BAGUIO (Philippines): Brother Isa says he found the path to Islam in the Bible. “John chapter eight, verse 32 — Jesus said seek the truth and the truth shall make you free,” the wiry 50-year-old explained at a mosque in the northern Philippine city of Baguio. “So I kept on asking and I came to Islam, and I was able to prove that the doctrines of Christianity were not true.”
Living in Saudi Arabia for a decade helped shake the electrician’s faith in Christianity and convince him that Islam was calling. And so Isa joined the growing ranks of Islamic converts in Asia’s largest Catholic country, inadvertently adding to what the government now regards as one of its biggest security headaches.
Fears of a potential enemy within have been fanned by terror attacks involving Islamic converts apparently working in tandem with the Abu Sayyaf Muslim guerrilla group.
For converts, known as “Balik-Islam” (returnees to Islam), that increasingly means living under a cloud of suspicion in a mostly Roman Catholic country where prejudice against Muslims has been ingrained by conflict in southern Mindanao and Sulu.
Converts to Islam are thought to number more than 100,000, adding to around six million born Muslims, mostly in Mindanao. Often drawn to Islam after stints working in the Middle East, among the millions of overseas Filipino workers, they return to find they are the subject of prejudices they once held.
“Many people say to me: before I embraced Islam, I hated Muslims,” laughed Bedejim Abdullah, an imam at Baguio’s Al Maarif mosque and teaching centre, who estimates that around seven people convert to Islam every month in the city.
“I would say there are more people coming now; it’s more intense.”
Perched high in the Cordillera mountains, Baguio seems a world away from the troubles in the southern jungles. But the Al Maarif centre has not escaped the fallout.
In March 2004, shortly after a bomb sank a ferry near Manila in the country’s worst terror attack, a Russian Muslim who occasionally taught at the mosque was bundled into a car by plain-clothes police as he strolled home from Friday prayers.
The man, Adis Khairoulline, was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to police headquarters in Manila for interrogation, according to people at the mosque.
He was released two weeks later, but still faces charges of training militants at the centre, which a state prosecutor said in a report “directly provides financial support to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and other Islamic extremist groups”.
The MILF is the country’s largest Muslim rebel group.
To the astonishment of Benny Bomogao, a Muslim lawyer who campaigned for Khairoulline’s release, the charge sheet also accused the centre of using “weapons or makeshift weapons intended to cause mass destruction”.
“The only problem here is that the government is paranoid about those who converted,” said Bomogao.
“We told them to come and visit, don’t brand this school as a school for terrorists.”
Attitudes to Muslims in the Philippines are shaped by the southern troubles, which still grind on four centuries after the Spanish conquistadors tried and largely failed to conquer the Moro people, as the Muslims in the south are known.—Reuters
