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?

Gone are the days when

Monday morning, 03 March, a friend in Zamboanga messaged me. Dr. Ikbala has been kidnapped. The incident, it was said, happened Sunday afternoon.  A lady who claims the doctor is a relative belied the news. Yes, kidnappers did enter the Ikbala vicinity, she said, but the doctor refused to go with them and just gave them money. A day later another version had it that robbers and not kidnappers entered the house.  

The headline news on Jolo’s runaway wire that Monday, however, was the Jajurie children, not Dr Ikbala. Three kids from Dr Farouk Jajurie’s household, ages eight, twelve, and fifteen, were nabbed by armed men, along with their driver, as they were on their way to school. On the banner side of the day’s news would be the two salesclerks at Natasha’s ground floor of Helen’s Lodge just right across Rizal Plaza.

On the street, people were abuzz with more news. On the same day that kidnappers or robbers got into the Ikbala house, a policeman had been shot; he just bought a ticket for Zamboanga and had taken a peep at the gym where a pageant was in progress. His daughter was up there and would be crowned Budjang Tiangge (Miss Jolo) later that evening. She would be informed of her father’s death. She stood through it all, in a state of shock, tears streaming down her face as she was dragged around the show. 

Hulah mangih, people whispered to each other. The times are dangerous; evil is aboard. Be careful, be ever careful.

Media is however conspicuously silent. Even the social media people in Zamboanga did not know about it. My sister in San Fernando sat through the newscasts, ABS-CBN, GMA, TV5; there was nothing on Jolo, she said.

She was interested because a daughter was pregnant and wanted to take a vacation in Jolo. The girl is thoroughly ignorant; didn't know a thing about war, about garbage disposal issues, about water supply issues. Whaat??? Oh my God, you have no TV??? Several text messages later she decided she will not get out of the island alive.

I also haven’t told her mother that the death of the policeman here was on account of another man’s daughter getting pregnant. That the boy’s father the shot man’s brother, refused to pay a fine; refused to spend for the wedding, saying it’s the fault of the girl, if girls nowadays were not cheap sluts, so what if she was family to that goddamn island politico (he didn’t say this within anyone’s earshot, I’m sure). So the boy’s father was shot first last year and no wedding took place. This cop who lost a brother therefore decided to bring the case to Camp Crame in Manila, where the generals are; and that was what this trip was all about. So they got two in a row. I have no idea where the boy or the girl is now, but obviously, fines and weddings and blood debts are matters that belong to fathers and elders;  erring kids are not supposed to interfere.

It is all very discouraging. I was not even through thinking over the Bansil sisters when all this got to me. Linda and Nadjoua, who, as town talk would have it, were just in Talipao all those eight months, playing house with the kidnappers. “Nagbaybay,” as they say in local lingo. One of the sisters is pregnant, or pregnant months ago, “matagal na,” according to someone who came from there. The guy who brought the news to Jolo could not tell however which one was pregnant; he had not spoken with the kidnapped girls, of course, as none could get near; they were cordoned off from visitors. Besides, with the both of them covered from top to bottom, who could tell one woman apart from the other.

Then women friends also told me about a Sister Fatima, a nun, who was half-white, very pretty. An Abu Sayaf commander married her, a few years back. She was pregnant when she was released. Of course she left the nunnery and went back to her country.

You just don’t jump into conclusions, no you don’t, they warned me. Don’t I say that it was kidnap, kidnap for ransom it wasn’t; it could have been guyud. We were sitting inside a roadside coffee shop, and a councilor from the municipal hall right across the street is being chatted up by another friend; he is paying for our coffee and the friend is soliciting for our publication, which the girls said, is high offensive lesbian. With their help, we are going to make the March women issue more photogenic.

Guyud, the friend sitting across explained, is traditional Tausug custom of getting oneself a bride by abduction.  

I sometimes cannot believe my eyes how some legends and fantasies about horse-riding men lifting with one hand runaway women still persist. So I said to friends who order me to evacuate, Shucks who wants my head; halaws don’t interest Captain Jacks in the least.

Don’t say that, they say. We don't know who are they; they're no Captain Jacks; they could be neighborhood addicts and they will pick anybody, and soon they will pick anything for a ten thousand or five.

Hilarious. Wouldn’t that democratize kidnapping a bit when traditionally it was only lucrative scourge of the rich? Why, in some shoreline communities, bride price has gone that low. And diyat, the fine for physically injuring another person, can go as low as five hundred, if it was only a tomboy hurting another important tomboy. (Unimportant tomboys won’t haul you to the barangay justice hall.) At the rate we are going, rape should be decriminalized soon.

Just a week back, a journalist friend to Arlene dela Cruz was relating to me what Arlene related to her. That no, the Abu Sayaf did not rape her, they just stripped her naked and threw her into a pit they dug for her, where they hogtied her, and spat at her. That’s what you do to kaffirs. That’s what you do to journalists. 

So I can understand and I thoroughly understand, if Philippine media, taking the cue from Mindanao HR groups and CSOs, had taken on an Abandon Jolo policy. They don’t want journalists? Fine. Let the rotten island rot. They’ll slaughter their own children soon and that will be the day when the place will perhaps be story-worthy.

The first time I heard of it this policy was from an NGO bigwig. Abandon Jolo!, he said. His own organization’s long foray into the field ended somewhat badly, resources captured, the best of his HR people now either settled down or remarried, with one slapped with a criminal case and is now in jail.

This recent wave of kidnappings, I want to tell them, should be interesting because they are taking fellow Muslims, not just kaffir journalists from Manila. For all they know it might be the new class and gender war: two-pronged; one against the elite; and the other against the female sex. See, the Tausug community itself is confounded; wayna, they say, we are a lost tribe if we hurt our own, bang pagkahi ta da in mulahun ta. The girls working at Natasha’s, said a tricycle driver, were Tausugs. He was mumbling to himself as he said so. It's all very well if it's only the Christians they kidnap. Then he checked himself and gave me a second third look.

So I said to my sister, who is neither a journalist nor a sociologist, I don’t really know what’s going on. I’d like to think, like how my Tausug girl-friends think, that the boys just want to marry. There is so much hunger here, so much deprivation. Then Jolo is full of bachelor women, young, pretty, and looking. Then if the men who kidnapped the girls were jihadists, maybe pretty girls selling cosmetics is their idea of kaffir bagu, the new infidels? Isn’t that nice? Muslimhood, ethno-religious identity continuously being redefined and reinvented? The Tausugs maybe extremely ethnocentric and chauvinist; the decades of war on their communities may have made them very sectarian and anti-Christian; but they are not a closed society.

Gone are the days when the only enemy they knew, their idea of a satru, was the Marine soldier and his whore.