Muslims in RP brutalized by state police

The symbol why Muslims fight

This photo shows the real situation of Islam and Muslims in the Philippines. Islam is besieged here by a brutal state, who treats Muslims as second or even third class citizens.  It is a reality created by centuries of enslavement by foreign hands, an existence threatened by co-optation and offers of co-existence.

How will Muslims in this country believe in the sweet promises of their oppressors when their existence is being threatened every day by the state? How will Muslims believe in the sanctity of peace when all they see, hear and taste are brutality, pillage and rape?

Such is the life of a Muslim living in the Philippines. Long is the suffering of people whose only desire is to live peacefully among equals.

Brutality makes it difficult for Muslims in this country to accept the offer of peace by those who do not share their faith. What can peace do when police brutalize you and your family, when they destroy your homes and ransack your mosque. They offer peace with their right hand while their left holds a dagger.

The Philippine state wants to co-opt the Muslims, lull them to sleep so that they lose all desire to fight. While Muslims allow themselves to be co-opted, foreign invaders take their lands in the name of “free trade”. Those who fight for their right to property, are considered “terrorists” and exterminated.

The Noble Qu’ran is emphatic—those who violate your right to property deserve your wrath. Muslims are mandated by Allah to fight those who desecrate the lands which the Muslims owe and till and fight they must until the invasion has ceased.

And how can these Muslims living in that isolated piece of land called Baclaran be considered as illegal settlers when all of Metro Manila were owned by the Muslims long before the advent of Western invaders? All of Paranaque, that once sleepy town of fishermen, were occupied by Muslim settlers even before De Goiti or Legaspi arrived and conquered these lands by force? That scene where Manila policemen brutally dispersed Muslim settlers in Paranaque seemed reminiscent of the past.

This shows that the struggle which Rajah Solaiman, the Muslim hero whose name was adopted to describe the mosque seen here, started centuries back, is still alive. Only those who are truly Muslims, those of pious natures, can very well do what is ordered.