Muslims oppose plan to rename South Cotabato

KORONADAL CITY — Muslims are opposed to renaming South Cotabato into Allah Valley province, a plan recommended by a ranking police official to Governor Daisy Avance Fuentes and South Cotabato Representative Ferdinand Hernandez.Michael Mendoza Mustapha, a former training officer at a local aviation school, described the change-name plan as an insensitive and ignorant suggestion. Senior Supt.Franklin Alvero, South Cotabato Police Provincial director, made the recommendation by writing Fuentes and Hernandez, as well as the South Cotabato Provincial Board.Alvero told reporters that changing the province’s name could effectively address outsiders’ often negative impression on the province which it has developed over the years, making the name Cotabato almost entwined with security issue problem. eached by reporters for comment, the offices that Alvero wrote to were apparently objective of his recommendation, although it had to go through a long process of deliberation.But Muslims, particularly professionals among then, are not convinced. Mustapha, who has both Muslim and Christian roots, said issues on the change of the province’s name could cause division, tension and even stir religious-based animosity among the residents.Sharia lawyer Parido Pigkaulan said he believed the proposal should be opposed by all Muslims in South Cotabato. Dr. Norodin Kuit, an agriculture official in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), said foremost the proper name of the province’s river-valley should also be rectified with its original spelling which is, Alâ River Valley.Veteran journalist-lawyer Teodoro Locsin Jr. held the same view in a 1988 article. In his column in the Philippine Daily Globe, Locsin said he had to do a quick research as he wrote a speech that President Corazon Aquino would then deliver at the opening rites of an upriver valley dam constructed there by the National Irrigation Administration (NIA). Locsin wrote he found out that it was spelled Alâ River, and not quite the Name of the Creator. Prof. Morie Guiam of the Mindanao State University-South Cotabato Campus said he had opposed a similar move in the past, but supporters of the proponents then would hardly listen to him. Another former member of the MSU graduate school faculty in Marawi City considered the plan as outright blasphemy, saying it violates Islam’s concept of Tawhid, meaning the Oneness of God or the indivisible concept of oneness or monotheism — which is Islam's most fundamental concept that God is One. (Tawhid comes from the Arabic word wahid, which means one ).The professor, who did not want to be named for a news story because of his clandestine preaching against extremism, said a similar plan could actually gain support from local daesh-inspired groups, like Maute and Abu Sayyaf. Because that is what they want. They want to divide the people. They want to create a situation in which the people would kill each other because of religion. They would also pass it off with a supposed intent under their agenda to create a ‘state for Allah’, the professor said. Daesh is the Arabic name of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.He said that makes it unlikely for any police official to be pushing for a plan like that with only the reasons cited (in the letter). If you create a place you name after the Creator, and step on it or do unclean acts in every square-foot of that 'small dominion' you designated for God, then what could that mean to us?, an irony?, mockery?, cynicism?, the professor said when asked by reporters as to how a renaming could be a form of blasphemy to Muslims. Even among Muslims, the name of the Deity is not used in naming a place, not even in the hollowed grounds of Islam’s holiest cities—Makkah and Madina in Saudi Arabia.Prof. Moner Bajunaid, former chancellor of the Mindanao State University (MSU) in South Cotabato said there is a place named Allahabad in Pakistan, as there is also Islamabad, a key city, in that country.In Urdu, the suffix abad is actually pronounced as aabaad which means populated or inhabited, from a verb abad karma, meaning inhabit or populate. Nash B. Maulana