If Rizal had been a Moro

By: Randy David

@inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer

12:09 AM June 18th, 2015

The story of a nations birth is the same everywhere. In a landscape of fragmented and
subjugated communities, someone glimpses the image of a people bound by a common
experience of oppression and a shared aspiration to be free. In Benedict Andersons
memorable words, every nation has its beginnings as an imagined community.
We Filipinos were lucky to have a genius like Jose Rizal who could do that imagining for
us and write about what he saw in a most eloquent way. In so doing, he made it
possible for generations of young people to grasp the concept of a Filipino nation, giving
them a reason to dedicate their lives to its full realization. No better example is there of
Rizals brilliant articulation of this modern concept than his essay, The Philippines a
century hence.
Below is my abridgement of the first pages of this powerful text, as translated into
English. If Rizal had been a Moro, he might have written a narrative like this, simply
substituting Bangsamoro for Filipino, and the Philippines for Spain.
To predict the future of a nation, it is necessary to look at her past. The Filipino past
may be summarized as follows: Soon after its incorporation into the Spanish crown, the
Philippines had to support with the blood and strength of her sons the ambitions and
wars of the Spanish nation. Its people were made to change their government, laws,
usages, customs, religion and beliefs. The islands were depopulated, impoverished,
and retarded, and the people left with no confidence in their past, with no faith in their
present, and no hope for the future. Their traditional rulers, who used fear to dominate
their subjects and accustomed them to bondage, fell like leaves from a dried tree. They
had no love for their people and no notion of liberty. They quickly switched masters,
hoping to gain something from the new order.
Thus began a new era for the Philippines. Its inhabitants lost their old traditions and
memories of their past. They gave up their writing, their songs, their poems, their laws,
and began to learn by rote other doctrines they did not understand, another morality, art
forms that were different from those inspired by their climate and their manner of
thinking. Thus they declined, lowered in their own eyes, ashamed of what was their
own. They began to admire and praise whatever was foreign. Their spirit was broken.
Having reached this stage of degradation, the people of these islands were ready for
the coup de grace aimed at totally crushing their willpower and their dormant minds, and
transforming them into beasts of burden, humans without brains and hearts. They were
openly insulted, stripped of any virtue or human quality. Some writers and priests went
so far as to say that these people were bereft of any capacity not only for virtue but also
for vice.
This blow, far from being mortal, became a source of salvation, a strong medicine to
enable dying men to recover. The insults and sufferings woke up their lethargic spirit. If
they once had the patience to suffer and die at the feet of a foreign flag, they soon lost it
when they were paid with insults and inanities.
The Filipino slowly examined himself and realized his misfortune, surprising his
despotic masters, who treated every complaint as an offense and punished every
misdeed with death. Though this awakening initially occurred only in a few hearts, its
flame rapidly spread.

Undoubtedly, there have been generous and noble spirits who, while they belong to the
ruling race, have stood for justice and humanityjust as there have been cowardly men
among the subject people who have participated in the debasement of their native land.
But they are the exceptions.
This is a sketch of her past. Lets understand her present. And now, what will her future
be? Will the Philippines remain a Spanish colony, and in this case, what kind of colony?
Will she become a Spanish province with or without autonomy? And, in order to attain
this status, what kind of sacrifices must she make? Will she eventually separate from
the mother country, Spain, to live independently, to fall into the hands of other nations,
or to ally herself with other neighboring powers?
Its impossible to answer these questions, for the answer depends on the time one has
in mind. If theres no permanence in nature, how much less there must be in the life of
peoples, endowed as they are with mobility. To answer these questions, it would be
necessary to fix a limited space of time and, using this as reference point, attempt to
foresee future happenings.
Rizal goes on to examine different scenarios and their varying conditions of possibility.
At some points, he writes, the impulse for freedom may be strong, but the people are
not ready. There might be too much dissension at the top, and general apathy below. If
Spain refuses to grant substantial reforms, and the country further retrogresses, it will
force Filipinos to gamble away the miseries of an insecure life for the hope of
obtaining something uncertain.
But three centuries of colonial rule altered the terrain. Today there is a factor which did
not exist before. The national spirit has awakened, and a common misfortune and a
common abasement have united all the inhabitants of the Islands. It counts on a large
enlightened class today constituting the brains of the country, and within a few years
its entire nervous system
Rizal became an inspiring figure to Indonesians and Malaysians as well. It would not be
surprising if his prophetic words still reverberate in Southern Mindanao, where the
struggle for emancipation of an imagined Moro nation continues to be waged.