Lack of Koran learning seen as terror cause Inquirer
November 14, 2006
COTABATO CITY—Muftis, or jurists of Islamic law in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), said that some Muslims are drawn into violence because they do not understand what the Koran says.
An ustadz (Arabic teacher) in Davao City, who requested anonymity, told the Inquirer that radicals, such as those belonging to the terrorist network al-Qaida, have been found to be misinterpreting the Koran, including the verses on jihad, to advance their brand of Islam.
“Jihad means struggle but this does not only pertain to people who persecute Muslims. Jihad also means a struggle against one’s self versus evil,” the ustadz said.
Another Islamic scholar said the Prophet Muhammad had foretold to his followers persons deemed bane to Islam after his time: “He who is least educated and pretended to be learned; and he who is learned and kept his knowledge all to himself.”
“Education is prescribed as a fard (obligatory) to every Muslim male and female,” Tawi-Tawi Mufti Abdulwahid Inju told the Inquirer, quoting a written tradition of the Prophet Muhammad.
Inju attended last week’s gathering of muftis in Zamboanga City, where they made the call to Muslims to learn the Koran so they would understand what it really says.
Mufti Abdulwahab Tunggal of Basilan said even non-students should learn the Koran because continuing education should not be limited by space or age.
The Department of Education (DepEd) in the ARMM said a study it conducted found that there are over half a million students in the region but less than 20 percent of them are learning Arabic.
From World War II through the 1980s, the DepEd-ARMM said the number of learners of Arabic, or those educated in it, has dwindled.
Currently, only about 300,000 of the ARMM’s five million residents are able to read the Koran in Arabic.
“This is a very small number,” Ustadz Muhammad Farid Adas, ARMM Education undersecretary for madaris (Islamic schools), said.
Gracia Burnham, in her book “In the Presence of My Enemy,” had also noticed this.
On page 73, she wrote: “They (meaning the Abu Sayyaf) had Korans but only two in the group had read the book all the way through. (T)hey read in distinctly nasal singsong tone. Martin asked one of the guys, ‘What did that say?’” “Oh we don’t know,” said the reader Musab (who, Gracia wrote, had established himself as the ASG “spiritual leader”).
“We don’t know Arabic,” confessed Musab to the late Martin Burnham, according to Ms Burnham’s book.
Of the ASG leaders, she wrote that the hostages’ attention was once invited to Abu Sabaya’s reading of a Koran verse in English.
Sabaya, Burnham wrote, had interpreted the verse according to what he said were “interpretations of (unidentified) scholars worldwide.”
These and other issues had prompted the muftis to call among their peers a series of low-key conferences, according to Tunggal. Nash Maulana with a report from Allan Nawal, Inquirer Mindanao
