Central Mindanao Eid worship rites held under tight security

COTABATO CITY -- Local clerics on Monday urged worshipers to strictly adhere to Islamic teachings on peace and religious tolerance in their Eid’l Adha sermons in open-field rites in heavily secured designated sites.
The Eid’l Adha, or feast of sacrifice,” is so important to Muslims, for them even more spiritually significant than the Eid’l Fitr that marks the culmination of the month-long Ramadhan fasting season.

Worshipers in some areas in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) performed their supposedly outdoor congregational Eid’l Adha prayers in covered courts and mosques either due to inclement weather or security concerns.The ARMM covers Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, both in mainland Mindanao, and the islands of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, all beset with peculiar security concerns owing to the presence in these areas of emerging extremists groups, the Abu Sayyaf and forces of the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.Muslim personnel of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division and their dependents prayed inside the mosque along the entrance route to Camp Siongco in Datu Odin Sinsuat town in Maguindanao due to security issues.

Text messages circulated from between Saturday until late Sunday purporting that radical groups in Central Mindanao are to sabotage the Eid’l Adha celebration in some vulnerable areas to avenge the deaths of 57 Abu Sayyaf gunmen killed in recent encounters with government forces in Sulu.The ARMM’s regional chief executive, Gov. Mujiv Hataman, who has more than five million Muslim constituents, on Monday appealed to residents of the autonomous region to unite against the religious extremism being espoused by groups circumventing Islamic teachings on religious tolerance and spiritual multilateralism” among local sectors.

These groups, to suit their `ill interests’ are misinterpreting the Islamic teachings on love for people and Allah’s other creatures, including nature, respect for other religions and unity among Muslims and non-Muslims,” Hataman said.
Hataman said Islam has a very strong advocacy for interfaith unity and forbids religious persecution.

Hataman’s deputy, ARMM Vice Gov. Haroun Al-Rashid Lucman, said he is saddened by what is for him mounting efforts” by self-styled jihadist factions to foment hatred on non-Muslims. Nowhere in the Qur’an can we find an instruction for us to kill non-Muslims as we spread Islam. Prophet Mohammad had taught his followers to fight a war only as a `last resort’ and only in defense of faith, people and homeland,” said Lucman, an ethnic Maranaw.

Lucman, who had studied Islam and Arabic language and cultures in Saudi Arabia, said there is a need for clerics now to keep mentioning in their Friday sermons how the pioneer Arabian Muslim community Mohammad founded have had strong religious, socio-economic and political relations with the Jews, the Christians and other sectarian groups in what is now the Middle East.

Lucman said religious extremism is nothing but misnomer” in Islam, which literally means peace.

Religious tolerance, respect for people regardless of their religions, forgiveness and reparation for wrongdoings are the watchwords in practicing Islam in letter and in spirit,” Lucman said.
Muslims celebrate annually the Eid’l Adha on the 10th day of Dhul-Hijjah in the Islamic lunar-based Hijrah calendar.This year’s Eid’l Adha corresponded to September 12 in the Gregorian calendar.

It is commemorated by Muslims to honor the biblical act of loyalty to God (Allah in Islam) by Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic), chronicled both in the bible and in the Qur’an to have nearly slaughtered his son, Ismael, as an offering in a test of faith via divine instigation.The biblical and Qur’anic narration of the story concluded with Archangel Gabriel (Jibrael) preventing Abraham from slitting the throat of Ismael, replaced with a sacrificial ram that appeared from the wilderness.