Salam.

I think it would be interesting and beneficial for us to read this article, insyaAllah.

====

Jose Rizal, Liberator of the Philippines

Raul J. Bonoan, President of Ateneo de Naga, and published in America magazine on 7

Dec 1996

In the early morning of December 30, 1896, 35 year old

Jose' Rizal, an indio with strong oriental features but the
bearing of a western intellectual, wearing a black suit and
hat, stood erect and calm in an open field by Manila Bay.
Ministering to him were two Jesuit priests. Wanting to be
master of his own execution, he refused to kneel and be
blindfolded. He asked to face the firing squad but was
forced by the officer in charge to turn his back. A
military doctor took his pulse. It was, strangely, normal.
At 7:03 the bark of bullets rent the air. Rizal fell, and
so, virtually, did Spanish colonial rule.

Born on the island of Luzon on June 19, 1861, Rizal studied

under the Jesuits and then at the Dominican University of
Santo Tomas, also in Manila. In 1882 he left the
Philippines ostensibly for further medical studies abroad,
but principally in pursuit of some vague political
objective.

Something of a genius, Rizal was an unlikely political

activist. He had been trained as an opthalmic surgeon by
leading specialists in Paris, Heidelberg, and Berlin. At
heart, however, he was an artist and a poet, and by
concious choice a scholar, historian, researcher, and
prolific writer. He wrote in Spanish, Tagalog, German,
French, Englisg, and Italian and spoke a few other modern
languages. In addition, he knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
The references in his writings to Cervantes, Schiller,
Shakespeare, and Dante are evidence of his broad humanistic
interests and worldwide perspectives. Through Ferdinand
Blumentritt, an Austrian scholar and personal friend, Rizal
came in contact with leading European intellectuals and was
admitted into two learned societies in Berlin.

The Enlightenment and Liberalism

No sooner had Rizal arrived in Madrid for studies in
medicine than he was recognized as a leader by the
Philippino students at the University of Madrid who were
determined to work for reforms in their country.
Enthusiastically reading Voltaire and the Enlightenment
thinkers, Rizal took to the "Rights of Man" proclaimed by
the French Revolution and to the new liberalism sweeping
Spain, which had long been sheltered from the intellectual
currents of the rest of Europe.

His first political advocacy was for the assimilation of

the Philippines as a province of Spain. In a landmark
speech, Rizal called Spain and the Philippines "dos
Pueblos", two peoples, of equal standing and equal
rights---a radical idea in 1884. This position angered the
Spanish community in Manila and marked Rizal as a
filibustero, a subversive. He also advocated a program
liberal reforms that included two proposals for immediate
implementation: freedom of the press and representation in
the Spanish parlament.

The frequent objects of Rizal's caustic attacks were the

"friars", namely, the Augustinians, the Recollects, the
Dominicans, and the Franciscans. They opposed the
advancement of the native secular clergy, whose leaders,
Fathers Burgos, Gomez, and Zamorra were garrotted in 1872
for alleged complicity in a mutiny at the Cavite shipyards.
Rizal accused these religious of encouraging superstition
and of turning mercantile in their ministry. They had, he
thought, prevented the teaching of Spanish (by which the
indios could have learned new ideas), had exercised control
on government officials, and had stopped progress and the
intrusion of every liberal idea.

In the end, however, Rizal became convinced that the only

viable solution for the Philippines was independance form
Spain. He did not forsee this happening soon, but thought
the Philippinos should loose no time in preparing for it
with determination. These ideas were to find stark and
vivid expression in his two novels. What Victor Hugo did
for les miserables of France and Charles Dickens did for
the wretched of London, Rizal wanted to do for the poor and
oppressed of his own country. In 1887 his first novel, Noli
Me Tangere, was published by a small printing press in
Berlin. It diagnosed the Philippines' as a malignant cancer
in so advanced a stage that the slightest touch produced
the acutest of pains. The title, "Latin for Do Not Touch
Me", echoes the words of Christ to Mary Magdalene in John
20:17. Copies of the novel were smuggled into the country
and read surreptitiously behind closed doors or at night by
candlelight. The effect was nothing short of cataclysmic.
What Abraham Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe---that
her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin caused the Civil War---may be
applied with equal truth to Rizal's novel and it's sequel.
They set the fires of revolution.

In August 1887, Rizal returned to the Philippines, preceded

by his reputation as a subversive and a heretic. Six months
later, at the urgings of his parents fearful for his life,
he left for london by way of the United States. This journy
led him to speak admiringly of America as providing "a
country to the poor looking for work." But he deplored the
American predjudice against Asians and African Americans
and was especially appalled by the ban against interracial
marriages in some states..

Founding the Filipino Nation

Rizal's second European sojurn (1882-92) was the most

productive period of his life. In London he did historical
research for eight months in the libraryof the British
Museum. One result of this work was the republication in
Paris in 1889 of Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas
Filipinas (1609), an eyewitness account of the 16th-century
Philippines. To this edition, Rizal added his own copious
notes and commentary.

At this time, the Filipino expatriates in Spain decided to

form themselves into an association, called La Solidaridad;
they elected Rizal, then in London, as an honorary
president. They also founded a journal with the same name
in pusuit of their political agenda. Rizal was a frequent
contributor, answering in incisive language racial slurs by
Spanish writers and in lenghty essays bringing his
historical knowledge to bear on Philippine questions. In
1891 in Ghent, Belgium, he published "El Filibusterismo"
(Subversion) , the sequal to his first novel.

Rizal's scholarship injected historical consciousness into

the nationalist movement. He asked his people to search
their past and to think of what they had been before the
Spaniards destroyed much of what was good in Philippine
culture, restricted trade and industry, and racially
reduced the population through conscription of the men to
fight Spanish wars. In an article entitled "The Philippines
a Century Hence", he turned the eyes of Filipinos to the
future and forced them to look to the day when they should
have shaken off Spanish rule. In a striking moment of
clairvoyance, he speculated that the United States might
one day think of acquiring the Philippines, but added that
this would be against U.S. traditions.

Increasingly Rizal warned of seperation and independence

and alluded to "the great law of history"---- that colonies
eventually declare themselves independent. While Rizal did
not6 categorically rule out violent revolution, he
articulated in his second novela philosophy of nonviolence-
--admittedly not as developed as Gahndi's. The Filipino
people, he said, must be worthy of their liberties and
prepare themselves for independence, principally through
education and moral regeneration. "only love can work
wonders, only virtue can redeem... What is the use of
independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of
tomorrow?"

Rizal's thought, developing far more rapidly than that of

his Filipino colleagues, brought him into conflict with
Marcelo H. Del Pilar, editor in chief of La Solidaridad.
Del Pilar's strategy was to pressure Spanish officialdom in
Madrid; Rizal believed it was time to work directly with
his people and decided to go back home. In June 1892,
entrusting to a friend a letter for the Filipinos to be
opened in case of his death, he left Hong Kong for Manila.

Shortly after his return to the islands, a new association

was formed, the Liga Filipina, whose statutes Rizal had
drawn up in Hong Kong. The aim of this reform movement was
to "unite the entire archipelago into a compact, vigorous
and homogeneous body" through cultural, commercial and
industrial activities. At Rizal's subsequent trial the
prosecution would claim that the Liga sought the violent
overthrow of the Spanish government, a charge Rizal flatly
denied. However, Rizal did hope to form his people into a
new national community in defense against and independent
of existing colonial structures. But the organization was
stillborn, since Rizal was arrested later in 1892 and sent
off into exile in the small town of Dapitan on the island
of Mindanao.

Trial and Execution

The exile in Dapitan ended after four long years, when
Rizal was accepted as a volunteer physician to work with
the Spanish army in Cuba. On July 31st, 1896, he boarded
ship and was brought to Manila, where he remained on board
under tight military guard for a month, waiting to be
transported to Spain. Meanwhile, the Philippine Revolution
broke out under the leadership of a warehouse worker,
Andreas Bonifacio.

When Rizal reached Barcelona, he was brought back to Manila

to stand trial by court martial. He was accuse of
instigating and leading the rebellion, which as an exile
and prisoner he was not physically capable of doing. Months
earlier, moreover, when Bonifacio sent a messenger to Rizal
in exile to ask for his support, the nonviolent Rizal
strongly repudiated the plan as ill-prepared and likely to
produce useless bloodshed. The court martial was firm,
however, and expeditious. The trial itself, on Dec 26, took
only one day. In the early morning of Dec 29, the accused
was notified of his conviction and of the death sentence to
be carried out the following day.

Soon after learning of his fate, Rizal asked some Jesuits

to visit him, and they spent much time with him in his last
hours. Disillusioned while in Spain by the church's
opposition to liberal ideas and to his own politics, he had
given up the practice of the Catholic faith. According to
Jesuit testimony, Rizal received the sacraments, after much
resistance and intellectual struggle, on the evening of his
death and wrote and signed a document of retraction from
Masonry. On the following morning he was married in a
religious ceremony to a young Irish woman with whom he had
lived in Dapitan. The Spanish press in Manila reported
these events, but Spanish credibility was at its lowest.
Many believed the story was sheer Jesuit fabrication, a
view held by some historians to this day.

For 300 years Spain had imposed political unity on the

disparate tribes, village clans, petty kingdoms and
linguistic groups to which the inhabitants of the
Philippines belonged. This cohesion was the product of
Spanish force backed by the church, which was at that time
tied to the Crown by the "patronato real". The intermittent
uprisings that had punctuated Spanish rule had been
localized and ineffective- --until the Revolution of 1896,
which was national in character. That national revolution
was founded on the awareness of a people living in a vast
archipelago of some 7,000 islands that they were one nation
bound by a common culture, history and destiny. Before the
late 19th century there was no such general consciousness,
and "Philippines" was nothing more than a geographical
term. By reason of his brilliance of mind, courage of
conviction and forcefulness of language and imagination,
Rizal was the Filipino who contributed most to this
national consciousness.

Philippines and Asia

Rizal's execution further srtenghtened the resolve of the

revolutionaries. They declared independence on June 12,
1898, in a document echoing phrases from the U.S.
Declaration of Independence and established a republican
form of government. The Philippines was the first colony in
Asia to stage a national revolution, declare independence,
form a republic and, thereby, send a discomforting message
to the colonial powers in that vast area.

The republic, however, was short lived, because the United

States of America, in fulfillment of its "Manifest
Destiny", embarked upon its own colonial enterprise. While
the new Philippine Republic was consolidating its
governance of the entire country, Spain ceded the
Philippines to the United States for $20 million. The
American military then successfully subdued the islands in
a bloody conflict kinown in American records as the
"Philippine Insurrection" , but called by Filipino
historians the "Philippine- American War." Though the aim
of independence was frustrated by the American
intervention, the execution of Rizal ands its aftermath
awakened the peoples of the rest of Asia to the essential
fragility of colonial rule and to their own capacity to
form themselves into modern nations. The message was not
lost on Rizal's contemporaries, Gahndi (1869-1948) and Sun
Yat-Sen (1866-1925), or on a much younger man, Nehru (1889-
1964).

In recent decades, historians of Marxist orientation have

characterized Rizal as a bourgeois thinker repudiating a
proletarian revolution. They also attribute his apothesis
as a national hero to the new American government, which
preferred the non-violent Rizal over the revolutionary
Bonifacio, as a model for the Filipinos. But Rizal, weho
defies Marxist molds, has survived such iconoclastic
efforts. The fact is that Bonifacio's rebel band of common
people had idolized Rizal even before his death, using his
name as a password in their secret meetings and as a
rallying cry in battle.

In Rizal's writings, particularly the novels and the

farewell ode to his country, "Ultimo adios,"written just
before his death, Filipinos see themselves, their history,
culture and ethos. A case in point is the "little
revolution" of 1986 against Ferdinand Marcos, when tanks on
the Epiphania de los Santos Avenue, a thoroughfare in
Quezon City that runs between the military installations
Camp Auginaldo and Camp Crame, were stopped by prayers,
flowers and people power. Suddenly concrete meaning was
given to Rizal's words: "I do not mean to say that our
freedom must be won at the point of the sword.... But we
must win our freedom by deserving it...by loving what is
just, what is good, what is great to the point of dying for
it. When a people reach these heights, God provides the
weapon, and the idols and tyrants fall like a house of
cards, and freedom shines with the first dawn."

Rizal's political thought is critical to the current peace

process in Mindanao, as Filipino Muslim schloars point out.
His search for the common past, for what Filipinos had been
before Spain stopped the advance of Islam and set clear
demarcation lines between Christianized inhabitants and
Muslim communities, provides a historical perspective
within which to search for a common ground between Muslims
and Christians. The recent peace agreement with the once
secessionist Moro National Liberation Front is, in fact, an
effort to integrate the Muslim minority into the nation.

What is particularly distinctive in Rizal's concept of the

Filipino nation is its emphasis on education. While some
nationalist movements in 19th-century Africa and Asia
assigned primacy to the state, which was often viewed as a
means to nationhood, Rizal considered the basis of
nationhood not to be race, ethnic origin, religion or
language, but a commonality that derives from education.
The binding factor is the broadening of the mind.

That quest invariably links the Philippines to the rest of

Asia, which today has the world's fastest growing economies
and is moving, after five centuries of marginalization, to
center stage in world affairs. What Asia needs for its
"renaissance, " stated Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister
Anwar Ibrahim in an international conference on Rizal held
in Kuala Lampur, is the humanism of Asian thinkers like
Rizal. Economic prosperity and political stability, Asia's
twin obsessions, must be guided by those universal moral
principals and human values, ancient and ever new----the
dignity of the human person, equality, justice, human
rights---for which Rizal gave his life. The pursuit of
prosperity within the context of freedom and democracy,
against the contrary advice of such sages as Lee Kuan Yew,
the long time leader of Singapore, and the tempting
examples of some neighboring countries, flows from Rizal's
political philosophy. It may likewise be the unique
contribution of the newly emerging Philippine economy to
the growth and development of the Asia Pacific region.

From http://pages. prodigy.net/ manila_girl/ rizal/ammag. htm

Maria Z.