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BANGSAMORO Juridical Entity is nothing more than the recognition and
concession of an independent Islamic state to the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front (MILF) rebels by former military generals working
beyond the Constitutional framework. First, these power-inebriated
generals masquerading as peace negotiators must understand that the
MILF leadership has no control over its commanders, who are as
bloodthirsty and intoxicated with power. Second, they must undertake
some historical analyses of the Bangsamoro people’s hostility, as
much as the over-all population’s frustrations and outrage,
against the Philippine government. In addition, it would certainly
be prudent to undertake a study of Islamic beliefs on the
unification of religious and political spheres in Islamic nations.
Islamic Studies Professor Mohammed Ayoob points
out that there is a mythical image of an indivisibility of religious
and political spheres propagated by popular literature and academic
discourses on Islam. As a consequential result of such mythical
propagation, the erroneous belief is spread that Islamic doctrine
determines the political trajectory of Muslim states, including
their inability to accept popular sovereignty or implement
democratic reforms. But Islamic historians know that, in practice,
religious and political spheres began to be clearly demarcated very
soon after the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E., an
inevitable occurrence because, according to Muslim belief,
revelation ended with his death.
While the first four “righteously guided”
caliphs, who were Muhammad’s immediate temporal successors, were
respected for their piety and closeness to the Prophet, they could
not claim divine ordination for their decrees. Their actions and
interpretations were openly challenged, while religious and
political dissenters assassinated three of them. In Shia Islam,
which recognizes Ali as the first caliph and believed to be the only
one temporal successor to Prophet Muhammad, the caliphate can only
be passed down to the direct descendants of Muhammad via Ali and
Fatima, being ‘ahl al bayt’ (people of the House of the Prophet).
But civil war often loomed, and during Ali’s reign as the fourth
caliph, two major intra-Muslim battles were fought largely as a
result of intertribal rivalry. Intra-Muslim strife culminated in the
massacre at Karbala in 680 C.E. of Ali’s son, and the Prophet’s
grandson Hussein and his companions by forces loyal to the newly
established Umayyad dynasty controlled by the Sunnis, who descended
from religious followers of the other Islamic caliphs. The religious
schism between Sunni and Shia dates back to this supremely political
event, a war for the throne of Islam.
However, Muslim leaders maintained the fiction
of indivisibility between religion and state primarily to legitimize
dynastic rule and to hide the fact of the religious
establishment’s subservience to temporal authority. Criteria
established by Muslim jurists to determine the legitimacy of
temporal rule were minimal. The consensus was that so long as the
ruler could defend the territories of Islam (dar-al-Islam) and did
not prevent his Muslim subjects from practicing their religion,
rebellion was forbidden. Fitna (dissension, anarchy) was thought to
be worse than tyranny since it could threaten the integrity of the
umma (community of believers). Internecine conflict was avoided
while political quietism was the rule in most Muslim polities most
of the time from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries.
In Philippine history, when the Philippine
military, during the time of tyrant Ferdinand Marcos, commenced the
usurpation of predominantly Muslim occupied territories in the
government’s wish to exploit natural resources in, and
industrialize, Muslim territories, without any participation and
without any intention of benefiting Muslim communities occupying the
areas, Muslim hostility festered. Moro peoples were forcibly ejected
by government military forces from their ancestral territorial
domain. The enmity between the Moro peoples and the Philippine
government was further aggravated by the notorious Jabidah Massacre,
the mass murder of a whole organization of loyal military forces
comprised of Muslim soldiers, who were assigned to forcibly occupy
Sabah in reasserting government jurisdiction in the territory
claimed by the Sultanate of Sulu but whose population had already
elected to join the Federation of Malaysia through a plebiscite.
Although much blood has already been spilled,
the government can still prove its sincerity not necessarily by
signing the ill-fated MOA on Ancestral Domain. But by proving its
sincerity in protecting Muslim territories predominantly occupied by
Bangsamoro communities, most of which have already been identified
within the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, simultaneously
appropriating development funds for programs, with the participation
of, and beneficial to, the Bangsamoro peoples in these communities
and not for the self-aggrandizement of government officials. The
Americans and Malaysians should participate in the progress of the
Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao by rechanelling their financial
contributions to development programs rather than participating in
the dismemberment of this nation.
If the government aspires to unify the Filipino
people, then it must continue to prove that Muslims, and all
indigenous cultural communities for that matter, are important in
the political life of this nation and should pave the way for a
secular leader, who has Muslim ancestry and lineage, to rise to the
highest pinnacles of power. Only then can the government prove that
a more solid and perfect union amongst the Filipino people can be
achieved and that a Bangsamoro Juridical Entity is absolutely
unnecessary because the Filipino people are one, singular, united
entity.
ericfmallonga@yahoo.com
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