(JOLO, Sulu / 02 January) — Jesuit Communications (JESCOM)’s and Metro Manila Film Festival’s 2nd Best Film GOMBURZA had Padre Mariano Gomes quoting for his last words a gist of this verse from the Quran (if there is, I could not find similar biblical passage):
“…Not even a leaf falls without His knowledge, nor a grain in the
darkness of the earth or anything—green or dry—but is ˹written˺ in a
perfect Record.
He is the One who calls back your souls by
night and knows what you do by day, then revives you daily to complete
your appointed term. To Him is your ˹ultimate˺ return, then He will
inform you of what you used to do.” (60)
–AL QURAN Surah Al An’Am (6:59-60)
To a Muslim viewer, the priestly dialogues between Padre Gomes and Padre Jose Burgos on the eve of their execution is heavily laced by thoughts and teachings of Spanish Valencia-born Muslim saint – Sheikh ul Akbar – Sheikh Muhiyuddin Ibnul Arabi (c. 1165-1240), considered as Islamic philosophy’s great reformist.
Death and transcendence of being are two concepts in Akbarian philosophy that continue as living teachings in Sulu spirituality of Pagtuhan. In the Philippines, folk Islamic pagtuhan or ilmu’ Kama’asan in Sulu archipelago has since time immemorial preserved and practiced the extant teachings of Sheikh Ibn Arabi that are taken and assumed as a continuity with the Qadirian (Sheikh Abdul Qadir Al-Jilani c. 1078-1166) theological traditions, which, in its recent 21st century popularization and revivals worldwide, are now variously appropriated as modern Sufism by moderate Muslims.
Not surprisingly, many of these teachings are found glossed in the movie such as the concepts of death as divine gift of mercy, and that the slaughter of innocents may consummate One-ness with God. Also, in patience and submission and the giving way to His Divine Master Plan of purging the world – including, if needs be, the massacre of innocents – to be held as salvific measure to restore order for those left to continue on the journey in the earthly mission. And finally, in God’s assurance to “revive you daily” guaranteed by the perpetuation of progeny among whom shall carry on with the legacy, as the final return is to Him alone.
Note how this trope of God’s calling back of souls is consistently being produced and read today by Muslims, both mystics and liberal progressives alike, who are plunged into the darkest of dark nights of Israel’s genocidal attacks of Palestine.
Not minding the historical narrative of religious apologeticism, i.e. that it was NOT the Spanish Friars but the Governador-General and military colluding with the munafiq-ish hoodwinker characters of Ilustrado “brotherhood” who were the perperators of abuse and staged and manipulated state violence and oppression of Filipinos and Indios – as mumbled expletive by the architect Ilustrado’s putzist line: “what cannot be given (by situation) must be taken! (by creating the objective circumstances)” – yet the film is still worthy of appreciation in that the theological lens of GomBurZa tried to achieve unity of universalism in spirituality of faith as liminal.
Albeit hesitant, it suggests being cognizant and aware of hazy memories of precolonial spirituality in our “barbaric” mystic forebears that persistently seep through and slip, bleeding into the parchments of religion of the mainstream and the racially purist rituals and doxa. In the figures of trans identity themselves, of Padre Pedro Pelaez retelling the story of Hermano Pule to his student, Don Jose Burgos, the two are agencies of hybridity articulating the mestizos’ political discomforts as well as their imaginations – their state of potent becoming and transformational creativity as being positioned in the interstices of their social and cultural locations as padres seculares, who would later themselves give birth to a nascent yet progressive identity of “Los Filipinos.”
The teachings and practice to today of this transcendental spirituality of the mystical “suluk”(wayfarers) are lived and embodied by travelers and lovers of leaving in the path of Divine love in Sulu archipelago. As inhabitants of cultural borders and dwellers of the margins, some adherents experience rejection and often are branded as deviants and are socially expelled and cancelled. To be politically interstitial and transitory too have to have been lived and professed more concretely and apparently among members of Islamic mystic orders in the perpetually rendering path of ‘tariqa’ (plural ‘turuq’). And perhaps, they were also lived in the classic orthodoxy among liminal communities of Early Christians, but were not, or were rather absent in conformist and totalitarian traditions of institutionalized and official Roman Catholicism.
It makes it plausible to say then that the secular Christians of GOMBURZA time (1870s) were either believers or followers of Augustinian mysticism, or were practicing remnants of pantheistic monist theology that in Akbarian philosophy is Wahdat ul Wujud or Unity of Existence, and a belief in multiplicity in everything of this world as manifestation of the Unity of Divine Knowledge and Order. This extant and indigenous may have been also existent among Early Filipino or Indiospirituality such as those adapted and carried on into Cofradia de San Jose of Apolonio dela Cruz a.k.a. Hermano Pule, thereby transforming into a fusion of syncretism of both Augustinian – or similar Catholic mysticism – and of Indio streams.
LESSON: the final inflection being is to point out here that progressive change in society may be in a sustained Knowledge-power process via values i. e. charismatic and religious transformations to be made possible through breakthroughs and advances in consciousness and embodiment of transcendental spirituality, as more effective counterpart to the liberal intellectual ideology proposed in the story represented as violent and rash opportunist adventurism by intellegentias and the elite and moneyed class.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mucha-Shim Lahaman Quiling is Chief Executive Officer and Senior Researcher of Sulu Current Research Institute and Sharif Ul hashim Incorporated. She is also the secretary of the Sangguniang Bayan ng Jolo.)
Source: WHERE TWO SEAS MEET: Islamic Akbarianism in Jesuit Film ‘GOMBURZA’?
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