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By Johnna Villaviray, Senior Reporter
(First of Three Parts)
When the television reporter Richard Rivera
stepped onto the Sulu pier, one thing was on his mind: send stories
to Manila about efforts to recover the Abu Sayyaf’s 19 Sipadan
hostages.
By the end of the six-week assignment, Rivera
brought home not just war stories but a new faith as well.
Now answering to the name Abdurahman Ismail,
Rivera has resigned from the network and is now helping to organize
rallies to raise civic awareness. He says he doesn’t miss his fast
life as a reporter and its perks—booze, payola and girls.
“Before I became a Muslim, the focus was on
money, how to get ahead in life. But now, I ask myself, ‘What’s
all that for? Isn’t salvation what’s important?’” Rivera
said.
Rivera is one of the thousands of former
Christians who “reverted” to Islam since the 1990s. The Office
of Muslim Affairs estimates that at least 20,000 Balik Islam, or
“reverts” as they like to be called, live in traditionally
Catholic Luzon. They call themselves “reverts” rather than
converts on the premise that everyone was born a Muslim.
Records show that Balik Islam comprises nearly
200,000 of the more than 6.599 million local Muslim community. It is
now the seventh-biggest group of the 13 local Muslim tribes. Islam
is now the fastest-growing religion in the country.
Muslims believe that the September 11 attacks on
the United States, while raising suspicion against them, also piqued
public curiosity about Islam.
“After 9-11, we suddenly had a shortage of
reading materials. The attack cast Muslims in a bad light, but it
also encouraged people to learn more about Islam, which is good,”
said Shariff Soilaman Gonzales. Gonzales acts as officer in charge
of the International Worldwide Mission (iwwm) after the group’s
imam—Mahmoud Al-Ghafari, an Egyptian—was deported on suspicion
of aiding local terrorists.
Gonzales, interviewed in the iwwm’s rundown
office in the heart of Quiapo’s Muslim quarter, said the age-old
misconceptions about Islam and Muslims are now helping to attract
the faithful.
The crude explanation is that people are
naturally curious about what is perceived bad or illegal. To the
Muslims, it’s all part of a divine plan.
“Everything that happens or will happen in
this world is the plan of Allah,” Gonzales explained.
The first Filipino reverts were the workers
deployed in Middle Eastern countries, especially in Saudi Arabia,
where shari’a law is enforced. When they came back, they so
impressed many with their zeal and piety that their family,
relatives, friends and neighbors followed suit.
Ahmed Santos took the shahada, the Islamic
testimony of faith, while working in Riyadh in 1991. From a landed
military and squarely Catholic family in Anda, Pangasinan, Santos is
now president of the Balik Islam Unity Congress.
“My grandfather is a soldier and he taught me
that Muslims would stab me in the back at the first opportunity.
Now, I know that he’s wrong,” Santos said while sitting in a
lotus position on the burgundy carpet of the air-conditioned mosque
he built.
The mosque occupies the second floor of the
four-story building Santos constructed in suburban Cubao. The
building is a block from the Nativity Parish Church where he was
first married.
Islam is heavy with divine predestination.
Santos believes that his dreams of a crying Jesus Christ when he was
younger indicated that he should revert to Islam.
He reverted in 1990 while working in Saudi
Arabia. While he led a comfortable and moneyed life before, Santos
now faces constant surveillance by suspected intelligence officers
and a daily struggle with finances.
“No regrets. Because this is the will of
Allah. And the brothers are there. People see that, and that helps
them revert,” he said.
There’s been no serious study on the state of
mind of people who revert to Islam, but law-enforcement authorities
lump them with Muslim radicals. If that line of thinking were
followed, Balik Islam would share the psychological profile of the
terrorists arrested since September 11.
A paper prepared by Singapore authorities after
the roundup last year of 31 suspected Jemaah Islamiah operatives
describes the men as having average to superior intelligence but
suffering from low self-esteem. The paper said membership in a
secretive organization boosts the suspects’ personal image.
“These men fully understood that they were not
dabbling in childish play,” the document said. “These men were
not ignorant, destitute or disfranchised outcasts.”
The psychological profile made on the alleged
Jemaah Islamiah operatives suggests that they are predisposed to
indoctrination and actually crave for the control exercised by
charismatic religious leaders.
Zamzamin Amaptuan, chief of Office of Muslim
Affairs, agreed that the reverts are prone to indoctrination to the
“deviant” interpretation of Islam that those arrested for
terrorism follow.
“They’re more aggressive, but it’s very
natural and human to be so engrossed in a faith that you recently
accepted. In some way, this aggressiveness can be converted to
something else,” he said.
Ampatuan continued, “It can be taken advantage
of by some people [because it makes them] more prone to conditioning
and exploitation, since they don’t fully understand.”
Santos, however, doesn’t mind being lumped
with so-called terror organizations.
“If being a fundamentalist or an extremist
means following everything in the Koran, like praying five times a
day or responding to the call for jihad [holy war], then I’d
prefer to be called an extremist or a fundamentalist rather than a
nominal Muslim,” he said.
Nooh Caparino, the head of the Islamic Call and
Guidance-Philippines’ da’wah (propagation) program, observed
that reverts to Islam are searching for spiritual fulfillment.
“Sometimes people transfer from one
affiliation to another, usually from Christianity to another, and
then when they encounter Islam, they stick there. That’s because
it’s the complete religion,” he said.
Rivera was one of those butterflies. Born a
Catholic, he was baptized in the Iglesia ni Cristo’s central
church in the mid-1990s before reverting a few years later.
“Everybody has it in him to convert. The only
blocking factor would be pride,” Santos said. “People who are
too proud to give up materialism and too proud to take the
persecution will not revert and they will not find peace and
salvation.”
(Continued tomorrow)
Part 2 |Conclusion |
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