Reason to rejoice
The signing of the framework agreement could herald the end of the Mindanao conflict, which has seen 150,000 people killed in the last 40 years.
LET me explain my name, Ayesha Mae Oro Gayao said. “Ayesha is an Arabic name and it was given by my father who is a Muslim. Mae is an English name equivalent to Mayo and it was given by my mother who is a Catholic.”
Are you Muslim or Catholic? I asked the 22-year-old journalist who lives and works in Cotabato City in the Philippines.
“This is going to be confusing. I was a Muslim when I was born. I had my Aqiqah. But when I was five years old, my parents divorced and my mother took me away and I became a born-again Christian,” she explained.
Her parents’ marriage was destined for divorce.
Her maternal great-grandmother Andrea L. Torres-Referente was a Spanish whose family owned a hacienda (Spanish word for “landed estate”) in Maguindanao. The land was taken away by her Muslim tenants.
“That is why my grandmother hated the Muslims,” Ayesha said. “That is why my mother’s family threatened to disown her for marrying a Muslim.”
Her mother Shirley Oro embraced Islam and married Datun Gayao, a Maguindanaon (ethnic group from Maguindanao province), in a traditional Muslim wedding.
Shirley had a hard time dealing with her Muslim in-laws, said Ayesha. “My (paternal) grandparents really did not want a Christian wife for their son. It was because she ate pork and they really did not like that.”
Growing up a Muslim and a Catholic, Ayesha has lived both worlds. When she was five years old, she wore a tendong (Maguindanaon word for “headscarf”) at her father’s house. She was also tasked by her dad, a tableegh (conveyer of the message), to go to mosque every Friday. At her maternal grandmother’s house, she had to wake up at 7am to attend Sunday mass.
“As a child, I learnt Islam and Catholic prayers,” she said.
Cotabato City is located within the boundaries of Maguindanao province in Mindanao. But just as Putrajaya is not part of Selangor, Cotabato City is independent of Maguindanao city.
The city has a notorious reputation in the Philippines.
For example, when Ayesha attended a seminar in Tagaytay, about two hours’ drive from Manila, in 2008, the other delegates were afraid of those who were from Mindanao.
“They said, ‘You come from Cotabato City? Isn’t it dangerous?’ They have a negative notion of Cotabato City,” Ayesha said.
About 70% of Cotabato City’s 280,000 population are Muslims and the rest are Christians.
There are differences in attitudes between the Maguindanaons living in the urban area (Cotabato City) and those in the villages, observed Ayesha.
“My father (who lives in a rural part of Maguindanao) is conservative whereas my stepfather (Sammy Sema, who lives in Cotabato City) is much more open, being in an environment of the Christians,” she said, adding that her mother later married Sammy, a Muslim.
“It is okay for him to dine with pork-eating Christians at our house as long as he does not eat pork. He does not require my mother to wear the hijab (Muslim headscarf) as he understands that it is difficult for my mother to adjust to wearing it. My stepfather even attends church to be a godfather to his nephews and nieces.”
In Cotabato City, said Ayesha, it is rare for Christians to become best friends with Muslims and vice versa.
“You can see the gap. The Christians think the Muslims are traitors and the Muslims don’t like the pork-eating Christians,” she explained.
Here is a typical banter between her Christian and Muslim friends.
Muslim: We were never conquered by the Spanish and you must remember that you were originally a Muslim.
Christian: You are burara (Chavacano language, which means “untidy”).
Muslim: You are dirty because you eat pork. Here’s another example. Muslim: We own this land because it was our sultan who disseminated the land.
Christian: Do you have the title for the land?
“The argument never ends. It goes back and forth,” Ayesha said.
In history class, Filipinos, according to Ayesha, are taught that in the middle of the 1500s, the Spanish colonisers tried to convert the whole of the Philippines to Roman Catholicism.
“Before the Spanish came, there was already Islam in the Philippines. They managed to convert most of the Philippines into Christianity but they failed in Mindanao. And until now the Bangsamoro are proud that they have never been conquered by the Spanish,” she said.
“The Muslims (in the Philippines) call Christians who convert to Islam as ‘ balik Islam’ as they have returned to their original faith.”
The Muslims of southern Philippines resisted the Spanish for over 300 years.
Like her mother when she was in her 20s, Ayesha is dating a Maguindanaoan Muslim man. Religion can be a source of conflict for a Christian and Muslim couple.
“My boyfriend does not want me to go to church. He wants me to wear hijab. He doesn’t want me to wear tight clothes. He wants me to wear loose clothes with long sleeves,” said the woman who described herself as “technically I am a Christian as my birth certificate says so but I behave (most of the time) as a Muslim because I live with a Muslim family”.
Even dating a Muslim brings a certain negative connotation. “My barkada (best friends) will tell me, ‘why do you hang out with that terrorist?’ It is because my boyfriend has Arabian looks as his ancestors are Arab,” she said.
She said her mother told her: “If you want to have a boyfriend, he has to court me, not you. He looks like a terrorist. Are you sure you want him to be your boyfriend?”
The relationship between Christians and Muslims in Cotabato City, according to Ayesha, is not “bad”.
“People are not killing each other. We live harmoniously,” she explained. “We have lived like this for many years and it seems normal and tolerable.”
The Mindanao conflict, which has seen 150,000 people killed in the last 40 years, is not about Christians versus Muslims.
“Maybe it was in the past. But it is no longer about religion,” said the journalist who hosts a radio programme on Thursday morning that explains the peace negotiation in the vernacular language. “The struggle of the Bangsamoro is not about their faith but their identity as Bangsamoro.”
Bangsamoro is a combination of two words, “bangsa’’ which in Malay means “nation or race”, and Moro. The Spanish, who could not conquer the Muslims in Mindanao, called them Moors (after the Muslim Moors of the Iberian Peninsula in Europe).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Muslims in Mindanao, in their fight for independence from Manila, used the term Moro to show that they were never conquered.
The Moro is the identity of Muslims who generally come from 13 ethnic groups such as Maguindanaoan, Maranao, Tausug (these three ethnic groups constitute the majority of Moros), Yakan and Iranun. Five percent of the 100 million Philippine population are Muslims and they live mostly in the predominantly Muslim provinces of Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.
As a multimedia journalist, Ayesha has seen how the war between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has destroyed peoples’ lives.
“I have Bangsamoro in my blood. I feel sad seeing the aftermath of the fighting,” she said.
The MILF are very religious people, she said. “They are not all about killing. The (senseless killing) that you heard is by young and trigger-happy foot soldiers. (Sometimes the MILF leadership) does not have control of soldiers who are mainit (Tagalog for “hot headed”).”
On Monday, when MILF supreme leader Murad Ibrahim gave a speech at Malacanang Palace in Manila, Ayesha was in her office in Cotabato City tweeting the historic moment live for @MinCross.
Ayesha was in tears when Murad said: “I must confess that this is the first time in my life I am stepping in the grounds of Malacanang. Never in my wildest dreams, since I was a child or when I joined the Bangsamoro struggle more than 40 years ago, (did I think) that one day I would see the interior of this building that once housed the Spanish and American governors-general and now the presidents of the Philippines.
“Today, I am here not as a tourist nor as a politician who seeks personal political favours from the president of the Philippines but as the humble chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front mandated by our brothers and sisters on the ground and by the Bangsamoro people to witness a historic agreement with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines under the leadership of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III that would, Insha Allah, usher in a just and enduring peace in the Bangsamoro homeland.”
“I got emotional,” she said. “This man is not just any ordinary Bangsamoro, He is looked up by most Muslims in our area yet in his statements he seemed humble.”
In her Facebook status, Ayesha wrote: “The epic signing of the framework agreement. Green flags are everywhere in Cotabato City and in ARMM. The oldest war of all time, as anthropologists believe so. Good luck to all who walk the path to peace ...” Will peace come to Mindanao? “We still have to watch and wait,” said Ayesha. “But if it happens, it will be a better future for the next generation.”