July 3, 1978. I’m seven years old and attending my classmate’s seventh birthday party at their apartment in Quezon City. Their apartment is pretty small so we hold the party outside, in a common area, really just a small concrete yard in front of the row of five or six small apartments.
It is a beautiful sunny day and the yard has been transformed, to my young eyes, into a magical place — we have a magician, storytelling, games, and prizes. It seems like a perfect day. After the games and blowing out the candle on the birthday cake, it is time to eat! The children and their parents pile spaghetti, pancit, and barbecue on their paper plates. In fact, everything looks delicious and I’m terribly hungry after playing nearly all the kiddie games. But I can’t eat anything. All the food, save for the cake, has pork — the spaghetti sauce has pork hotdog, the pancit has pork liver, and the barbecue is pork barbecue. I start to cry. I’m jealous that the other kids get to eat whatever they like. But, as my dad always reminds me, I’m a Muslim boy and pork is forbidden.
This is my moment of realization: I’m different.
April 23, 2011. I’m 40 years old and I’m having lunch at Paseo de Sta. Rosa with my kids, Santi, 8, and Mike, 5, my wife, Weena, and my in-laws. I have an inter-faith marriage: my spouse is Catholic while I’m a Muslim. We are having a very pleasant lunch at a place where they serve barbecued chicken. Mike sees that one of his cousins is eating batchoy, a noodle soup cooked with pork liver and crunchy pork skin. He wants to have some batchoy. I tell him he can’t eat it because he is a Muslim boy and eating pork is forbidden in Islam. Mike pouts and is on the verge of tears. “But noodles are my favorite,” he says.
It hits me again and I think Mike starts to realize it as well: We are different.
Mike, being the essentially good and well-mannered child that he is, does not complain but I see the melancholy disappointment in his eyes. Obviously, no one in our family wanted to hurt Mike’s feelings — everyone, his grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc., have been nothing but kind and loving to him — but the situation has saddened him nonetheless.
So my wife and I take him out of the restaurant to buy chicken mami (noodle soup) from a nearby fast food store. We return to the restaurant and Mike, showing the great resilience of children, returns to his normal happy self and begins eating his noodles. However, I can’t help but feel sad for him — this is something that he will experience on a regular basis: the life of a Muslim in a country where the majority are Christians.
Like me, Mike and Santi will go to restaurants, look at the menu, and realize that they cannot eat half of the dishes, most likely because the food will contain bacon, ham, or some other pork derivative. During the holy month of Ramadan, Mike and Santi (since Santi has autism, I’m not sure if he will fast) will be fasting, not eating or drinking anything from sunrise to sunset, while their friends, officemates, and non-Muslim family members eat breakfast, merienda (snacks), lunch, and afternoon merienda (snacks). (An aside — fasting is particularly difficult in the Philippines since we Filipinos are such constant eaters.) If my children grow up to become devout Muslims, which I, unfortunately, am not, Mike and Santi will see their peers drinking beer and alcohol while they are forbidden to do so. Mike and Santi will hear their friends make jokes about Moros (ethnic Filipino Muslims) and Muslims in general. If Mike and Santi will lose their temper or get upset, then some people will blame it on their simply being Moros, stereotyping all Muslims as juramentados or plainly violent people. In truth, Mike and Santi will experience life as someone who is different, separate from the norm, a minority.
The life of a minority, the small and big discrimination, stereotyping, and prejudice that all minorities face, is enough to make some bitter. But not for me. And definitely not for my children and my family. I will turn our being a minority on its head and I’ll use the fact of our being “different” to make my children strong and, hopefully, even virtuous.
I have always believed that we are born into specific circumstances and contexts for a reason: that the Divine makes us rich, poor, handsome, ugly, Filipino, Argentinian, black, albino, etc. for a particular purpose. We are not the offspring of cosmic accidents, thrust into the world for no reason, apparent or otherwise. Rather, we are beings created for a specific — and I believe special — objective. So there is a reason why my children and I are minorities. There is a reason why we are Muslims. For myself — and I will guide my children towards this idea — I believe that one of the reasons is so that we can learn to be tolerant of others. Tolerance is a powerful virtue. It teaches one kindness and acceptance of others. It also enables one to see beyond stereotypes and superficialities. So our being a minority becomes a gift instead of a curse. Being a member of the Muslim minority will help teach me and my children to be kind, tolerant, and forgiving human beings.
Perhaps we even have a bigger role to play as a result of our minority: Maybe my children and I can help shatter the stereotypes against Muslims, particularly how Muslims are negatively portrayed in the Philippines. It may well be that my marriage can be an example of a genuine inter-faith marriage, where both parties continue to respect each other’s religious freedoms. If we are able to do these things, then our being of a different faith will have become more than a simple accident of fate, being born into a Muslim or inter-faith marriage instead of another faith. Consequently, our being a minority can become truly meaningful, not only for ourselves but even for others.
Finally, since words have power, I’ll turn that word “different” upside down for my children — I’ll wrestle it, smooth out its lines, turn it inside out to become a new term for myself, my children, and my family. We aren’t different anymore: We are special.