The Meeting of the Tausug and Zamboanga Worlds.pptx

The Meeting of the Tausug and Zamboanga Worlds.

1. The Meeting of the Tausug and Zamboanga Worlds by Laja, Jawali H. in Peter Gowing, ed. Understanding Islam and Muslim in the Philippines. Report by: Anica Leska N. Alcopra PS 213 MA in Philippine Studies

2. Dr. Jawali H. Laja First Regional Secretary from Sulu and former Assistant Regional Director of Dep-Ed RO IX Belongs to the Tausug ethnic group.

3. SUMMARY OF THE REPORT It is quite difficult to conceptualize without research evidence, the interaction profile resulting from the encounter between the Tausug and Zamboanga worlds. Even the process of putting into meaningful terms the exact reality of the Tausug world in relation to the relation to the Zamboanga world becomes complicated when one considers that the term “Tausug” is primarily and clearly mono-ethnic and tribal and never geographical in linguistic usage. On the other hand, the term “Zamboanga” is frequently although hazily multi-ethnic (which also includes Tausug) and primarily geographical.

4. To postulate the existence of two worlds under these sets of identities seems quite difficult. The meeting of Tausug world and Zamboanga world as part of a world-wide pattern of encounter between two main cultures-Islam and Christianity. Laja view the Zamboanga world as a sub-culture of Christianity and the Tausug world as a sub-culture of Islam. Within the context of the present day encounter, to view the meeting as anything different from its being an encounter of the sub-cultures of two main streams is to deny a face to face meeting with present day realities.

5. As a matter of fact, if I may be allowed to digress a little our policy-makers and decision-makers have apparently arrived at this conclusion and subtly and patiently evolved solutions to the present violent aspect of the meeting of these two sub-cultures employing the principle of reconciliation and rapprochement as a basic ingredient. While there is no religious conflict, yet there is an acknowledgement that two groups or schools of thought need to be reconciled. Indeed there was a recent tacit admission that these groups have their riots in religious identities when the government assigned a purely Government-Muslim panel to solve the present conflict.

6. HISTORICAL LINKS The purpose of Laja’s paper is that he would like to establish the historical links between the two main cultures which led to the existence of our sub-cultures. The historical events and geographical routes to the Philippines of Islam and Christianity diverged. Islam travelled to the Philippines quite late but earlier than Christianity. Islam primarily reached us through the extensive missionary zeal of the Madramaut religious sayyids who worked zealously in the mighty Moluccan Empire which in turn became the main political entity that was instrumental in the spread of Islam in the Far East.

7. Anthropological evidence can well establish this conclusion. The Arabic style of writing on the tomb of a Muslim missionary atop Bud Datu matches well with the Arabic style found in a Moluccan stone now in a museum in Malaysia. From then on Islam in the Philippines and even in the whole of Asia was not in peace. Spanish and Portuguese missionary zeal to spread Catholicism clashed head on with Islam in the Philippines and the Far East. Laja stated that when Christianity came to the Philippines it had already antagonistic stance against them. There was a clear intention to convert people to Christianity as Magellan did clearly show in his conversion of King Humabon and Legazpi in his betrayal of his friendship with rajah Soliman.

8. Laja mentioned that the two groupings in the Philippines divided clearly along religious lines. Through the years both groups struggled until Christianity became indigenous as the Northern Filipino tribes adopted it. The Southern Filipino tribes clung on to Islam as they staunchly defended it. Subsequently, the world-wide power and territorial retrenchment of Islam pushed Islam to the South until in 1641 the Spaniards put up strong military forts in Zamboanga to spread its power and influence among the Muslim South. The sub-culture we now call Zamboanga world came into being, established here to check the Muslims in the South. The Tausug in Sulu, the main remaining political entity opposed Spanish rule to the last. This was our historical relationship.

9. In the light of this, I would like to make some personal declarations vis-à-vis the present realities I find myself in the present encounter between the Tausug and the Zamboanga worlds. For while the forces of history are silent and inexorably working at its own rate and rules, yet the human mind is not and should not be a slave to history. It can only bow down to truth. As member of the Tausug World, this I declare: “I am of the brown race as the Zamboanga people are. Whether my ancestors were of the Malay waves who came to this country in the mid-tenth century or of the earlier Indonesian waves or of the Papuan Polynesian groups, or of the earliest prototype Malays. Does not really matter with me. What matter is that I am as brown as the people in the Zamboanga world are brown. If I am a Filipino by nationality, it is so because it is the political entity to which I belong and the Philippines is the political reality.

10. I have been taught to acknowledge and love ever since grade school days. The people of the Zamboanga World have been taught the same principles. Over and above these considerations of race and country is the primary conviction that I belong to one humanity, the convergence of all races, nationalities and creed. Thus, if I am Muslim by religious persuasion, not Christian, Hindu or Buddhist which were the main intellectual streams that flowed into this religion, it is so because it is the intellectual reality. I hold as valid and true. But alongside this conviction is the realization that Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism also work toward the same orderliness and goodness of humanity that Islam seeks. And this common goal towards the upliftment and enlightenment of the human specie should be the rallying point for the unity and ecumenical understanding of all men of varying religious background. Personally, I believe that the survival of the Tausug world in its present encounter with the Zamboanga world hinges on the acceptance of this reality, i.e., that we are all under the encompassing sovereignty of the One most High God. Both groups in the interest of peace and harmony should recognize this as a basic living principle in order to survive. And the fates of both are intertwined. The survival of one is the survival of the other; the destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. Let those who want to mold society to their particular ways not forget this basic principle.”

11. UNITY IN DIVERSITY The Tausug World and the Zamboanga World are parts of a river which I should call River brown. This analogy equally holds true of the sons and daughters of the Tausug and the Zamboanga worlds. As the Tausug race go through the historical phases of their peculiar worlds, the Tausug world and Zamboanga world remain constant whatever the composition. And as the battering elements of history impinge their effects on the Tausug tribe, so will the same batter the Zamboanga world. The present conflict in the relationship between the Tausug and the Zamboanga world is normal. These are obstructions in the mighty flow of River Brown as it is a warp in the time-space reality of Islam and Christianity in their senseless claim to be separate river streams when in point of fact they are of the same stream.

12. “ In all sincerity, I declare that it does not really matter that in this present violent aspect of the encounter between the Zamboanga and the Tausug worlds, the forces of hate, barbarism and intolerance spare not the women, children and the aged in so-called “No Man’s Island.” In this unreasoning conflict where there are no prisoners of war, there are really no protagonists or enemies. There are only brown beings succumbing to the forces of history which somehow fade into obsolescence with the passage of time.

13. In this meeting of the Zamboanga World and the Tausug World, who cares about such alleged minor irritations as a Mariki re-settlement project which after all is done in good faith to allow the Muslim to live their own way of life in separate areas, the better for the tourist to observe their unpolluted, truly Filipino ways? If it is done to promote tourism, it is also done to give justice to the landless, and to protect a way of life from the intrusion of modernity. Within the Zamboanga World there ought to be a truly Tausug World.

14. In another instance, what matters, if the Tausug World dead is disturbed by their transfer to other distant sites to give way to a naval wharf complex? Even the dead of the Zamboanga World were equally transferred because the location has become a military reservation. Too , why worry over the lack of worth of one in the eyes of the other as shown in the behavior of low-level income groups who see each other through colored prism?

15. Why give much thought to the refusal of the Zamboanga World to move the seat of the regional government to the Tausug World Capital? The Zamboanga world has always been the center of government because it is strategically located and the communication flow passes through it. There can only be one center. If a sub-center must exist, let the main center be in the Zamboanga World and the sub-center in the Tausug world. Let the Tausug man the sub-center to give them jobs and responsibilities. No offense meant, no undercurrent ethnic bias really exists.

16. And if there is fighting in the hills with no quarter given in the battlefield near where the regional complex is to be located, there are equally peace talks and amnesties in the plains for those who can come to the folds of the law. Better deals are promised and given, although sometimes not given and this can be better done if the Tausug-manned sub-center is created in Jolo. All these are episodes in our attempts to develop maturity in our encounter with one another.

17. Seriously speaking, the relationship between Tausug and Zamboanga could be molded by the political accommodation which they developed towards the end of the Spanish period and the brotherly approach they had under a common conqueror, the Americans, under a common Constitution during the Commonwealth and the Republic and under an equalitarian rule under New Society. If there are disparaging differences, these can only be vestigial roots of the Spanish influence which then sought to divide us and which hopefully the New Society will obliterate as President Marcos steers the nation into peace and enlightenment.

18. CONCLUSION Our point of commonality transcends this eighteenth-nineteenth century limitations: we are members of one humanity. The Tausug World and the Zamboanga World exist only in the terminology of a limited time-space continuum. The reality of these worlds actually lies in their being a part of a phenomenon of unfolding of God’s will in the affairs of man. In essence, there really is only one world.

19. In a larger sense, the confluence of the many historical ramifications of God’s religion into its original stream would remove all these illusory phenomena to give way to a “humanization like” congruence a seed emerging out of an unfolding many petalled flower. –Laja Today under the new society, ecumenism and judicious diplomatic ventures, this seed of unity is becoming a reality. But these signs and of hope and enlightenment, signs that we have somehow realized that we are just men, not divine absolutes. We have realized that religion is a personal thing between God and Man, not institutionalized, and that religious freedom involves the rights of a man to choose his path to God without being influenced indirectly by circumstances of birth, economic necessity or the thinking of the majority.

20. Ancient Spain’s edicts no longer hold true. Here in this country under the new Society, unity in diversity which most of us envision but fail to understand, will take a firmer root under the guidance of the highest God, the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent called by many names by many temporal beings in this temporal phenomenal world of men.