you can always read it online here. But I would want to reproduce some passages where she touched on insurance and EPF monies.
Firstly, the Insurance Act 1996 which was amended such that the Muslim beneficiary named in an insurance policy acts only as the administrator of the estate. Whatever monies in the policy has to be distributed according to the Fara’id.
Thus, if a man buys a policy and names his wife and daughters as his beneficiaries, their well-being will not be wholly protected when he dies. According to the Fara’id, his parents and siblings or even distant male relatives are part of his heirs and will be entitled to claim a share of the insurance money.
Secondly, the same applies to his EPF funds too. Zainah says that in 2000, the National Fatwa Council issued a fatwa to extend the Fara’id rule to EPF funds. So if a husband names his wife as the beneficiary, she actually only acts as an administrator.
She continued: “This means that if a woman has children, she gets only one-eighth of the monies; if she has no children, she gets only a quarter, while the rest goes to the husband’s surviving heirs. If he has no other surviving heirs, the monies go to Baitulmal. If the husband is a convert and there are no children, his non-Muslim children from an earlier marriage or his non-Muslim parents or siblings cannot benefit from his insurance policy or his EPF monies as non-Muslims are not considered heirs.
“A convert friend of mine was so outraged and baffled that we could have decision makers who could think that he should purchase an insurance policy that would benefit Baitulmal, instead of his loved ones. The saving grace is that many Muslims have the conscience to recognise the injustice of these policies and have not chosen to contest EPF and insurance monies that have gone to the bereaved widow and the children.”
Remember, you can read the entire article here.