The race against time: chasing wayward ancient manuscripts around Ground Zero

POSTSCRIPT. Just when my field works should have been winding down, I had—by way of an intermezzo—uncharacteristically put on hold the expected debut of my Monsoon Riders series in accepting the role as an adviser, scout, and de-facto paleographer for the Manila-based Grupo Kalinangan in its quest to digitize Ranaū-Iranūn manuscripts. I'm a self-confessed sucker on anything ancient, so when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped the saddle with my camera on sling, my laptop hanging askew off my shoulder, and the tiny wheels on my battered luggage wiggling down the zebra pedestrian crossing of downtown Manila as I hastened for the airport. I had the tingly feeling that some detail in my initial volume needed some wee tweaking here and there, and in hindsight I can say that I did judge correctly.

The digitization project, funded under a grant from the Prince Claus Foundation of Holland, was not something everyone involved had thought of beforehand. It was in knee-jerk reaction to the aftermath of the ISIS-Mauté's siege of Marawi in the Group's utopian dream of putting up an Islamic "caliphate" in the country. As a consequence of the tussle between government forces and these self-proclaimed messiahs, tomes and tomes of irreplaceable kirim parchments such as kissa, hikayat, darangên, tūṯhól, sĕlĕsîlahs, and siyarahs kept by old scions of the town were irretrievably lost and destroyed forever.

 

Nor-ain Lambitan and Zawarah Tarhata Cabugatan busy at work on the notorious “Makarārab” from Maçiu. The much older Makarārab sa Sawer, reputed to be more than 300 years old, an original calligraphy gilded in gold inks, which I and Mohd. Jason Cristobal had digitized, could not be featured as yet pending some agreement with the clan’s custodian, the heirs of the late Ālīm Azis Mimbantas, Vice-Chair of the MILF.

 I shudder to claim to have premonition of what was about to happen. My field work on the sĕlĕsîlah (genealogy) started in earnest on January 1, 2015. As part of my initial survey, some few months before the 2017 siege, I had asked the Pacasum clan at Raya Madaya to open up their family archives for my scrutiny. This I was granted, and I’m kicking myself now that I only managed to finish a quarter of the collection, postponing to continue at a much later date until the siege caught everyone pretty flat-footed. One prized collection that I now keep in my position is the 1950 essay of Pacasŭm (Saȳik Mustapha) himself widely known to his peers as Amaī Sangğa Kala. The article had been transliterated from a kirim in the patriarch’s handwriting. Because it touches on sensitive issues of old Manticao, Nāäwan, the Bayūg area in Iligan, and Misamis Oriental in general, it will be showcased in the appendix to Volume One of the Monsoon Riders series. On the whole though the loss of literature in the City is colossal. The collection of Ālīm Majid Ansano, among others (not to mention my late father’s writings), were wiped clean. On day one, the ISIS-Mauté group made sure that the priceless old libraries at Dansalan College containing personal anecdotes of such luminaries like Frank Laubauch, Maisie Van Vactor, and Peter Gowing while they made Lanao their home were burned to ashes. What other priceless materials were lost in the battle, we will never have a way of knowing.

In the siege’s aftermath, the loss of buildings and lives, and the attempt to reconstruct Ground Zero and put the city back on its feet again dominated every proceeding. The loss of precious manuscripts, if mentioned at all, is drowned out in the melee. They are little mourned, and not much remorse was shown on this irreplaceable heritage. It took the imagination of an ad-hoc group of young enthusiasts led by Joél Aldor, a computer architect at that, to come up with a digitization plan, hoping for whatever scraps might be salvaged from the ruins of Marawi and its environs. From the get-go, Mohd. Jason Cristobal who heads the project, openly admitted that it could be a shot in the dark. Cristobal is a freshman student of the University of Santo Tomas. He may only be eighteen years old, but he showed exceptional ability in field work, not to mention his sterling knowledge of Southeast Asian cultural influences on the Philippines as I found out to my delight on several discussion binge at Starbucks. To enhance and facilitate its project, Kalinangan had signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Mindanao State University, and the institution assigned us a quiet work room at the Aga Khan Museum in its main campus to house our equipment and the loaned materials.

Of course, even before there were some digitization projects in the works already, albeit on a limited scale, such as the ones done by Kawashima Midori of Japan, her findings ably published by the Institute of Asian Cultures of Sophia University in 2011. The Kalinangan's work, on the other hand, is a bit ambitious. When we had reached the 400 manuscripts mark, Cristobal called it a day, although he admitted that this could only be a drop in the bucket. Any future hurdle will have to await further funding.

The fight I am waging, however, is on a grander scale: siege or no siege, the collections, whatever scraps were left of them, are rapidly going away. The culprit: the self-styled "muttawas"(مطوع), a product of the thousands of Filipino Wahhabi scholars pumped in back by Saudi Arabia to Mindanao (thanks to the oil boom of the 80s) who are now wreaking havoc on the ancient cultural heritage of the country. These "clerical police" who hide behind the cloak of a Ālīm (religious scholar) loathed wholesale anything cultural as contravening Islam. Unlike their counterparts in the Middle East, their authority doesn't have the force of law in the Philippines. Yet their annoying influence playing gullible on the layman's psyche is just as effective. Their uncanny way of branding every ritual and literature endemic among Southeast Asian Muslims as bida’ah (innovation) is legendary. The pious—fearful of committing sin—kowtow to their every whim, such that their reaction whenever something is declared as bida’ah borders on Pavlovian, clouding their sense of reason.

I had the opportunity to document these happenstances in my field works. The latest being the case of Baì Pinongkí Buat of Pantao, Masiu in Lanao. On September 24 this year, acting on a tip from my guide, I expectantly ascended the planked stairs of the octogenarian’s wooden house, who as an artist, was reputed to own a quarry of kirim scripts in her repertoire. On the upper landing of the open balcony, she welcomed me with a lively knowing smile befitting a bayok singer despite her age. Once we were settled, it was when I broached on the subject of her collection that her face turned crestfallen. For a few minutes she sat quiet, frozen. Then slowly she regained her composure. Ten years ago, she began, she went on hajj to Mecca. Yes, it was a defining moment in her life, fulfilling one of the pillars of Islam, and, why, she was happy of it. Little did she know also that her absence was used as a ruse by her children to have her get rid of her "old habits"—her passion for the kirim. When she came back, she was blissfully unaware of the loss until she had a craving to recite, and when she rummaged through her belongings, she found out to her horror that the stacks upon stacks of manuscripts in her luggage were missing. She confronted her children, and they chorused to answer that, collectively for guilt, they have thrown them into in the stream to drown. Hearing these oft-repeated incidents is starting to sound to me like a broken vinyl record.

 

Baì Pinongki trying to sort leftovers from her kirim manuscripts. The author holds the sĕlĕsîlah copied from the original.

I took a deep sigh, stood to collect my paraphernalia and bid Baì Pinongki a goodbye. "Wait," she stopped me. "I still have something that might interest you." She went inside and came back with heaps of dog-eared sheaves of parchments, and one manuscript cradled at her elbow. "These," Baì Pinongkí said, "escaped annihilation because it was separately stashed away up the rafters. It isn't much, mind you, but I still keep it." I examined both. She gave me permission to take pictures of the manuscript which turned out to be a sĕlĕsîlah (genealogy), and it took me some 300 clicks with my Nikon camera. The loose sheaves were in disarray and it took her a while to sort the episodes into order, sometimes pausing to sing some passages of them. Once she latched onto a favorite, she sang it to the end, causing windows in the neighborhood to pry open as everyone began to listen to the old croon’s crackling but hauntingly beautiful voice.

I could have listened to the soulful recital tell sundown when our reverie was broken by the thumping footsteps at the staircase. It was one of Baì Pinongki's daughters. She stared at us with a heavily arched eyebrow, and looked down at the tattered manuscripts with apparent disdain. After grudgingly acknowledging my presence, she disappeared through the door curtain. Some ten minutes later an olive branch came in the form of a 3-in-1 coffee and a platelet of sliced dōdol. I don't know if Baì Pinongki had reconciled or come to terms with her children regarding these "arts of the devil." These women folk are getting their weekly fix of Qu'ran thumping lectures. Mahdi Ahmad Basher, the current President of the Jamiatu Muslim Mindanao had confided to me that his father, the late Sheikh Ahmad Basher, one of the patriarchs of early religious order in the Philippines during the 1950s had confessed in his deathbed that the Ūlamas themselves are partly to blame as they had been unduly harsh with our culture. As my mentor in Jeddah, Sheikh Ali Alireza of Saudi Arabia, used to quote an Arabic proverb: "A man who disown his culture is like a crow imitating the dance of the dove."

 

The tattered manuscript that Baì Pinongki is trying hard to restore to its original form. Writings like this is getting rarer and rarer with each passing year. No cohesive plan, either government or private, is in the offing to save these endangered heritage from the past.

There is no Asian culture much maligned today on multi-pronged front than that of the Filipino natives in general. It started with the Iberians who wanted get rid of everything native and start off with a clean slate. They destroyed relics, graves, makams (mausoleum) and anything that would remind the natives of their former faiths. Branding them the “works of the devil”, they were even worse than the mutawwas of our day. The dampening effect they exerted on the search for indigenous history and culture is still very much strongly felt today long after the colors of Leon and Castile was carried off into the sunset in 1898.

Taking their cue, Filipino historians of our day compounded the mayhem by bidding on a one-size-fits-all account. In school, we are not told proper history. Instead stereotypes abound, and religion is the building block on which homogenized narratives were grounded. Take, for instance, this moronic quote from Gregorio and Sonia Zaide's Philippine History and Government: “…We are a nation with a gift of faith and a gift of music that other Asian nations do not have. The Filipinos are very spiritual and deeply religious. Christianity triumphed easily in the Philippines, but the other Asian nations do not accept Christianity from the West….”

Very patriotically neat indeed, but even a kindergarten today would guffaw at the childishness of the claim and could easily dismantle the fallacy in the statement. The bankruptcy of this approach is beginning to be exposed gradually as the history of Southeast Asia begins to unravel, thanks to the effort of a new crop of researchers such as Eric Tagliacozzo, Nicholas Tarling, the veterans couple Leonard Andaya and Barbara Watson and a host of others, accessing native genealogical history like the Tuhfat Al-Nafis, employing unorthodox techniques and the unleashing of the internet. The "Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico" by Tatiana Seijas, which in some portions discussed the fate of Moro captives on board the galleons shipped to Nueva España to be enslaved is a recent favorite of mine. By leveraging new discoveries, more and more details of the interconnecting link among these monsoon nations begins to unravel.

Old habits are hard to break, however. There had been talks about recent decades being "the most productive in Philippine historiography," such as the friar estates, the Mexican situado, the Diego Silang revolt, Schumacher's Philippine church history, and the tobacco monopoly. But these deal mainly with Luzon and a token of the Vizayas, which try to coop the country's historical timeline within the confines of the Spanish era. Mindanao remained virtually untouched. I got tired of hearing Datu Salansang as the only character of Lambago(Manobo-Higaunun term) or Kalambaguhan (Bisayan for old Cagayan de Oro) just because he happened to be the grandson of Doña Magdalena Baaya.

In the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain, most Philippine team sent in would only do research on religious conversion, missionary activity, and nothing else. Our inability to do a meaningful comprehensive history is the reason why our country is constantly glossed over in the historical narratives of Asia. In the first edition of A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–1500, Kenneth R. Hall deigned not to include the Philippines. Soon this sorry state of affair will peter out. The Katipunan which started out as a secret organization in 1892 didn’t see real action at all until it was discovered four years later in 1896, and just two years afterwards Spain sold Philippines to the highest bidder. And if Gregorio Zaide is to be deemed right, this phosphorous build up is the only one worth remembering. No wonder it had been analyzed to death. We're starting to tire of hearing the National Historical Institute's oft-recycled trivia: "Sino-sino ang mga nag gantsilyo ng watawat ng Pilipinas?"

The multi-cultural diversity of the Philippines is a gift. This cultural "tension" should not be relieved at the expense of many, but, in fact, embraced, even encouraged and cultivated in myriad creative ways. The accompanying intrigue and curiosity could only be a draw to its attractiveness. This "duality" is what makes Filipinos so different from other nations in Southeast Asia, why the output of its artists, sportsmen, and entrepreneurs so unique. The overriding beauty of this concept is it takes everybody in. It gives Pilosopong Tacio a purchase as much as it gives Pilandok sa Raya and Pilandok sa Lilod an elbow room. Any opposition among the players is merely demonstrative of the tension at work. And in the spirit of trendy “country branding”, it ought not be annihilated to favor just a few…