Bangsamoro Governance: Culture of Co-existence in Islam (1)

By Datu Michael O. Mastura

Candor compels one to say this country has come to a fork in the road, take it. This may sound too harsh. But the single inclusive unitary construct of the Philippine Republic has become fragile. “We need to stop pretending,” says one specialist, “that fragile states are just less-developed versions of Western states.” Let’s start recognizing then Mindanao realities, building on the Bangsamoro capacities so as to enable indigenous and Muslim societies to chart their own development paths within modern “state-nations” framework.

The earlier modernity gripping Islamic countries paced on that of nation-state trajectory was conducted on the European model. This was the case for Attaturk in Turkey and Bourguiba in Tunisia modeled on the juridical spirit of the French Third Republic.

Last month, I travelled to Turkey with Mohagher Iqbal and two other lobby volunteers for whom it was like coming in from the cold. We’ve been catching up with substantial changes to the way foreign policy is conducted around the world on armed conflicts and peace initiatives. In Istanbul, our research team was hosted by civil society and foundations. With uncanny chance, we met Ebubekir Dogan, a journalist who translated into Turkish the original thin version of Salah Jubair’s “Bangsamoro, A Nation Under Endless Tyranny” (1983). In the new political life of the Turkish nation, Muslim politics evolves with younger Islamists driven by realistic political discourse; they have established think tanks and social research institutions. More interestingly, we’re told that the onus of finding a long-term solution to the Kurdish problem remains with Turkey as a sovereign country through national consensus.

The Undersecretary in the Prime Ministry received our MILF delegation. Ankara’s public diplomacy does not remain hostage to history, however, it takes pride as heir to the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. As a dynamic modern Republic, Turkey has made substantial inroads in mediating roles (or back channel talks) to initiate strategic partnership in key issues in the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Recep Tayyip Erogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey and leader of the post-Islamist movement AKP, want “a constitution that is going to provide and protect a state that is a democratic, secular, and social state of law.” The Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) oscillates in ideology then shifts from Islamism to ‘Muslimhood’ activism; so for theoreticians, it has become the pendulum: Turkish ‘polyarchy’.

On our last night in Istanbul we were treated to a public forum of women volunteers group. We got interested to know the heritage of the Ottoman millet system. Historically, this millet was a self-governing community curved as sphere of autonomy. This community system in dealing with people of different cultures and religions under the same political order and social domain enabled the culture of co-existence in Islam as a natural human condition. When we look at the current context of relationships between the Muslim majority and non-Muslim minorities, the millet provided freedom not only in the field of religion and worship, also in the areas of civil law and politics. How far modern Turkey inherited the culture co-existence? Which new instruments it has developed to consolidate this culture within its national boundaries under the Westphalian system?

And my take is each nation has “constants” it adheres to and from which it does not deviate. But whether summons to striving would bring about a cultural revolution or not, civic religion appeals to equality as its core principle under the constitutional canopy. When the revolutionaries created “citizens” from the new republican “nation-states” they put premium on common culture for social cohesiveness. There was instability in the pre-modern republics. To follow Montesquieu, conventional wisdom dictated that republics should be small in size and similar in character.

Twenty-first century global realities trump competing powerful “nation-states” because there’s something to just being small. That is, if we just want earned sovereignty and settle for “state-nations” model. Who needs governance that denies the existence of autonomous politics? Should Muslims suffer any longer to allow the modern concept of territorial state sovereignty to imprison groups within a unitary scheme that stifles all diversity? Withering states can survive only by signifying representation of citizenry from geographic areas—with a myriad of ethnic backgrounds and cultural ethos—but with common claims on the state-nations.

This is not the early 19th century when Moro proto-states (sultanates) signed most treaties with the European powers; it is now the first decade of the 21st century. Indeed, most modern constitution originated from a treaty devised between the monarchy and nobility (English model) to lay down the rules for political conduct. States union (American model) is a kind of ‘negarchy’ to moderate interstate territorial conflict by compromises in multi-sided agreements to combat threats of anarchic state of war among foreign powers. By writing ‘citizens’ into a declaration (French model), the Jacobins cut monarchy from public life essential to the survival of the republic and its ideals. The Bolshiviks reinvented also the ‘people’ by organizing them along ‘class’ lines (Russian model) followed by the Maoists (Chinese model). Sukarno in Indonesia, Gamal Abd al-Nasir in Egypt, and Riza Shah in Iran were working in a nation-state political context such that Islam did not provide the political matrix.

Who needs an Islamic State? (2008) is the very title of a small book published by the Malaysia Think Tank London. To the author, Dr. Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “the central value governing the Islamic polity and giving it meaning is freedom.” It posits that shar’ia can rule only when the community in observance of it perceives this as a liberating act and self-fulfillment. And when only coercion underpins sharia, it becomes hypocrisy. That word “freedom” was the give away for a democratic model of governance, which the GRP sought to drop from MOA-AD (Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain). To be sure, in the MILF leaders’ thinking an Islamic polity only deserves that name if it is governed by shari’a though it may be founded on co-existing communities.

But why do modern thinkers of the Muslim polity call for an Islamist agenda without an Islamist vocabulary? They argue that an individual does not need the state to be Muslim; he creates the state as a Muslim to enhance his Islamic life. And so, why relegate the Moro individual to a status of non-entity in terms of the fardu jamai (or collective duty)? The polity constructed by the Prophet based on the sahifat al-Madina was a framework treaty. (I shall shortly revert to this point in part 2 of my commentary).

God-and-country people are raised to respect and obey their rulers while politicians invoke “the people’s trust.” This has to be placed in the context of foundational authority in Islam. In contemporary Islamic movements, there’s stress on wala (obedience) to vet ‘those in authority’ balanced with indices against resisting it. Theory and practice attempt to reconcile the revolutionary content inherent only in the caliphal ‘righteous successors’ and in dealing with the reality of present power state. Normative orthodoxy by which the ruler’s removal weighs against the collapse of religious life and the community’s peaceful existence is a well-considered hierarchy of values.

I have read with interest Eliseo Mercado’s write up posing the need for any group or Liberation Front insisting on Islamic rule and government “to spell out in clear terms the status of non-Muslims in such situation.” After attributing the articulated MILF position on the fact that the people of the book are given as “protected people” (ahl-dhimmah), Mercado then takes issue that a simple reference to dhimmah does not capture the essence and praxis of the concept through the centuries.

Qur’anic scriptural verses on protected peoples were revealed in the course of war with the “polytheistic” Quraysh when tyranny was the sole obstacle in the face of the call for justice. But I find it important that the critical writer proceeds to jot down factual conditions for the protection and to check circumstances of praxis in the time of Umar ibn Khattab, the 2nd Caliph. The Muslim rules of engagement and their applications to non-Muslims were highly flexible. It has to be said that when Islam expanded into Iran and India these conditions were tailored to match public policy considerations.

Whenever multiculturalism dominates our contemporary discourses, we’ve grounds to be suspicious of any attempt to read it back into the past. There’s always a tendency to extract from Islam in history as culture for some kind of bearing on contemporary problems to reflect on it (or de-construct) familiar aspect of it. This present-mindedness needs “critical control” to avoid “grafting” that could cause errors of perception and mistaken judgments. It matters not whether the graft is religious or secular. The schematics of ahl-kitab and ahl-dhimmah are quite extensive which appears in the large literature on just-war theory in Islam in three stages.

The dhimmah status which justifies the jizya (poll tax) levy explains the legal order appropriate for non-Muslims who defied living among Muslims and waged war and were defeated. By definition the dhimmah as the pact (‘ahd) and the dhimmi as a person who has the compact of the Islamic polity is the non-Muslim domicile of the Muslim country. As for those who belong to different religions or beliefs living among Muslims are safe and secured people according to the general principles of the agreement they have signed. In conjunction with this theory, a “mu’ahid” is a citizen of a non-Muslim state which has a compact with the Muslim country. [To be continued]

(Datu Michael O. Mastura is a lawyer, historian, a former representative of Maguindanao to Congress and now a senior member of the MILF peace panel.)