Search Results

This chapter explores the changing relations of the state and Muslim Filipinos by taking a long historical view, analyzing the historical vicissitudes of the meanings of the term Moro over the more than four centuries from the Spanish colonial period to the present-day militant and separatist MNLF. In large part as a result of the Spanish colonial period (1565–1898), the Philippines has been divided into three distinct social formations: The dominant Christian lowland population of the northern islands, the marginal pagan upland groups throughout the islands, and the oppositional Muslim groups of the southern islands. Employing a designation used during the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish colonists called Muslims in the Philippines “Moros,” a pejorative term, and the Muslims appear to have called themselves Islam.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period between 1898 and 1905 and analyzes American religious justifications for the annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War and the role that American beliefs about Islam played in the early colonial apparatus. The chapter begins by analyzing the religious motivations that prompted the extension of American Empire to the Philippines, including the rhetoric of anti-imperialism. It analyzes how Americans sought to deal with the “Moro Problem”: the phrase that came to describe how the United States would go about governing its Muslims subjects. The chapter offers specific analysis of the first Philippines Commission, headed by Jacob Schurman, who initiated the classification and categorization of Filipinos according to their racial and religious identities.

Chapter 6 focuses on the American Empire in the Philippines between 1903 and 1921, analyzing how religious beliefs continued to play a part in the development and application of American colonial policies on the ground. It begins by examining how American officials relayed information about Filipino Muslims in plays, literature, operas, including a display of Filipinos at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904. It then offers detailed analysis of the policies of military rulers such as Leonard Wood, Hugh Lennox Scott, and John Pershing. It also examines how American missionaries, including Charles Brent, worked alongside colonial officials to convert Filipino Muslims to fit within the larger American colonial apparatus. It concludes with the role of American businessmen who pushed for the United States to make Mindanao a permanent American colony.

This chapter argues that the conflict in southern Philippines has not led to any serious radicalization of Islamic education. On matters of religious schooling, parents and educators alike show a level-headed pragmatism. Parents appreciate Islamic education for its ability to instill piety and a religious identity in an unstable world in which neither can be taken for granted. At the same time, parents want their offspring to acquire marketable skills. Islamic schools aim to strike a balance between these two valued ends. No less surprising, and again notwithstanding the thirty-year insurgency, no political party or umbrella organization has been able to seize control of the decentralized religious school system. Until the recent establishment of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), Islamic schooling was managed at the local level, and school directors were justly famous for their independent-mindedness.

This chapter discusses theoretical issues surrounding the politics of heritage, and analyzes them in light of the various configurations of culture and power evidenced in Cotabato from the precolonial period to the present. It considers how power in Muslim Cotabato has been both enunciated by rulers and questioned by those subjected to it, and discusses the problems concerning the nature of traditional Islamic rule in Cotabato and the derivation and prevalence of a transcendent Philippine Muslim identity. The chapter also proposes an alternative approach for analyzing ordinary and extraordinary resistance based on a radically reformulated notion of hegemony as public accommodation of power.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Philippine Village exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. Despite the supposedly comprehensive nature of the Philippine display, the exhibit was ultimately called upon to serve two sometimes divergent scientific and pedagogical functions. On the one hand, the Philippine Village was a self-contained exhibit, set apart as an inclusive continuum of indigenous types ranging from the “head-hunting,” “dog-eating,” savage Igorots to the highly civilized Philippine Scouts and Constabulary. By viewing these communities in quick successive comparison, onlookers could draw broad lessons from the “demotic” differences in dress, materials, cultural customs, and habits. The Philippine exhibit was also meant to be an interactive display promoting a sense of otherization and cultural affirmation. This book examines a particularly soft spot in the subjective and contested colonial discourse between colonizer and colonized at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—that of the Philippine Muslims, also known as Moros. The chapter then describes the Moro Village, which was constructed to effectively commodify and exoticize the mundane aspects of Moro life.