MAKATI CITY (MindaNews / 30 December) – I write this not merely as a reader of history, but as a Bwayan’n—someone whose memory is tethered to a river older than the republic, older than the textbooks that taught us to look north when the story turns heroic, and to look south only when it turns troublesome.

So, let me pose a question to you, of the impolite-awakening type no polite commemoration can bear:

What if one of the reasons Dr. José Rizal was martyred had nothing to do with Manila—and everything to do with Buayan?

We are conditioned, almost by rote, to believe that José Rizal died simply because he wrote Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo—two novels about how the nerve of colonial rule was rotting. That is true.

There was a third charge.

A quieter one. A scholarly one. A Moro one.

Among the cases marshaled against Rizal in the Spanish military court was his annotation of Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas by Antonio de Morga.

Annotations, you see, are dangerous things. They look innocent—like marginal whispers—but they unsettle empires because they refuse to let official narratives rest.

In those annotations, Rizal did something audacious: He defended the Moros. He named them a people. He recognized a nation.

He called it Patria Buhahayen—the Buayan Nation. Bangsa Buayan, you may say.

Let that sink in.

Long before we had a Bangsamoro Organic Law, before acronyms like BARMM, before peace panels and transitional authorities, Rizal was already writing Buayan into history—not as a rebellious periphery, but as a legitimate polity wronged by conquest.

This, to the Spanish crown, was not academic commentary. It was subversion.

History, when read carefully, is rarely spontaneous. Violence is often provoked, then later narrated as “necessary.”

Consider this episode—conspicuously absent from many popular history platforms.

In 1593, Miguel López de Legazpi, through colonial machinations, ordered the abduction of Datu Bantilan, son of Datu Sarikula of Magindanao and the Pangian (Princess) of Sulu—sister of Sultan Batara Tenga.

The order coursed through imperial veins, reaching Francisco de Sande, and was executed in 1595 by Esteban Rodríguez de Figueroa, who raided Sulu to seize Bantilan.

Here is the detail textbooks fear:

Sarikula was the brother of Rajah Laut Buisan—the father of Muhammad Dipatuan Kudarat.  Bantilan and Kudarat were first cousins.

So, when Figueroa was later killed, it was not savagery. It was not treachery. It was political consequence.

Silongan and Buisan were allies. Kinship was governance. Honor was law.

Rizal understood this.

What troubles me is not that colonial history erased Buayan. That was expected.

What bothers me is that we carry out the denial ourselves, celebrating Rizal by pruning him of elements of his legacy that make us squirm—particularly, his resistance to seeing Muslims in the South as mere footnotes to a Christian nation-in-the-making.

To remember Patria Buhahayen is to admit that Philippine history was never singular. It was negotiated. Contested. Argued—sometimes with ink, sometimes with blood.

Rizal knew that. And for that knowledge, he paid with his life.

As such, the next time we speak of his martyrdom, let us remember all three of his crimes:

He wrote novels that exposed colonial hypocrisy.

He imagined a people awakening to dignity.

And quietly, courageously, he defended Buayan.

History lives in the margins. And some margins, once read properly, refuse to stay quiet.

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]