Cina buta - the Meaning

I learned a new term today from The Star. The term is cina buta literally translates to blind Chinese. There must be a logical or justifiable explanation to the origin of this term, I am sure. Read on for its meaning, in the meantime.

>THE term cina buta is synonymous with a situation where a Muslim man who has filed an irrevocable divorce (talak tiga) against his wife is intent, for whatever reason, to marry her again.

The divorced woman can take another candidate as a husband but if the next marriage also ends up in a divorce, she is considered an eligible single woman and, under Islamic law, her first husband can seek her hand in marriage.

Using this technicality, Harian Metro reported that some ex-husbands were willing to pay another man to become the cina buta so that it would be legal for the first husband to reconcile with her.

“I have been offered three times to be a cina buta,” said 31-year-old Ramli, who boasted he was paid up to RM10,000 each time.

He is among a group of men who offer their services through the Internet to desperate husbands who had divorced thier wives on talak tiga and sought to marry them again.


When you have a melting pot of ethnicities and cultures as in Malaysia, words tend to cross borders and get adopted along the way. That is the beauty and fluidity of languages. Everything evolves, why shouldn't languages?

By the way, a Google search on cina buta yields more than 2.7million results!