Conclusion
IN reality, very few Sharia courts are in operation. However, there is a clear standout in Tawi-Tawi.
In Tawi-Tawi, the southwesternmost island province of the country, the sole Sharia court is in Bongao.
“But even its look is appalling,” said Radzma J. Jamiri, one of five Sharia lawyers in the area and one of only two women lawyers.
“The building is unkempt, unpainted and looks more of an ordinary office than a court. It does not elicit dignity and respect a courtroom should imbue,” she told the BusinessMirror in a mobile-phone interview from Davao City.
It is an injustice for the Bangsa-moro in the Philippines “that we have the presidential decree [PD] that already mandated the creation of the Sharia courts and, yet, it has not been implemented”.
The expanded autonomy law, in fact, she added, has taken the PD further by empowering also the Sharia courts to litigate criminal cases, contained in Islam’s Hudod Law, or criminal law.
Yet, nothing has brought further inroads into the jurisdiction of the Sharia, she said.
“The Regional Legislative Assembly should have made the implementing rules and guidelines immediately after the laws were enacted.”
The Bongao court is one of the supposed eight courts allotted to Tawi-Tawi. For many reasons, only that court was established.
Jamiri has stopped lawyering after 2007. She said this was after being disappointed over a Sharia judge who recalled an earlier decision for the husband-respondent to pay compensation to his wife in a divorce case.
Jamiri was one of the more than 100 Sharia lawyers who took their oath before then-Chief Justice Hilario G. Davide Jr. in 2001.
Islam’s tenets
THE Sharia and Hudod laws are practically contained in the Koran, Islam’s holy book. “The Sharia court only lifted them from the Koran to be enforced among men,” Jamiri said.
The Koran has made it easier for the Sharia courts and Muslim scholars, including the imams, to enforce the law equally among men, whatever the stature one has in the community, said Hadji Basit Baraguir in Davao City.
Baraguir is the program officer of the Madrasah Comprehensive Development and Promotion Program of the Davao City government, the only one program by any local government in the Philippines. The program covers the operation of the 45 madaris [plural of madrasah] and the 180 Arabic language teachers.
“Many nations who implement the Sharia court system are progressive, mainly because the dispensation of justice is fair and just, whether you are rich or poor, has position in society or an ordinary resident,” Baraguir said.
“People will know, or eventually will know, if something unusual is not being done right. The judge would have to answer to Allah,” he said. “But nothing has ever happened that was not right.”
“When I say that most nations adapting the Sharia law has become progressive, it is because the law is swift and just, and there is a corresponding information dissemination for every act punished,” he added.
For stealing, for example, “a finger is cut, and for higher amounts, the bigger part of the limb would be cut also,” Baraguir explained.
In the Middle East “either the finger cut or the person itself is being brought around the community to announce the act that was punished,” he said. “It’s the message that is important: That no one should commit the act again or meet the same fate.”
Petty crimes
NOTHING of that sort of ordering the dismembering of a limb has happened in the Philippines, so far.
According to Samer Allong, administrative officer at the same Madrasah program in Davao City, a semblance of the Sharia court is being practiced in communities populated by Moro Muslims.
As far as I remember, Allong said, in the Muslim Village at the southern edge of Barangay Bangkal in Davao City, petty crimes have been litigated and decided by the imam. But mostly, the public punishment of lashing, or whipping, “is one punishment that has left a mark in the community consciousness”.
“It is commonly enforced on cases of premarital sex, and the two persons involved are given 100 whips in full view of the community,” Allong said. “It’s also the imam to do it.”
Unlike in the Middle East, though, the whipping material is taken from the softer end of the coconut palm, or the outer edge of a palm frond, “which are common in our community”.
While this mellowed version of the hard stick or metal-ended whip belt may still inflict pain, it was intended to send a more grim message that crime does not pay.
“It’s a psychological and religious message that drills deep into the consciousness of a Muslim.”
Worse than a whip
ALLONG could still remember one Muslim resident in the same village.
He said in 2005 resident “volunteered confessing that he had sex with another Muslim while they were migrant workers in Saudi Arabia”.
“The girl got pregnant and had to go back to her hometown in General Santos City,” he said. That voluntary confession and accepting the hundred lashes “freed him of his bad conscience, and opened the avenue for them to get married and to receive the blessings of Allah”.
But it was worse in a Muslim community in Sulu, “when I was a kid then,” Jamiri said. She said an uncle committed the same offense, but opted to take all the 200 lashes, half of them supposed to be inflicted on the girl.
“An ‘uway’, or rattan, was used, and I could still recall the whipper doing it in full blast,” she said.
It would be worse for adultery and rape, where death is meted out, but which has not been applied in the Philippines, too.
“Muslims would usually rest the case to the regular courts,” Baraguir said. As in the case in the Muslim village in Davao City, the imam only went as far as warning the parents of one of the rapists to surrender their child to the police “because it is already out of his jurisdiction as an imam, and which would have been handled by a Sharia lawyer.”
“But the imam told the parents that had a Sharia court handled the case, their child could have meted the death sentence,” Allong said.
Gender equality
WHILE the Sharia law promises a strong deterrent to crime and offers better economic development as a consequence, Jamiri said women issues, like the rest of the Philippine society, has a far and winding road ahead.
She has used women-rights issues among Muslims as her dissertation for a doctorate degree in 2005. That time, she asserted that Muslim women “should be given equal rights to file for a divorce” that she said, was commonly a privilege for Muslim men.
“Muslim society is still highly patriarchal, but a number of our Islamic elders and scholars are beginning to agree to giving Muslim women wider latitude and equality before the Sharia law,” she said. She said her sources came from the imams, the ulama, the asatidz, [plural of ustadz] and other learned men in the Muslim communities in Tawi-Tawi.
“All agree that women should be respected to exercise their gender rights,” she added.
Image credits: Alysa Salen