Cafe Armalite days

Is Sabrina Ikbala Voon Muslim or Not?

 

Days after she was kidnapped, this question was posted on Facebook. 

You never know, one put in, the times they are a-changin’. The girl is a businesswoman, she sells beauty products. 

One male gossip insinuated that it was the son the kidnappers wanted; but the boy violently resisted while the young mother bravely volunteered herself, in lieu of the son, so it was she they took.

A jihadist argued: kidnapping of jahils (whores), munafiqs (hypocrites), and kaffirs (infidels) is just. But fellow Muslims, no. 

Not Muslim, some bar-going men judged. 

Hands off, dear, a Tausug friend now in the peace-keeping force stopped my rantings. It might not be kidnapping for ransom. What she heard, she said, is it was a custodial fight between two adults, private matter. The boy’s father could not even get near his son, how is that. 

By the time I got to Jolo, I had made enough enough enemies on account of Sabrina’s Muslimhood that I threw Sabrina out of my mind. So much for. I was thinking of Linda and their Café Armalite film, now unfilmed, and who Karen said, was a Muslim and did not wear a scarf. I was thinking of her because a friend said that she saw the news of their release and that the two of them were covered head to foot. Only their eyes could be seen from behind the slits of the black cloths around their faces. 

Be that they did not set the camp to fire.  

Then Linda and Nadjoua, I should know, are no whiny bitches. They get along; won’t do theatrics just because some sword-brandishing Koran-quoting Quasimodo asked them to cover their aurat. Just like that other girl, the one who got widowed after marrying her abductor, I can’t even remember her name now, Jo?, the kaffir engineer in the Ipil caper over a decade ago, whom the Abu Sayaf converted and married. We interviewed that one. At the time we were doing this CATW-HURIDOCS project inventorying human rights violations against women, and big was my dismay because she attested that No, she was not forced; she fell in love, or learned to love his captor now his husband, and that she found redemption or found a truer faith in Islam. She also related that the kidnapper-lover, during the early phase of the courtship when she was still all-resistance, kept on saying what a waste she was, a waste that she had to be a kaffir, a lost woman. 

So when my friend in Zamboanga said later that Sabrina, it turned out, was not a kidnap for ransom case but an abduction for marriage, it felt like Alhamdulillah we will never run out of this. Marriage boom in the country’s kidnap capital!

Question: Who collects?