Islam in the Philippines

Islam was the first-recorded monotheistic religion in the Philippines. Islam reached the Philippines in the 14th century with the arrival of Muslim traders, Sufi missionaries from the Ba Alawi of Yemen from the Persian Gulf, southern India, and their followers from several sultanates in the wider Malay Archipelago. The first missionaries then followed in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. They facilitated the formation of sultanates and conquests in mainland Mindanao and Sulu. Those who converted to Islam came to be known as the Moros, with Muslim conquest reaching as far as Tondo that was later supplanted by Bruneian Empire vassal-state of Maynila.

Quotes

• Muslims first arrived on the Philippine archipelago as traders in the tenth century and were followed by Islamic missionaries about three hundred years later. Many tribesmen of the southernmost islands were converted, so that by the mid-fifteenth century the island of Sulu had emerged as a leading center of Islam. In subsequent decades, Muslim rule reached as far as Luzon, the northern island, though when the Spanish explorer Magellan arrived in 1521, the Islamic faith had gained a firm hold only in the south. The Spanish government under Charles V (r. 1517-56) virtually ignored the archipelago but Philip II (r. 1556-98) did take an interest—as the name of the country commemorates to this day. In 1564 Philip dispatched Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to pacify the islands and make them Christian. Legazpi won Manila from the Muslims in 1571 and then captured all of Luzon. Other islands fell in rapid succession and by 1600 most of the archipelago had submitted to Spain. The pagan inhabitants accepted Spanish dominion with little resistance; after the conquest, they quickly accepted the Spaniards’ language, religion, culture and institutions.
  • Pipes (1983), • Pipes D (1983) In the Path of God, Basic Books, New York

• Only the Muslims resisted. Located on the islands of Mindanao, Palawan, and on the Sulu chain, the Moros (the name for Filipino Muslims, from the Spanish word for Moors) turned away all attempts at pacification or conversion during one-third of a millennium, much after the rest of the country had settled into docile tranquility. Unlike the pagans, they fought Spain in long and vicious wars. In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards pursued a strategy of containing Islam’s expansion and in the seventeenth they tried to Christianize the south; in 1700-50 they tried but failed to tempt the Moros with a policy of lenience and attraction; Spanish attacks temporarily broke Moro power at times during 1750-1850; from 1850 to 1890 Spain tried again to subdue the Moros through force; and in 1890-98, the last years of Spain’s presence, the occupation was marked by panic and intolerance as the Philippines slipped from Spain’s grasp. When the United States took control of the country in 1898, it inherited the Moro problem (viewed as a variant on its Indian troubles at home), and two years later launched a full-scale assault on them. At last, in 1913, General John Pershing of World War I fame subjugated them, using the full array of modem technology, including steamships, the .45 caliber revolver, and dumdum bullets. After three and a half centuries, the Muslims had finally been vanquished. Even this was not permanent, however, as violence broke out anew in 1972, once again over the issue of Manila’s control over the Muslim regions in the south.
  • Pipes (1983), • Pipes D (1983) In the Path of God, Basic Books, New York