Understanding war, separatism and Islam in Mindanao
Understanding war, separatism and Islam in Mindanao
Karina Francisco
By Karina Francisco
TORONTO–In light of the signing the wealth-sharing agreement between the central government of the Republic of the Philippines (ROP) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) as well as the signing of the Framework Agreement in October 2012, it might seem that peace has finally been achieved in Mindanao. However, violence continues as demonstrated by Sultan Jamalul Kiram’s attempted invasion of Sabah, Malaysia, and the emergence of break-away separatist groups of the MILF.
Before further solutions can even be discussed, it is essential to understand the historical institutional and political-economic subjection of Muslims in the Philippines. Understanding war, separatism and Islam in Mindanao is a two-part series. The following is the first part of the series, which expounds upon the history of Islam and land resettlement in the Philippines.
Early history of Islam in the Philippines
Islam was brought to the Philippines in the thirteenth century by Arab and Malay traders. By the fifteenth century, Islamic forms of governance had been established. In 1450, the Sultanate of Sulu was proclaimed by Shariful Hashim. In 1515 sultanate of Maguindanao was proclaimed by Muhammad Kabungsuwan, and later, in the 1500s the Buayan sultanate was established in the Upper Pulangi Valley under indigenous rajahs who converted to Islam1.
While the Muslim identity that developed by this time was never politicized to the magnitude required by a separatist movement, to claim that it never existed denies the historical significance of Islam in the Philippines. In fact, Islam had already spread as far as Manila by the sixteenth century, which by that time was integrated into the rajah system at the behest of the Bornean empire2. It was not until the early 1900s that Islam began its transformation and integration into the economic superstructure when the resettlement of Christians in Mindanao began. It is in this moment when the relations between people and religion became tied to the systems of class and landownership.
Transformation of the system of land ownership
The nature of land ownership in Mindanao was traditionally communal and remained so until the American invasion of the Philippines in 1899. It is the implementation of the Torrens titling system in November 1902 by the Philippine Commission (which was nothing more than a cohort of American academics hand-picked by the colonial government) through the Land Registration Act that changed land relations.
The Torrens law imposed the concept of private ownership, which was in contradiction to the indigenous system of land communalism. This law stipulated that private ownership would be determined by whether the claimants to the land registered their so-called “properties” with the colonial government. The consequence of this was the easy appropriation of land from Muslims, and its subsequent declaration as publicly owned.
Mass resettlement of Christians to Mindanao
It is also during this time that the Americans facilitated the mass resettlement of Christians to Mindanao. The land appropriated from indigenous Muslims a year before was consequently redistributed among the new Christian settlers. In other words, the combination of the impositions of private ownership and resettlement resulted in the transformation of the indigenous Muslims into a peasant class.
This development persists even until the present moment, whereby an “ethnic division of labour”3 can be clearly observed. The case of contemporary Cotabato is instructive. In this province, the ethnic Chinese primarily control retail trade and manufacture of agricultural goods, Tagalogs dominate the bureaucracy, Visayans control small businesses such as restaurants and pharmacies, and indigenous Muslims are relegated to fishing and farming4. It is this impoverishment and relegation of Muslims to the peasant class that served as one of the factors for the outbreak of sectarian violence in the 1950s.
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1 Abdurasad Asani, “The Bangsamoro people: a nation in travail.” Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, 6 no. 2 (1985), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13602008508715944 (accessed January 31, 2013), 296.
2 Ibid.
3 Thomas M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippine,. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 36.
4 Ibid.
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