As Liz Gooch reports in the New York Times, in a piece titled ”Malaysian Custody Dispute Lost Between Courts,”  Malaysia has a two-tier judicial system, with Islamic Shariahcourts handling family law disputes involving Muslim families and secular civil courts hearing non-Muslim cases.  this leads to jurisdictional conflict when families include both Muslim and non-Muslim members, or in cases in which one party converts to Islam (sometimes for strategic reasons).  Gooch’s story describes a recent decision in which the civil court overruled the custody judgment of a Shariah court in such a case.