Introduction: Muslims in the Philippines

There are an estimated 3.5 million Muslims in the Philippines. While they represent less than 5 percent of the population of the Philippines (the only predominately Christian country in Southeast Asia), Philippine Muslims are geographically concentrated in the south of the country in Mindanao and Sulu and are distinguished from Christian Filipinos not only by their profession of Islam but also by their evasion of 300 years of Spanish colonial domination. At the same time, Philippine Muslims have always been separated from one another in this archipelagic nation by significant linguistic and geographic distance. They are divided into three major and ten minor ethnolinguistic groups and dispersed across the southern islands. The three largest ethnolinguistic groups are the Magindanaons of the Pulangi River Basin of central Mindanao, the Maranaos of the Lanao Lake region of central Mindanao, and the Tausugs of Jolo Island in the Sulu archipelago. Smaller groups include the Yakans of Basilan Island, the Samals of the Tawi-Tawi island group in Sulu, and the Iranuns of the Cotabato coast of Mindanao. In some parts of their traditional territory, Philippine Muslim populations retain their majority; about 98 per cent of the population of the Sulu archipelago, for example, are Muslims (Costello 1992:41). In Mindanao-Sulu as a whole, however, Philippine Muslims now comprise less than 17 per cent of the population (Costello 1992:40), due primarily to large scale Christian in-migration from the North over the past 50 years.

Philippine Muslims share their religious culture with the neighboring majority Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. They also retain certain elements of an indigenous pre-Islamic and precolonial lowland Philippine culture--expressed in dress, music, political traditions and a rich array of folk beliefs and practices-- that are similar to those found elsewhere in island Southeast Asia, but are today mostly absent among Christian Filipinos. Thus, while Philippine Christians and Muslims inhabit the same state and are linked together by various attachments, a profound cultural gulf created by historical circumstance separates them. That gulf is the outcome of two interlinked events; the conversion of some regions of the Philippines to Islam and the Spanish colonial occupation of other regions shortly afterward. Islamization was still underway in the archipelago when the Spaniards gained their foothold in the northern Philippines in 1571. After consolidating control of the northern tier of the Philippine islands, they failed, despite repeated attempts, to subdue the well-organized Muslim sultanates of the South.

The Spaniards assigned to the unsubjugated Muslim peoples of the southern sultanates the label previously bestowed on their familiar Muslim enemies from Mauritania and Morocco, "Moros" (Moors). The term "Moro" was applied categorically and pejoratively with scant attention paid to linguistic or political distinctions among various "Moro" societies. The American colonizers who succeeded the Spaniards and eventually subdued Philippine Muslims in the early twentieth century by means of overwhelming force, continued the usage of "Moro" even though it had become an epithet among Christian Filipinos, denoting savages and pirates. In a bold semantic shift, Philippine Muslim separatists during the late 1960s appropriated the term "Moro" and transformed it into a positive symbol of collective identity-- one that denominated the citizens of their newly imagined nation. For more than 30 years, Moro activists have sought self-determination for Philippine Muslims, sometimes through armed struggle. Their efforts have caused the Philippine state to experiment with regional autonomy for the Muslim South and have conditioned state responses to the claims of other unhispanicized minorities. While the Muslim peoples of the Philippines have often been referred to in the modern era as "Muslim Filipinos", they tend today to identify themselves in English as Philippine Muslims (the closest English equivalent to "Moro") and that is the term employed here.