Spanish Aggression and the Myth of a Unified "Moro" Resistance

Having traced the contours of Spanish aggression against the Cotabato sultanates and the various local responses made to that aggression, we may turn now to examine the modern myth of Morohood that undergirds the official ideology of Philippine Muslim nationalism. That myth, in its most fundamental rendering, refers to the conviction that a transcendent Philippine Muslim (or "Moro") identity was fashioned among the various Muslim peoples of the southern Philippines in the course of more than three hundred years of Spanish offensives against the Muslim polities of Mindanao and Sulu. It is a view advanced not only by Muslim nationalists or nationalist-oriented historians (e.g., Majul 1973) but also by various other scholars of the Muslim Philippines (e.g., George 1980; Gowing 1979; Molloy 1988; Bauzon 1991). A representative capsule expression of the myth of Morohood is found in a recent piece concerned with the contemporary politics of Muslim separatism in the Philippines.

For over 400 years, the Moros perceived their struggle as a fight to protect their religion, cultural identity and homeland against foreign invaders. They have fought many wars for political independence against the Spanish, the Americans and lastly, the Christian Filipino governments in Manila. With their strong sense of Islamic nationalism, the majority of the Muslims regard themselves simply as Moros and not Filipinos at all. Over the centuries Islam has been important to the Muslim people in the Philippines not only in forging the basis of their self-identity, but also in acting as the cement between deep ethnic divisions that exist among the many cultural-linguistic groups that make up the Moro people. (Molloy 1988, 61)

As the passage demonstrates, "Moro" is the term used to designate the shared identity postulated for Philippine Muslims. "Moro" (or "Moor") was the appellation applied to all the Muslim populations of Southeast Asia by the Portuguese who seized Melaka in 1511. It was the same label used by the Spanish conquerors of the northern Philippines. With their Reconquista of Muslim Spain a recent collective memory, the Spaniards in Manila regarded the Southern sultanates and

beheld Moros—familiar Muslim enemies. "Moro" denoted a Muslim inhabitant of the unsubjugated southern islands. It was applied categorically and pejoratively with scant attention paid to linguistic or political distinctions among various "Moro" societies. While, for instance, eighteenth-century British and Dutch chroniclers most often refer to sea raiders from Cotabato as "Iranun" or "Illano" (see, e.g., Forrest 1969 [1779]; Hunt 1957), contemporaneous Spanish reports virtually always denominate them as "Moros" (Warren 1981, 165 ff).

The Spaniards referred to the non-Muslim inhabitants of the Philippines as "indios," a term that eventually came to designate the subjugated and Christianized populace. For indios—the principal victims of "Moro" marauders—the term "Moro" connoted savage and treacherous pirates. A folk-theater form known as the moro-moro survived into the postcolonial period. It enacted the defeat of pillaging Muslim villains by Christian heroes (Majul 1985).

Beginning in the late 1960s, Philippine Muslim nationalists attempted to appropriate the epithetic "Moro" and transform it into a positive symbol of collective identity. The "Moro National Liberation Front" was formed to direct the struggle for an independent political entity proclaimed to be the "Bangsa Moro," or Moro Nation. Muslim nationalist ideologues have proposed, with the support of certain historians, that the Spanish ascription "Moro" reflected an actual social entity—a self-conscious collectivity of Philippine Muslims engaged in a unified, Islamic-inspired, anticolonial resistance. More specifically, it is proposed that Spanish aggression against the southern sultanates generated an oppositional Islamic identity (or intensified an already existing one) that transcended linguistic and geographic boundaries and motivated steadfast and widespread armed opposition. The individual skirmishes, engagements, and campaigns are referenced cumulatively as the "Moro Wars" (Majul 1973).

These suppositions are confected from meager historical evidence. My reading of this material suggests, to the contrary, that Spanish aggression against the Muslim polities of the archipelago did not, to any significant degree, stimulate the development of an overarching ethnoreligious identity self-consciously shared by members of various Muslim ethnolinguistic groups.

Consider first the claim that the "Moro Wars" were "fundamentally religious in character" (George 1980, 44). This view is advanced by the foremost historian of Muslims in the Philippines, Cesar Majul, who notes that "the motivating force behind the [Moro] wars was

religious difference" (1985, 18). The discourse of Spanish offensives against the Muslim South was undeniably religious in tone. Spanish attempts to reduce the southern sultanates to submission were voiced through an ideology of aggressive Christianization. Official documents, beginning with those from the earliest Spanish expeditions against the sultanates in 1578 and continuing up to those associated with the military campaigns of the last decades of the nineteenth century, order or advocate the destruction of mosques, the suppression of Islamic teaching, and the coercive conversion of Muslims to Christianity (see, e.g., Blair and Robertson 1903–19, 4: 174–81; de la Torre quoted in Saleeby 1908, 252–53). Nevertheless, this religious rhetoric is most often inlaid in texts that also announce more mercenary objectives related to monopolizing trade, controlling resources, and collecting tribute.^[23]

Related to the first claim is the supposition that Spanish hostility provoked the development of a transcendent and oppositional Islamic consciousness among the Muslim peoples of the archipelago. While it is reasonable to assume that Islamic appeals were occasionally employed to mobilize opposition to Spanish aggression in the southern sultanates, there is little historical evidence to suggest that indigenous resistance to the Spanish threat led to a heightened Islamic identity among the Muslim populace, or that such elevated consciousness "stiffen[ed] the resistance of the Muslims" (Majul 1973, 343). When considering the frequency and importance of Islamic appeals, it may be noted that the two most famous anti-Spanish appeals on record—the 1603 address by Datu Buisan (the father of Sultan Kudarat) to the Leyte chiefs and Sultan Kudarat's 1639 exhortation to the Iranun datus (see above)—contain no reference to Islam nor any mention of religion whatsoever (quoted in Majul 1973, 118, 141). Those speeches were reported by the Spanish Jesuits who witnessed them, and one presumes those diarists to have scrupulously recorded any religious references they may have heard. The evidence available for later in the Spanish period is fragmentary and inconclusive. While there exist several accounts of religious observance by the high nobility of various sultanates, descriptions of the level of religiosity of Muslim subordinates are quite scarce. As we saw for Cotabato in chapter 3, one of the most complete of those accounts—that of William Dampier (1906)—remarks upon the lack of apparent religious devotion observed among ordinary Magindanaons. Prior to the late nineteenth century (see Arcilia 1990, Blumentritt 1893; Ileto 1971), there is also no direct evi-

dence for Islamic clerics preaching anti-Spanish resistance to the general populace.^[24]

Finally, there is the assertion that this postulated Islamic consciousness motivated a sustained and broad-based armed resistance. Available evidence suggests that if Philippine Muslims shared a self-regarding Islamic identity in opposition to the Spaniards, it was hardly ever manifested in concerted action against them. The term "Moro Wars" has been employed to describe an assortment of armed collisions, occurring over more than three hundred years, between Muslim polities in the southern archipelago and Spanish colonial forces. It has also been used to refer to the great number of slave raids made by various Muslim seafaring marauders—most notably the Iranun of the Cotabato coast—against Spanish-held territories in the North. While often closely connected economically with one or more sultanates, the Iranun and other raiders usually had no formal political ties to any large sultanate. They were, in European parlance, freebooters—those engaged in plundering without the authority of national warfare.^[25] If we exempt the private Muslim raids against the North, which occurred almost yearly between 1768 and 1846 (Warren 1981), the three hundred-year conflict was primarily a cold war consisting of extended periods of mostly peaceful coexistence with the Spanish colonial intruders in the North coinciding with intersultanate rivalry in the South. That relative calm was only occasionally punctuated by armed confrontations between the Spaniards and particular sultanates, clashes that tended to be isolated events of relatively brief duration.

We need look no further than Cotabato for illustration. For the first few years following the initial abandonment of the Zamboanga garrison by the Spaniards in 1599, the two Cotabato sultanates jointly sponsored annual slave-raiding forays against Spanish-held territories in the Visayas and as far north as southern Luzon. Those raids were state-sponsored military expeditions, some with as many as three thousand warriors, and were always led by the highest officeholders of the sultanates (de la Costa 1961). The discontinuation of major state raiding expeditions after 1605 was due in part to the growth of intersultanate rivalry in Cotabato (motivating the Buayan sultan to enter into a peace treaty with Spain that year) and a consequence of the expansion of the China trade during periods when the Zamboanga fort was not garrisoned. The lucrative trade made the rulers of the sultanates both less interested in leading raids themselves and more concerned with controlling piracy in general (Ileto 1971). The 1719 agreement

between Spain and the Magindanao Sultanate occurred as the result of a plea by the downriver sultan to the Spaniards to aid him in his war with the Sultan of Sulu; the same sultan later requested Spanish assistance in suppressing an internal rebellion (lieto 1971). Despite occasional armed clashes, Cotabato trade with the Spaniards increased steadily over the centuries. The Spaniards attempted to block the direct China-Cotabato trade not only to force the subjugation of the sultanates but to interpose themselves in the trade network. As a result, for the greatest portion of the Spanish period, the Spanish colonial capital of Manila was a major trading partner of the Cotabato sultanates. The largest portion of the beeswax collected in Cotabato was shipped by local Chinese intermediaries to Manila in exchange for Chinese goods (Laarhoven 1989, 147).^[26]

Cotabato's history of sultanate-Spanish relations indicates that depictions of the Philippine Muslim response to Spanish intrusions as a three hundred—year-long religious struggle fail utterly to capture the complexities and contradictions of that period. Muslim nationalist ideologues are not, of course, interested in unearthing discrepancies or discontinuities. As with all nationalist discourses, their narratives entail "the subjugation of a threateningly unruly history" (Spencer 1990, 287) in support of their ideological stance that a self-conscious oppositional identity as Philippine Muslims is ancient, deep, and broadly shared.^[27]

I shall return in a later chapter to the official discourse of Muslim nationalism; my principal purpose in taking up the myth of Morohood here is to draw attention to its uncritical acceptance by certain scholars of the Muslim Philippines, and to the theoretical and methodological consequences of their endorsements. The analytical significance of political myths in general lies less in the details of their formulation and dissemination than in how they are received and what they obscure. It is interesting to note in this regard that the myth of Morohood has been professed as historical fact by various scholars who are not avowedly Muslim nationalists (see, especially, Gowing 1979; George 1980; Molloy 1988; Bauzon 1991). Their receptivity to this myth suggests that these scholars, for reasons of their own, elect to believe (despite the ample existence of disconfirming evidence) in the ancient existence of a distinctive Moro culture, in a consolidated Moro history. Their retellings of the myth of Morohood obscure for their readers the historical complexity and cultural diversity I have outlined here.

More important for our purposes, these historical narratives share the core premise that a deeply rooted cultural homogeneity among Philippine Muslims has not only surmounted geographic and linguistic barriers but bridged social distance as well. Leaders and followers, aristocrats and commoners, are bound to one another by enduring Islamic bonds forged in the flames of jihad against infidel invaders. The presumption in these writings of a particular shared structure of historical experience precludes notice (in a manner similar to those culturological depictions of the precolonial history of other Southeast Asian polities) of divergent interpretations of relations of power by political subordinates. It also obviates any need for the social analysis of present-day political mobilization for Muslim separatism; ordinary adherents of Philippine Muslim nationalism are simply reenacting the precolonial past—driven by similar impulses and commanded by comparable leaders. It is the reason that most accounts of Muslim nationalism in the Philippines neglect the questions that compose the core basis of this study: What were ordinary Muslims fighting for? What precipitated their involvement in the separatist rebellion? How did they respond to the appeals of movement leaders? What did they hope to obtain from their participation?

One other matter has been obscured by the myth of Morohood, a topic that requires our attention before we turn to examine popular participation in the Muslim nationalist movement in Cotabato. Morohood—the self-conscious ethnoreligious identity as a Philippine Muslim—is evidenced among many Muslim citizens of the Philippines today and plainly predates the contemporary struggle for Muslim separatism. If not the consequence of a coordinated "Moro" resistance against Spanish aggression, what is its source? When and under what circumstances did it develop? I will argue in chapter 5 that Moro identity was first developed and nurtured during the American colonial period with the active encouragement of representatives of the colonial state.