Context of Moros and non-Muslims Coexistence (2)

2nd part of Bangsamoro Governance: Context of Moros and non-Muslims coexistence

By Datu Michael O. Mastura


Any national liberation front that is without Moro territorial base will come up against one regime after another Filipino government. But the emergence of the Moro Islamic movement is different. It’s not that there are few claimants to Islamic rule and governance. Far from it, Muslim contemporary thought such as the Tunisian reformist Rashid al-Ghanoushi rejects the idea that Islamic movement has “a monopoly in the interpretation of Islam” by limiting its role to “just another actor within the liberal democratic state.” The one thing people don’t understand is that the ideological dimension matters to the leading theoreticians.

Nor is the case for the Moro Islamic movement the lack of what is desirable as an Islamic state model. Whether we like or not change of condition in the people is inevitable, which is the principle of movement within a social organism. Can Moros who are Muslims and non-Muslim Groups Coexist? The fundamental institutions of political life—the state, government, and citizenship—have both a past and future. Satellite ideas such as civil rights, civil society and status of non-Muslims in governance are justificatory modalities in contemporary discourse. Twenty-first century de-Christianization of public life has penetrated through a civic religion of ideas reached by reason alone. Secular humanism is a faith of educated Filipinos imbibed from America’s elite; it asserts the separation of church and state. This civil libertarian agenda is not concealed: “The separation of ideology and state are imperatives.”
The usual debate about “interpreted shari’a” fits those who think of the anomaly in the mode of “liberal Islam” to be contesting revelation itself. That’s why the Luwaran website cautions Eliseo Mercado, OMI about the imperatives of traditional tafsir (or exegetical commentary). Specialists focusing on textual construction of reality are keen to import epistemological skepticism of the theorists of today only to erode scriptural reading in social contexts. The true shari’a as an organizing principle of society is far more concise than the legal structure evolved through the centuries by the fiqh (or jurisprudence) of the various schools of thought. But it is the province of the mujtahids (i.e. scholars so learned they have a right to engage in independent original rule decisions) and the ulama that are closely tied to the masses.

In this sense, can one appreciate Muhammad Assad writing a pamphlet on Islamic Constitution Making prior to the partition of India. Does Islam demand for Muslims a duty to strive for the establishment of an Islamic state? Or is the desire for an Islamic state based only on their historical memories? Thus, it is for the Muslims to decide whether to subordinate their polity to modern concept modeled in the West, which deny to religion the means to shape the nation’s public life.

I’m convinced that the fear of Islamists coming to power boils down to the secular liberals’ intellectual preference to settle for regimes that have captured the cultural institutions of the republic. Why is it that a person who does not belong to the Anglican Church cannot be ruler of the English monarchy? Islamist strategies co-opt popular religious sentiment hewed strictly to the creation of social conditions that postulate the enjoining of what is right and forbidding of what is wrong (al-amr bi ‘l-maruf wa ‘nahy ‘an al-munkar) mainly from the viewpoint of public morality than on the political democratic argument.

This framework of equity and justice—toward Muslims and non-Muslims alike—situates us at the intersection on which the political instrument of the ideal (Islamic state) stands and falls. A corollary basic principle is incumbent on an individual to tell the truth and expose fasiq (or transgression) even when this entails opposing the ruling authorities.

I find it is a misplaced context for Fr. Mercado to craft political authority of “the head/chief of a community/state” for the enforcement of Islamic law lodged on the premise relating to the Qur’an verse we are now considering. Our critical public intellectuals have missed out the conceptual constants of dhu ‘l-amr (or layers of holders of authority). Without falling aground to secularism, the liberation theology tact spins in new or postmodern discourse that can be grafted on to an old content, or an old (traditional) discourse can be grafted into a new base. This is a negative salvation in “fundamentalism” in regard to the virtuous community model making up the Islamist “restorative vision” an element of instability in current discourses on political Islam. Behind any laicism establishment, harking back in “fanaticism” to the cultural hand of the church and clergy who compete for power (pure and simple) within the hierarchic power-state is a problem of instability of the original republican model.

Once we look at the Muslim homeland with paramount political importance it does not take much fresh political thought, for historical replica, to follow or not the lead of the theoretician Abul al-Maududi to preserve the unity of millat al-islamiyyah (nation cum community of believers). The major architects of that “Islamic republic” were not unmindful of the presence of non-Muslims in Pakistan. Instead theoretical reflection aroused apprehensions to a point of obstructions of the nass (or textual ordinances) of the Qur’an and Sunnah. The Qur’an commentators include also the prohibition of sabb or insult to non-Muslims with enormity. But the act of blasphemy has generally been subsumed under riddah (apostasy) overlapping with kufr (disbelief) and zandaqah (heresy) being treated as part thereof. Provocative offense to sensibilities of believers constitutes legal and moral restraints in Islamic law.

As a digression, talk of “medieval practices” and bigotry for my reading covers an obscure crime of blasphemy, which is still extant in English statute. In any case, we know the struggle for the Filipino Christian soul is not fading away, if we go by the TV bible debates with polemical vectors of influence.

Without proposing a context, the terms “people of the book” and “protected people” are construed in their distinction from the polytheists (or idolaters). But the context for the Qur’an verses on ideological struggle has given rise to the idiom of ahl al-jiza (or those subject to poll tax) ‘an-yad (out of hand) in exchange for protection. Thus MILF’s leadership is careful to avoid explicit reference to Islamic terminology because it does not advocate autocratic strictures of the state. Moreover, MILF theoreticians downplay pietism rhetoric that cuts the ties between culture and religion to prevent the alienation of indigenous peoples.


Our general public may now have only begun to glimpse Islamic observant party across the Arab and Muslim world. What can one learn from this compressed summary? If readers of the Qur’an can grasp the political ordinances, they will discern the ordered major transitions toward the Islamic systems of individual and community (societal) identity, social structure, governance, and conduct towards outsiders. We know that not just matters of ideology are at stake in the debate over movement versus party, not to mention da’wah versus politics. The role of the ulama was underestimated by the nascent nationalist movement but the influence of this Moro internal debates go back to the 1960s and 1970s.

Beginning 30 years ago, since I first got a close look at the workings of the Philippine unitary state at the Constitutional Convention of 1971, I have discerned that as the failings of politics and public policy in Mindanao. Our problem arises from the way the governmental system is constituted in the constitution. We believe a political compact could unite us so I wrote, The Moro Problem, an approach constitutional reform (unpublished, 1971). Ideas can become also part of the public culture. It’s the claim of political ideologues that their present-day use of ideas shaped from the history of political thought can be a source of answers to questions that could enhance contemporary political thought.

The troubling Bangsamoro nationalism articulates the beliefs and values of freedom as a study in Islamic contemporary political thought, not history. The “nationalism” I’m speaking of developed not where the Filipino “nation-statism” (is) was conceived in seeds of idea as a country. That is why the Constitution is not central to the identity of Moros resembling the way German-speaking peoples came as multitude of principalities and kingdoms under a Basic Law. Our Bangsamoro juridical entity has the so-called volkgeist or “people” congealing with a spiritual essence and heroic resistance shared in common in Muslim-inhabited soil. Whereas in America’s model of union multitudes of individuals could become “a people” by virtue of shared principles and allegiance to a process, the Constitution. Historians hold that ideas are the products of particular circumstances (and moments in time), so that using them for present purposes distorts their original historical meaning.

Leading MILF theoreticians are aware of the Christian Filipino governing elites and Mindanao settler colons that have never been more openly hostile than when they felt intimidated by the MOA-AD. Yes, it was Napoleon who said that “God is on the side of the big battalions”; and so, are the Catholics supposed to be on God’s side? Just the same the episodes mentioned by Fr. Mercado are instructive. The Turkish constitutional movement (1905-1911) had “historical antecedents” embodied in the nineteenth-century Tanzimat (reorganization measures) from 1816 that led to the reform edict of 1839. The notion of nationalism that seeped into the Ottoman world had corrosive effect. Imperial edicts worked directly against the interest of the ulama. The demands of the Young Turks from about 1860 emerged from the French paradigm of progressive bourgeoisie preceding the Kemalist revolution. The French movement was no doubt secular with an ideological expression in nonreligious terms.

When the Republic of the Philippines is categorized as a secular state, it synchronizes political legitimacy within a polity and society. Sovereign authority emanating from “the people” is founded on the rejection of absolutism ordained in the non-establishment clause of “official religion” in the constitution. That in such a religiously neutral ideology the downside is its weakness as foundation for public morality. There’s no way I know that the fundamentally different impulses could be addressed by the Filipino propensity for “politics as usual”. The Indonesian pancasila and the Malaysian rukun negara are amalgam models of the practicability of religious and social conservatism with modernity.

(Datu Michael O. Mastura is a lawyer, historian, former congressman and now a senior member of the peace negotiating panel of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front).