Asia-Pacific Social Science Review 8:1 (2008), pp.

19-31

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This study examines the various historiographical trends that have shaped the intellectual and
political integration of Filipino Muslims into a developing national narrative over the past century
in the Philippines. By exploring notions of religious, cultural, and national identities, this piece
highlights the various intersections and points of contention that frame a negotiated exchange
between majority and minority populations in the Philippines. Questions of cultural and national
authenticity, imperial conquest, and post-colonial economic and bureaucratic modernity create
widely differing visions of a sharply contested “Filipino nation.” These essential questions form
the foundations of a meaningful inter-ethnic/religious dialogue among the various participants
of the “Moro Integration Conflict.”

Keywords: Muslim integration, post-colonial identity, Moro exceptionalism, Western imperialism,

indigenous authenticity

As a post-colonial state, the Philippines often
struggles in its national narrative to justify its
existence as an invention of that which it once did,
and still must, necessarily resist. The various
syncretisms and interdependencies that frame the
Philippines’ current reality are not always congruent
with the exclusive and homogenizing definition of
a modern nation-state. Perhaps the most apparent
and lingering of these incongruities is the presence
of an outspoken and historically separatist Muslim
population in Southern Mindanao. These
“Moros,”1 as they have been called, have resisted
incorporation into the Philippines’ larger ethnic,
geographic, and especially religious polity since
Spanish colonial times. As the increasing pressures
of modernity compelled Filipinos to define their
nation-state in inclusive and exclusive terms, Moro
distinctness from and conflict with an overwhelming
Christian Filipino population intensified, and has
continued to plague the Philippines with bloody
confrontations and political strife.
This essay examines the various historio-
graphical trends that have shaped the intellectual
and political integration of Filipino Muslims into
the Philippines’ national narrative over the past
century. An exploration of notions of religious,
cultural, and national identities highlights the various
intersections and points of contention that frame the
negotiated exchange between majority and minority
populations in the Philippines. Questions of cultural
and national authenticity, imperial conquest, and post-
colonial economic and bureaucratic modernity create
widely differing visions of a sharply contested
construct called the “Filipino nation.”

2008 De La Salle University-Manila, Philippines

 
Much of the scholarly work on this subject
referred to and discussed in this piece analyzes
Muslim conflict and integration through a prism of
deterministic colonial intrusion by Spanish and
American imperialists. As is demonstrated below,
Filipino and American scholars throughout much
of the post-war period have devoted their efforts
to examining the ways in which Christian and
Muslim Filipinos were conditioned by colonial
imperialists to internalize particular and mutually
exclusive socio-religious identities. These
arguments typically assert that the imposition of
colonial rule disrupted, provoked, and exacerbated
otherwise dormant or moderate fractures within
and among indigenous societies. The claims of
these scholars largely rely on fallacious reifications
of the concepts of “Filipinos,” “imperialists,” and
the “Philippines” in its proto-nationalist phases.
Notions of pre-colonial historical trajectories more
conducive to inclusive historic and natural national
identities necessarily accompany these
generalizations. Such arguments wholly give
themselves over to a confining teleological reading
of Filipino history fraught with anachronistic and
certainly inaccurate notions of “patriotism,”
“national identity,” and increasingly self-conscious
national historical trajectories among pre-colonial
indigenous Filipinos.
This phenomenon is of course not unique to
Filipino history. For far too long scholars of
Southeast Asia have assumed an overly simplistic
uniform process of colonial and post-colonial state
formation.2 Such scholarship typically favors a
linear chronology of developments progressing
towards civic and bureaucratic uniformity, defined
territorialization, and homogenizing socio-cultural
identities formed under pressures from imperial
intrusion. In the post-colonial period newly
independent nation-states and nationalists leaders,
forged through colonial collaboration and
epistemological conditioning, are perceived to have
replicated these developments in toto and thus
reproduced the dynamics of imperial rule.
The net product of this type of scholarship is to
produce a seamless teleological narrative of state
formation in which the discourses of power

sustaining unjust colonial rule are replicated and
maintained on a domestic level, complete with
stratified and often binary socio-cultural identities
and reconfigured center-periphery relationships of
power; all of these at the expense of national
minorities – the perpetual victims of sustained
colonial oppression.
Recent scholarship has produced a more
nuanced view of this issue (see Stoler and Cooper,
1997). 3 Many authors are now focusing on
deconstructing the processes of state formation in
the Philippines.4 This literature reveals a negotiated
process of partial and compromised integration of
Muslims into an emerging Philippine state. Yet,
while these recent trends in such studies have
opened up important and insightful avenues of
historical inquiry, there is a danger of carrying this
particular approach a bit too far by overly diluting
ethno-religious identities and by marginalizing their
role as a driving force behind the Muslims’ struggle
for integration. Certainly, it is beneficial to
deconstruct the processes of state formation, and
challenge long accepted notions of hegemonic
forces as determining factors in Mindanao.
However, one cannot discount more than four
centuries of imperially imposed epistemologies of
social, racial, cultural, and religious classification.
This is not to say that imperialism determinis-
tically dictated the current conflict; rather, that
historically constructed ethno-religious identities
became accelerated and enhanced when Filipinos,
not imperialists, were required to define an
emerging modern nation-state. Though negotiated
and far from uniform in their conception or
application, political and cultural identities do
indeed form the basis of the integration conflict.
This does not mean, however, that traditional
scholarship has been altogether correct in its claims
that colonial mentalities and socially conditioned
identities forced Filipinos to labor under a false
consciousness of deviant, post-colonial nationalism.
Rather, the drive to homogenize populations under
a single identity emerges from the realities of a
modern world system composed of nation-states.
The fact that this system is largely the product of
Western dominance does not automatically
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indicate that its non-Western participants are
inevitably and permanently possessions of the
West, simply repeating mantras and replicating
imperially constructed and imposed identities. The
conflict in Mindanao was spawned out of Filipinos
cognitively exercising their agency to produce a
Filipino nation, and not simply by post-imperial
automatons reflecting imperial ideologies.
MUSLIM EXCEPTIONALISM
The literature concerning Filipino Muslims’
national integration is overwhelmingly predicated
on two related notions of Muslim exceptionalism.
The first notion asserts that the Moros’ fierce and
persistent resistance to Western imperialism
preserved a high degree of indigenous authenticity
relative to their Christianized counterparts. Such
studies typically assert that Moro resistance
prevented Filipino Muslims from falling under the
same imperially conditioned consciousness of
Christian bigotry and conquest that had, in the past,
historically shaped the minds of their Christian
neighbors. This view presents an alternative reading
of the integration conflict whereby the Moros are
seen as the vanguards of an historic Filipino nation,
while Christian Filipinos are perceived to represent
a deviant ethno-national identity.
The second notion of Moro exceptionalism
claims that this colonial mentality among the
Christian majority has produced a particularly
extraordinary prejudice against Muslims in the
modern Philippine nation-state. This view asserts
that imperial epistemologies, policies, and biases
ingrained in the minds of Christian Filipinos have
caused them to reproduce the oppressive dynamics
of imperial rule on a domestic level, singling out
Muslims because of their religion and preventing
the latter’s integration into a pluralistic society.
Needless to say, these two notions are plagued
with a number of significant problems. Such a
binary reading of history requires the use of
numerous untenable reifications and anachronistic
and convenient allusions to an historic Philippine
nation – all of which will be discussed below. But
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perhaps the most glaring problem revealed by the
exceptionalist paradigm is the proponents’
ambivalent and often dichotomous relationship to
the very idea of national integration, which they
seem unable to either endorse or reject. Cesar
Adib Majul, one of the most prolific writers on the
subject, explains,
The history of a conquered people who
ultimately revolted has now merged with that
of another who had remained unconquered…
When some Muslims at present do not appear
too happy in being called ‘Filipinos,’ it is not
that they do not desire to be involved or
participate more intimately in the body politic;
rather it is simply the recognition of the fact
that their ancestors were never subjects of
Felipe, the Spanish Prince … That other
Christian natives are still willing to keep the
name because their ancestors were subjects
of the Spanish Monarch, is no criteria why
Muslims should follow likewise (1973, pp. xii,
346).
This statement concisely encapsulates the
difficult dilemma facing Filipino Muslims as long
as such perceptions persist. If scholars continue
to view this struggle in stark, monolithic, and
historically distorted terms, through a prism of
imperial determinism and ethno-national
betrayal, then integration into the modern nation-
state becomes ideologically impossible—leaving
only the alternatives of armed struggle and
bloodshed.
Thus, this study proposes to challenge the
exceptionalist paradigm and to offer a more
nuanced reading of a difficult integration process.
Though it is primarily a critique of the general
paradigm outlined above, this does not mean to
imply that Christian Filipinos hold no biases, or that
the integration conflict is solely in the minds of
Muslims. Rather, it is an attempt to provide a
clearer picture of the often misunderstood
relationship between Christian and Muslim
Filipinos, and to remove potential perceptional
obstacles to an honest inter-ethnic and inter-
religious dialogue.
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IMPERIALISM, AGENCY,
AND INDIGENOUS AUTHENTICITY
To disclaim that imperialism had an intrusive and
disruptive effect on indigenous societies would be
incorrect. There can be little doubt that almost four
centuries of imperial rule had significant and often
terrible consequences for indigenous populations
in what would become the Philippines. Yet, despite
imperialism’s crucial significance, one cannot
correctly assume that early-modern and modern
Philippine history is simply colonial history and
nothing more. Scholars have traditionally
acquiesced far too easily to notions of omniscient,
indomitable, and unchallenged imperial power; and,
furthermore, have allowed these notions to
deterministically dictate their analyses of Philippine
history. In a broad historiographical sense, this
phenomenon is usually the result of Euro-centric
biases, ignorance or misunderstanding of
indigenous sources, or a combination thereof.5 In
the case of the integration conflict, however,
marginalizing Christian Filipino agency in the
imperial encounter serves a distinct political
purpose.
Though neither Islam nor Christianity are
indigenous to the archipelago, their relative impact
on the islands’ history is often judged by perceived
degrees of conscious acceptance. The extent to
which native agency is credited with determining
Filipino conversion largely dictates assumptions of
indigenous authenticity and ethno-national
legitimacy. Scholars generally describe
Islamicization in the Philippines as a relatively
organic and largely internal phenomenon driven by
uncoerced conversion. Muslim scholars often claim
that their religion came to the archipelago under a
banner of peace, devoid of ulterior political or
economic motives (Balindong, 1972, pp. 8-9). Its
adoption, therefore, was volitional, and
accomplished according to the desires and dictates
of indigenous societies. This interpretation has
prompted scholars to allow Filipino Muslims
possession of their own history. The perceived
historical trajectories of ‘natural’ indigenous
development are thought to have been
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fundamentally undisturbed by the advent of Islam.
Scholars such as Cesar Majul and Peter Gowing
trace out a generally seamless historical narrative
for Filipino Muslims in which their “older history”
as an “identifiable community” has bravely
persisted against destructive forces from without
(Gowing, 1979, pp. 11-12). Thus, though scholars
acknowledge Islam’s transformative effect on the
Southern Philippines, their analyses are carefully
confined within accepted notions of indigenous
agency and authenticity.
Conversely, Christianization has been uniformly
regarded as coerced and irreparably disruptive to
indigenous society. The Christian Filipinos’
apparent collaboration with Spanish Catholics is
seen to have often prompted feelings of ethnic
betrayal among Muslims. Cesar Majul, for example,
castigates early Christian converts “who, in spite
of similarity of race and of a basic cultural matrix,
have allowed themselves to be used as tools of
imperialistic powers,” declaring, “that Catholicism
had likewise become a source of identity for them
and this was the way the Spaniards wanted things
to be” (Majul, 1972, p. 13).
For most scholars, Western imperialism, and
Christianization specifically, represent a critical
departure from the natives’ supposedly natural
social and political development. The impact of the
West is viewed to have “caused the fragmentation”
of a relatively uniform indigenous-centered and
locally dictated historical path (Ibid., p. xi). Those
who fell sway to Western influence are often
considered the products of a divergent or deviant
historical trajectory, resulting in superficial or
inauthentic indigenous identities. These
assumptions have led scholars such as Peter
Gowing to proclaim, “It is manifestly true that
Christian Filipinos, compared with Muslim
Filipinos, have moved further away from what Luis
Ma. Guerrero has called ‘the preconquest Malay
traditions’”(Gowing, 1979, p. xi). Christian
divergence from a presupposed indigenous
historical trajectory, however, is not regarded as
an alternative historical consciousness and identity,
but as a decidedly binary antagonist to Filipino
Muslims’ “preconquest Malay traditions.”
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Such a binary interpretation relies heavily on
reified notions of “imperialism” and “resistance.”
The scholarly literature concerning Moro history
makes little or no effort to distinguish imperial
epochs, or to address the inconsistencies and
vacillations of colonial policy over the past four
centuries. For these scholars, imperialism
represents a seamless coordinated Christian
conspiracy to subjugate Muslims. Peter Gowing
affirms, “The crusading spirit of the Spaniards and
the Americans served to condition a similar spirit
in Christian Filipinos whose programs of
Filipinization and integration have often been
spelled out in decidedly crusading terms and
sometimes implemented in a crusading manner”
(Ibid., p. 41). Though overly simplistic and often
misleading, monolithic explanations of imperialism
are convenient and difficult to resist. As late as 2003
B.R. Rodil reiterated and confirmed notions of
uniformity in colonial philosophy. He states, “The
forces of colonialism were chiefly responsible for
the marginalization of the minority peoples of the
Philippines. First, it was the Spaniards, then the
Americans and, finally, by its adoption of the same
policies and programs implemented by the
colonizers, the government of the Republic of the
Philippines” (Rodil, 2003, p. 89). In other words,
“imperialism” and “Christian Filipino” are
irreducible, chronologically static, and synonymous
terms.
Reification of imperial conquest naturally tends
towards a reification of Muslim resistance. Virtually
all of Cesar Majul and Peter Gowing’s historical
analyses is precariously based on vague notions
of a homogeneous “Islamic consciousness” which
provided “sufficient unity to effectively resist the
invading Europeans” (Majul, 1974, p. 11; Gowing,
1979, p. 11.). Authors who base their views on
Majul and Gowing’s widely read conclusions
continue to use the terms “Moro,” “Islam,”
“Christian,” and “imperialism” seemingly without
being cognizant of or even sensitive to the different
nuances of signification these terms evoke.
Variables such as chronological periodization,
geographic location, ethno-linguistic identity, class,
gender, and age are all extinguished by the totalizing
 
primacy of religious affiliation. This, no matter how
eclectic or ill-defined. Muslim resistance is
postulated exclusively in terms of religious
difference, perhaps thus anachronistically
supporting Samuel Huntington’s simplistic notion
of a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1996). The
structural approach of this scholarship is simply,
“Islamic,” “authentic,” “indigenous,” “East” versus
“Christian,” “imperial,” “indigenously corrupted,”
“West”.
Once disrupted and estranged from their genuine
ethnic and historic character, Christian Filipinos are
portrayed as automatons, performing the bidding
of their imperial masters. “The adoption of
Christianity,” claims Majul, “tended to make its
Christian converts in the Archipelago somewhat
content to be subservient to Spain” (Majul, 1974
p. 11). This subservience manifested itself primary
through contempt and overt hostility towards Islam.
Almost uniformly, the literature asserts that
Western Christianity conditioned non-Muslim
Filipinos to hate their southern neighbors, and
compelled them to lead fanatical campaigns of
eradication that still continues today. Hence,
“historical conditioning,” “moro-moro colonial
mentality,” and an obsessive “crusading spirit”
characterize colonialism’s effects on Christian
Filipinos (Majul, 1972, p. 24; Gowing, 1979, pp.
28, 41). Rather than rational participants in an
historical interaction, they are regarded as empty
receptacles, simply absorbing the evils of Western
colonialism. “The Christian Filipinos were taught
to hate the Muslims,” declares Majul, “who were
painted in the blackest and dirtiest of colors”
(Majul, 1972, p. 13). Filipino scholars F. Delor
Angeles and Alunan C. Glang similarly lament “the
narrow domestic walls of prejudice imposed upon
the Indios for nearly four hundred years by the
colonial West,” which “implanted deep hatred and
prejudices between Muslim and Christian Filipinos
which have divided them for a long time” (Glang,
1969, p. 4; Delor Angeles, 1974, p. 31).
In sum, the literature asserts that modern
conflicts between Christian and Muslim Filipinos
are neither natural nor historic, but rather the result
of Western impact, which supposedly initiated an
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abnormal series of inevitable and deterministic
events culminating in the current ethnically distorted
and inauthentic Philippine nation-state. As B.R.
Rodil fervently implores, “Blame not ourselves but
correct the evils that aliens have left behind within
and among us” (Rodil, 2003, p. 37).
It is interesting to note, however, that despite
the tendency to discredit and debase the Philippine
nation-state as an oppressive legacy of colonialism,
nationalism continues to exercise significant
ideological currency among scholars of Islamic
integration in the Philippines. There is no historical
pre-colonial basis for the Philippines’ current
territorial boundaries. Nor is there any evidence
of an overarching ethnic, linguistic, cultural,
political, or religious unity among the archipelago’s
inhabitants before the coming of the West. Yet, the
scholarship concerning Filipino Muslims routinely
anachronistically employs notions of an historic
“Philippine nation.” This predisposition to view
Filipino history in terms of national history
reinforces notions of ethnic betrayal by Christians,
and reaffirms Moro claims of ethno-national
authenticity. “Historically,” writes Pangalian
Balindong, “the Filipino Muslims of yore down to
modern times had played and displayed a
prominent and unequalled role in the preservation
of the Faith and in intense patriotic defense of this
country against foreign dominations” (Balindong,
1972, p. 8). Similarly, Cesar Majul claims, “Islam
… emerged as a rallying ideology which, with
patriotism, served as a force against Christianity
and colonialism” (Majul, 1974, p. 6). “Patriotism”
and “national” defense indicate notions of a self-
conscious and historically essentialist nation that
was collectively recognized by the various
inhabitants of a geographic space that,
coincidentally, became the colonially-constructed
Republic of the Philippines. The current Philippine
state represents an usurpation of an essential
historical national identity.
Such claims are, of course, extremely
problematic; nevertheless, their circulation
buttresses allegations of national betrayal and a
counterfeit ethno-religious national consciousness
by Christians.

As the alleged products of colonial conditioning,
members of the Filipino Christian elite are often
accused of replicating the oppressive dynamics of
colonial rule long after independence was achieved.
Their supposedly distorted identities extinguish
agency and cloud moral clarity. This notion is, of
course, not unique to Filipino Muslim
historiography. In the early 1960s Franz Fanon laid
out in excruciating detail the deceptions and
betrayals of a pos t - c o l o n i a l “ n a t i o n a l
bourgeoisie” in Africa (Fanon, 1963). His
conclusions have been largely supported and
reiterated by the Philippines’ post-War literature
(see Agoncillo, 1956 and 1974; Constantino,
1975 and 1978), and by Western scholars
struggling to explain post-colonial turmoil.
Though traditionally framed within a Marxist
paradigm of class conflict, the historiography of
Moro integration describes this phenomenon in
religious terms. Peter Gowing explains, “Muslims
fighting in the southern Philippines understand
themselves as struggling for deliverance from a
tyrannical, oppressive Christian Filipino
‘colonialism’” (Gowing, 1979, p. 201). The
perceived consuming need of Western imperialists
to conquer and extinguish Islam in the Philippines
is often regarded as an institutionalized objective
of the modern state, which serves as proxy for the
departed imperialists. As Jainal Rasul asserts, “the
Philippines merely imitated … colonial policy of
the previous three centuries” (1979, p.3). This
perception of perpetual colonial collaboration, or
the enduring “colonial mentality,” is overwhelmingly
reiterated and validated in post-colonial literature.
In a recently published and well-received collection
on minority studies in Southeast Asia, the editors
set the tone of the book with the following
statement:
Many present-day Southeast Asian
governments have followed policies similar
to their former colonial overseers, seeking
to extract wealth from natural resources
while returning very little of that wealth to
local populations … current governments
in Southeast Asia have added an emphasis

on ‘developing’ these indigenous minorities:
to institute ‘civilizing projects’ and to improve
their standard of living (Duncan, 2004, p. 7).
Contemporary post-colonial nationalist leaders
seem to represent the ultimate culmination of the
imperial project. As the diluted sycophants of an
indomitable West, such leaders seem to continually
reaffirm and maintain comfortable notions of a
totalizing and hegemonic imperial legacy. For
Filipino Christians, this legacy is allegedly both
revealed and expressed by their antagonism to and
even “genocidal” oppression of Muslims (Gowing
and McAmis, 1974, p. viii).
CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE
Though the historiographical developments
outlined above have endured for several decades
and continue to shape historical perceptions of the
integration conflict, the underlying premises of this
scholarship are tremendously problematic. The
very idea of “authenticity” is becoming increasingly
discredited as an outright fiction of the “static and
typologizing approaches of classical anthropology”
(Gupta and Furguson, 1992, p. 6). Likewise,
notions of imperial hegemony and indigenous
submission have been roundly critiqued by authors
such as Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper.6
Aside from theory, however, the literature
concerning Muslim integration is unsubstantiated,
given the larger corpus of knowledge composing
Philippine history. Conceptions of agency,
authenticity, imperial impact, and historical
trajectories, become increasingly untenable as the
islands’ broader history is disaggregated and
decontextualized from totalizing assumptions of
imperial determinism.
As outlined above, the integration crisis in the
Southern Philippines is generally believed to be the
product of one fundamental polarizing event in the
archipelago’s history—the conquest and
subsequent conversion of non-Muslim Filipinos by
Western Christian imperialists. This development
supposedly created a divergence in the islands’
 
natural history, producing two contrasting
populations. Christian Filipinos, acting under an
imposed false consciousness of ethnic self-loathing
and religious bigotry, contrast sharply with Muslim
Filipinos, which purportedly still enjoy a genuine
indigenous identity and full exercise of agency. Yet,
the processes of religious acculturation among
Christians and Muslims are far more complex and
varied than these simplistic conclusions indicate.
Though Islam may not have been a vanguard of
imperial conquest in Mindanao, its adoption was
far from uncontested. Scholars such as A.C. Milner,
Clifford Geertz, M.C. Ricklefs, and others (see
Geertz, 1960; Milner, 1985; Ricklefs, 1985 and
1988), have shown that Islamicization in Southeast
Asia was a highly-contested, negotiated, and often
violent affair. The various indigenous groups of
Mindanao did not suddenly become Muslim. Their
modern ethno-religious identities are the
culmination of thousands of inter-cultural
exchanges, modifications, and selective practices.
Though it is often argued that imperialism
consolidated a coherent sense of “Moro-ness”
among Filipino Muslims, history shows that this
was not the case. Imperial oppression and Muslim
resistance varied greatly, depending on a number
of independently shifting variables. To assume any
manner of consistency over the prolonged Moro-
imperial encounter is to simplistically reify more
than four centuries of history. In the early 1980s
Filipino historian Samuel Tan boldly challenged
monolithic perceptions of Muslim resistance in a
collection of essays published through Mindanao
State University. He writes,
While persistent and oftentimes furious,
Muslim resistance was not necessarily
consolidated or unified … There was, in fact,
no connection between depredations from
Sulu and from Mindanao or any relation
between armed opposition to Spanish rule in
Lanao and Cotabato to that of Sulu and the
rest of the Muslim areas … The Muslim
struggle was divided and limited … From
historical pattern, it seems quite difficult to
see a ‘Muslim society’ bound together by
historical experiences and the struggle against
 
colonialism. It is hard to find any inter-
relationship between uprisings, movements,
or reactions in various areas of Muslimland
(Tan, 1982, p. 39).
More recent scholarship has confirmed Tan’s
assertions. Thomas McKenna, for example finds
that “Spanish aggression against the Muslim polities
of the archipelago did not, to any significant degree,
stimulate the development of an overarching ethno-
religious identity self-consciously shared by
members of various Muslim ethno-linguistic
groups” (McKenna, 1997, p. 53).
Inconsistencies in colonial oppression and
Muslim response are also closely linked to
dissimilarities in imperial intent and policy over this
four hundred-year span. Though Spanish
colonialism and Christianization are inseparable
concepts throughout much of the historiography,
scholars such as William Henry Scott and Nicholas
Cushner demonstrate that Spain’s imperial
intentions were decidedly economic rather than
religious in nature (see Scott, 1985; Cushner,
1971). Donna Amoroso’s examination of the U.S.
military occupation of Mindanao during the opening
decade of the twentieth-century similarly counters
arguments of imperial religious continuity among
Western colonial regimes. Amoroso reveals
patterns of cooperation and even advocacy on the
part of the U.S. military as it preserved indigenous
institutions and prevented American evangelical
efforts in Muslim Mindanao (Amoroso, 2003, pp.
118-147). Such studies severely undermine reified
notions of imperial-Christian hegemony and
uniform Moro resistance based on a homogenizing
Islamic identity. This fact should in no way
marginalize or demean the Moro’s Muslim-ness,
but rather realistically explain their position in a
larger religio-cultural matrix. As Peter Gowing
observes, “there is no question about the
psychological disposition of the ordinary person
to be Muslim, which is, in the final analysis, the
only valid degree of ‘Muslimness’ can be judged”
(Gowing, 1985, p. 127).
The agency of identity formation is certainly not
exclusive to Filipino Muslims. In his books,

Contracting Colonialism: Translation and
Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under
Early Spanish Rule and Nationalism and the
Technics of Translation in the Spanish
Philippines, Vicente Rafael examines
Christianization as a means of both resisting and
subverting Spanish imperialism. Rather than
facilitating submissive obedience, conversion
actually empowered Filipinos by allowing them to
participate in a new discourse of power, resulting
in an indigenization of things foreign (Rafael, 1988
and 2005). Similarly, Reynaldo Ileto has
persuasively argued that Filipino national identity
is the product of the islands’ unique vernacular
culture of folk Catholicism. The various indigenous
syncretisms that continually challenged Spanish and
American hegemony present a uniquely native
ethno-religious identity unlike any envisioned by
Western imperialists (Ileto, 1979 and 1998). Such
works severely undermine notions of Christian
Filipinos as “conquered,” “historically
conditioned,” “tools” of Western imperialism. Both
Christian and Muslim Filipinos used imported
religious belief systems to articulate their resistance
to foreign intrusion. Christian Filipinos are no more
slaves of Rome than Muslims are slaves to Mecca.
Both groups employed innovative and adaptational
responses to a changing social and political
environment.
Charges of coordinated marginalization and
oppression of Muslims by a Christian Filipino
majority during the post-War independence period
are also perhaps a bit overstated. It is certainly
true that Moros have been treated unjustly by the
independent Philippine state. Resettlement and
colonization programs, economic disparities, fear
mongering, and other forms of discrimination have
indeed marred the integration process. Yet, to claim
that this is specific to Muslims, or that these
injustices are solely the product of imperial religious
conditioning and bigotry is to lose sight of the
broader history of minority relations in the
Philippines. Over the past six decades the
Philippines state has engaged in a number of
suppressive campaigns against a variety of minority
populations. Displacement of ethnic highland

groups has been thoroughly documented (see
Scott, 1971 and 1993; Eder and McKenna, 2004,
pp. 56-85), as have government policies aimed at
suppressing populations from Zambales. The
marginalization of socio-economic underclasses,
factional political groups, and even predominantly
Christian ethno-linguistic groups throughout the
islands has been a hallmark of Philippine history
over the past century.7 The fact that Muslims see
their own oppression as exceptional or excessive
may have more to do with a pervasive Islamic
religious consciousness than an institutionalized
Christian one in the State. Elmer Vigilia perhaps
summed it up best when he wrote, “the tendency
to see differences in terms of the single difference
of religion is perhaps more true of the Moros
themselves than of the Christians” (Vigilia, 1977,
p. 59).
CONCLUSION: WHO CAN LAY CLAIM
TO FILIPINO HISTORY?
Despite their weaknesses, the historiographical
trends discussed above have persisted for quite
some time, and continue to exercise tremendous
political currency among those involved in the
integration struggle. In cases such as the Moro
conflict, one cannot overstate the paramount
importance of perceived historical grievances. By
creating and supporting uniform historical narratives
predicated upon reified and sharply distinguished
historical actors, political activists are able to
maintain seemingly logical and justified conclusions
concerning victimization and oppression. Perhaps
in an effort to swing the pendulum away from these
misleading trends, recent scholarship has moved
away from analytical models based predominantly
on identity formation and politics.
In his excellent work on Muslim integration in
the southern Philippines, Patricio Abinales soundly
rejects “the use of identity politics and economic
change as dominant independent variables” in
analyzing the Mindanao conflict (Abinales, 2000,
pp. 2-3). In their place the author offers an
extremely insightful study that disaggregates the
 
processes of state formation in the Philippines and
localizes integration struggles to the “peripheries”
where social, political, and religious distinctions are
negotiated and defined (Ibid., p. 14). Abinales’s
case studies involving ambivalent relationships
between the fledgling Philippine state and local
strong men reveal discourses of power independent
of homogenizing classifications. His findings
severely undermine appeals to historic, or current,
ethno-religious identities, and negate notions of an
imperially constructed conflict.
Abinales’s work is supported by the earlier
findings of authors such as Kenneth Bauzon. In a
somewhat disjointed and meandering discourse on
Western political philosophy as it relates to the
Mindanao conflict, Bauzon concludes that scholars
“mistakenly attribute the cause of the conflict to
religion, even though the religious character that
the conflict has assumed is merely a perceptual tool
with which the protagonists have viewed, and
continue to view, the realities around them”
(Bauzon, 1991, p. 57). Bauzon bases his finding
on the assumption that Moros are still
fundamentally animists, and only employ Islam as
an identity because of its powerful political
currency (Ibid., p. 63). Though approached from
widely differing angles, both Abinales and Bauzon
marginalize socially constructed identities as the
catalytic factor in Mindanao’s integration struggle.
Certainly Bauzon and Abinales are correct in
their disaggregation of state formation and belief
systems. Breaking apart simplified processes and
simplistic structural interpretations of a seemingly
binary conflict forces a much more nuanced and
honest assessment of historical events. However,
one should take care not to completely discount
socially constructed identities. Fictional as they may
be, “the use of identity politics” as a “perceptual
tool” spawns from a very real, and extremely
cherished, historical consciousness among Filipino
Muslims. When one asserts that their ethno-
religious character represents some kind of false
consciousness, or simply a politically expedient tool
to be wielded during struggles for power, one risks
committing the same pervasive mistakes
demonstrated throughout Moro historiography as
 
outlined in the previous section. One cannot
conclusively decipher integration struggles in the
southern Philippines by marginalizing or
extinguishing socially constructed identities. Rather,
scholars must embrace the validity of ethno-
religious identities while carefully contextualizing
them in their proper historical perspective.
In the early 1980s Filipino historian Samuel Tan
suggested, in a series of essays, that scholars of
Philippine history move away from notions of a
national meta-narrative. Instead, the author
advocated utilizing local histories and oral traditions
as “the basis of Philippine historiography” (Tan,
1982, p. 17). He argued that “the relative
unimportance given to oral literature or materials
raises the question of relevance of national histories
to national integration since a great number of
ethnic groups in the archipelago have not as yet
developed their own histories” (Ibid., p. 16). Tan
felt that if local historical narratives were given
primacy, then broader connections would naturally
emerge, eventually formulating an inclusive sense
of national history. While both intriguing and
insightful, Tan’s admonitions prove problematic
due to their reliance on an overly teleological
reading of Philippine history and the assumed
inevitability of the nation-state. Rather than
recognizing the Philippines as a colonial
construction, Tan claimed:
It is equally evident throughout the breadth
of Philippine history that the different regions
of the archipelago, where state constructions
had been going on since pre-Hispanic times,
had looked towards the establishment of each
of their stage pattern as the national system…
the regional historical processes were meant
to be national in direction or goal (Ibid., p.
26).
By reinserting the Philippine nation-state as the
ultimate and natural culmination of heterogeneous
regional histories, Tan simply reified old contested
notions of national identity and historical
development as well as anachronistic conceptions
of the nation-state. If Moro and Christian Filipinos
(as well as a variety of other ethno-linguistic groups)

are currently disputing the validity and applicability
of the homogenizing term “Filipino,” then it appears
very unlikely that “regional historical processes
were meant to be national in direction or goal”
(Ibid.).
Perhaps the most effective means to properly
contextualize and understand the integration conflict
in the Philippines is to localize and Filipinize national
history. As demonstrated throughout this paper,
historians have attempted to explain the integration
conflict by reifying historical actors, processes, and
identities (Majul, Gowing, etc.); or by
disaggregating historical components to either
simply reconstruct a different path to these reified
conclusions (Tan); or to marginalize notions of
socio-political and ethno-religious identities to the
point of non-relevance (Abinales, Bauzon). In all
these studies the authors have failed to cast
Philippine national history in terms of Philippine
national history.
Put another way, the Philippines is what it is
because of a long series of interrelated but
ultimately discursive events which followed no
pre-determined teleological path to national
fulfillment. The current Philippine nation-state
is the sum total of innumerable internal and
external historical variables. The current nation
does not represent any kind of historically
encoded “natural” or “abnormal” entity resulting
from “normal” or “deviant” historical
trajectories. Rather, the Philippine nation-state
is the product of millions of heterogeneous
processes and historical actors responding to
various stimuli in an attempt to order and manage
their world as they encountered it.
This is not to say, however, that the various
identities and ideologies assumed by these historical
actors are simply superficial constructions that must
be discarded to arrive at the meat of “real” history.
On the contrary, these presumably exterior
historical trappings are the modus operandi that
dictate and order the course of historical
development. Identity, culture, ideology, and the
like compose the aforementioned variables and
stimuli of history. Filipinos then, whether Christian
or Muslim, cannot be categorized by teleologically

confining historical narratives or by historically
deterministic events. Neither can they be strictly
circumscribed within imposed or historically self-
proclaimed identities, which are of course not
static, but are continually reconstructed and
reiterated depending on the particular
circumstances of the historical moment.
Hence, Muslim integration in the Philippines
must be examined in the context of Filipino national
history. This does not mean that scholars should
suddenly attempt to compartmentalize the islands’
history and systematically eliminate “externally
foreign” elements to capture the essence of a truly
“indigenous” historical narrative (as several
historians of Southeast Asia have suggested). To
do so is not only a virtual impossibility, but would
be to mistakenly essentialize and misrepresent what
it is to be “Filipino.” Imperialism, Christianity, Islam,
and the millions of other historical developments
that have shaped the archipelago’s history because
they were internalized, syncretized, and selectively
employed by rational historical actors. Filipinos are
no more compelled to act according to the dictates
of “external” historical influences than they are by
supposedly “innate” cultural reflexes. As stated at
the onset of this study, the struggle to integrate
Muslim Filipinos into the Philippine nation-state is
an attempt to negotiate and redefine relationships
of power under changing historical circumstances.
In such a situation, collective and individual
identities are reproduced, altered, embraced, or
discarded, but always with a sense of historical
relevance, which is, at least in someway, tangible
and legitimate. Such is, after all, the nature of human
interaction.8
ENDNOTES
1
The term “Moro” has a long and complicated
history. Spanish colonialists, who had recently endured
the 750 year long Reconquista driving North African
“Moors” from the Iberian Peninsula, originally applied
the epithet to Filipino Muslims. The appellation
maintained a certain pejorative tone throughout both
the Spanish and American colonial regimes, and into the
Early Republic Period. However, in recent decades many
 
Filipino Muslims have embraced and reappropriated the
term as a mark of both distinction and pride. And
though “Moro” is now considered to be politically
incorrect in academic and other socially sensitive
circles, the distinction is actually embraced by many
Filipino Muslims who speak fondly of their “Moro
heritage” and take great pride in referring to themselves
as “Moros.”
2
See Day (2002), for an excellent critique of this
process.
3
For a practical application of their research
orientation, see Stoler (2002). See also Reynolds (1995);
Day (2002); as well as, Day and Reynolds (2000).
4
See: Rafael (1988 and 2005); Ileto (1979 and 1998);
Kramer (2006).
5
For an excellent discussion of this topic see
Chakrabarty (2000).
6
For an excellently concise, yet thorough discussion
of this subject, see Stoler and Cooper, 1997; and for a
practical application of their research orientation, see
Stoler, 2002.
7
The Ilokanos of Northern coastal Luzon, for example,
have often claimed victimization by an institutionalized
ethnic Tagalog bias in the Philippines revolutionary and
independent governments. See Scott (1986) and Woods
(1996, pp. 189-190).
8
For further discussion of the theoretical orientation
of these conclusions, see Hawkins (2007).
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