Chapter 4
European Impositions and the Myth of Morohood

The predominant theme enunciated in the official discourse of Muslim nationalism in the Philippines is that of Morohood—the postulated existence of a single, deeply rooted, Philippine Muslim (Moro) cultural identity. Morohood is said to have developed principally as the result of more than three hundred years of religious warfare against Spanish invaders. This chapter examines the modern myth of Morohood in light of the historical evidence from Cotabato concerning the nature of armed resistance to Spanish aggression in the Muslim Philippines. I begin by investigating the political economy of the precolonial Cotabato Basin, tracing how political and economic relations within and between its indigenous polities were shaped and transformed by external perturbations in international trade and European conquest.

While a significant number of Southeast Asian sultanates were founded or dramatically expanded as the direct or indirect consequence of the initial European invasion of Southeast Asia at the opening of the sixteenth century, none have had their histories more thoroughly entangled with that of European penetration of the region than the Cotabato sultanates.^[1] The rise and fall of the Cotabato sultanates is bracketed by two separate conquests—that of the first Western colonial power in the region and that of the final. Sarip Kabungsuwan, the legendary founder of the Cotabato sultanates, was a refugee from the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1511. Datu Ali, the last independent Cotabato ruler, was captured and killed by the American colonizers of

the Philippines in 1905. In the intervening centuries the Cotabato sultanates were inflected and eventually deranged as the result of encounters with various agents of European expansion. The most frequent and intense engagements—economic and military—were with the Spaniards, who from the outset of their occupation of the northern Philippines in 1571 sought the political subjugation of, as well as expanded trade with, the southern sultanates.

A Tributary Mode of Production

The three main indigenous populations of the Cotabato Basin—the Magindanaon, Iranun, and Tiruray—were linked together from the earliest historic period in a single political-economic system based on the external acquisition of plunder and slave labor and the internal production of commodities for external trade. It was a system propelled by the direct extraction of surpluses from primary producers by political or military means, and the circulation of that surplus "through the transactions of commercial intermediaries" (Wolf 1982, 82), what has been called a tributary mode of production (Amin 1973; Wolf 1982).

That system comprised two principal socioeconomic categories that crosscut ethnolinguistic boundaries: tribute-takers and tribute-providers.^[2] Tribute-providers were predominantly direct producers, either freemen or slaves.^[3] Tribute-takers consisted primarily of local overlords (datus) linked with one another through intermarriage, through patronage arrangements, and by means of the ideology of nobility related in the previous chapter.

Chinese sources from the Ming period and earlier suggest that, by at least A.D. 1300, there existed in Cotabato a harbor principality engaged in substantial direct trade with China.^[4] Early Spanish accounts of Cotabato from the mid-sixteenth century are the first to report the existence of two rival power centers in the Cotabato Valley. These adjacent sultanates had areas of influence corresponding to the dialect boundaries between Tau Sa Ilud and Tau Sa Laya, with the seat of the Magindanao Sultanate in present-day Cotabato City at the mouth of the Pulangi River, and that of the Buayan Sultanate upstream near what is now Datu Piang. However, at different points in the history of their rivalry, each one was controlled for significant lengths of time by the other.

The upriver and downriver sultanates were similarly structured, and they conformed to a general sociopolitical type that has been characterized as a "segmentary state" (Southall 1965) or "contest state" (Adas 1981). They were loose confederations of local overlords, or datus. Datus formed a tribute-taking aristocracy with hereditary claims to allegiance from followers. While a ruling datu was almost always associated with a specific district, or inged,^[5] the index of relative political potency was command of people rather than control of territory. In accord with the pattern that pertained throughout precolonial Southeast Asia, where arable land was more abundant and thus less valuable than human resources (Reid 1988), the wealth of a ruling datu was secured through rights over persons rather than rights in land. The land under cultivation in a particular domain was held in usufruct by individuals, but the datu had the final right of disposition (see W. H. Scott 1982).

Datus usually held large tracts of land for their own use that were worked by slave labor. The nonslave followers (endatuan) of a datu were obliged to provide him support in the form of scheduled payments of a portion of their crops and unscheduled contributions for prestige feasts or bridewealth payments. They were also required to perform military and nonmilitary labor service. Datus used surplus wealth to support themselves and the armed followings that were the basis of their power (compare Gullick 1958). Wealth also was used as capital to engage in or finance trading or slave-raiding expeditions. Chattel slaves (banyaga), taken in raids or warfare or purchased, were a common form for storing (and investing) surplus wealth (compare W. H. Scott 1982; Warren 1981). Banyaga were exchanged as part of bridewealth payments and were also a medium of commercial exchange (Forrest (1969 [1779]).^[6] Other nonfree subjects of datus were debt-slaves (ulipun). Endatuan could be reduced to ulipun for a number of causes, the rate of reduction often being related to the availability and cost of banyaga at a given time (Warren 1981, 216). New debt-slaves were either added to a datu's personal following or put to work to produce food or provide menial services to the datu's household. Typically, a significant portion of a datu's debt-slaves were utilized as personal retinue or armed retainers and were supported by banyaga or other debt-slaves.^[7]

The Magindanaon tribute-taking elite recognized the hereditary claim of one among them to allegiance from all other members of the

aristocracy. Because of the existence of a royal (barabangsa) bloodline, the sultan was not simply a primus inter pares ruler. He was, nonetheless, a datu who, as a result of a combination of pedigree and political savvy, commanded the allegiance of other datus. That allegiance was accomplished and maintained primarily through the creation of dyadic alliances between the sultan and individual datus—arrangements commonly sealed either by his bestowal of a daughter in marriage or his marriage to a daughter of another datu. Because datus ruling ingeds were the basic components of a sultanate, the authority of a sultan was exerted not over a royal domain as such but over his datu supporters, linked together in a network of dyadic alliances.

A reigning sultan had the formal right to collect taxes and tariffs, render legal decisions, and make various administrative appointments. He did not hold a monopoly on the means of violence, and, despite his capability to apply substantial coercive force, military power was widely diffused (W. H. Scott 1982).^[8] In addition to the taxes collected by the sultan (primarily tolls on commercial river traffic) and the tribute he received in various forms from datu supporters, the sultan had his own inged and tribute-providing commoners. A significant portion of a sultan's wealth, however, probably came from his privileged access to sources of wealth external to his realm, derived from wars conducted on his enemies, slave raids on (or tribute-collecting visits to) non-Muslim neighbors, and his privileged access to trade with external powers.^[9] Much of a sultan's wealth was also held in the form of slaves, the number of which was "the most important index of prestige and power" (Ileto 1971, 50).

External Acquisitions and the Flow of Tribute

Despite their development as rival power centers, the two principal Cotabato sultanates were linked throughout most of their history in a single economic system based on the commercial production of rice and the collection of forest products, and the external exchange of those commodities for prestige goods, firearms, and bullion.^[10]

The upriver Buayan Sultanate was located in the fertile upper valley of the Pulangi. Rice was one of the primary exports from Cotabato and it is likely that the major portion of all rice exported from Cotabato was grown in the upper valley. Slave labor was centrally important to the economy of the Buayan Sultanate and much of it was prob-

ably utilized in commercial rice production. In the mid-nineteenth century, Datu Utu, the effective Sultan of Buayan and the most powerful man in the Cotabato Valley for much of his rule, was reported to have four to five thousand slaves (Gayangos cited in Ileto 1971). Lesser datus usually held fewer than one hundred slaves (Ileto 1971).

While debt-slaves almost always originated from within the domain of the sultanate, chattel slaves (banyaga) were originally acquired from outside. It is probable, because of the proximity of the Buayan Sultanate to upland areas and its relative distance from the seacoasts that were the source of slaves seized from Spanish-held territories, that most of the banyaga of the Buayan Sultanate were obtained in raids on non-Muslim upland groups.

For most of its history, however, the Buayan Sultanate did not raid its closest upland neighbors, the Tiruray, for banyaga slaves. Instead, slave hunters went farther afield to raid the Manobo of the central Cordillera or the Bilaan or T'boli of the southern Tiruray Highlands (Ileto 1971). This was because Tiruray communities had been incorporated as client groups into both sultanates. Tiruray communities entered into unequal, ritually reinforced trade relationships with individual Magindanaon datus. In exchange for Tiruray products, the datu provided salt, iron, cloth and other manufactured goods, and, just as important, protection from other datus. During his stay in Cotabato, Forrest observed profoundly unequal exchanges between Tirurays and Magindanaons. He reported loans forced on Tirurays to create permanent indebtedness and described Tirurays in their own communities being abused and treated like "slaves" by visiting Magindanaons (1969 [1779], 266).^[11]

The incentive for incorporating the Tiruray into the Buayan Sultanate as clients was the value of the products the Tiruray could provide. In their upland fields the Tiruray grew tobacco, an important item for external trade, and upland rice valued by the Magindanaon for domestic consumption. Equally important were the forest products collected by the Tiruray. The mainstays of the forest product trade were beeswax, rattan, and hardwoods.^[12] The Tiruray were thus critically important to datus as collectors (or, in the case of tobacco, producers) of products that could be traded externally oat great profit for highly valued Chinese goods.^[13] Consequently, they were not enslaved but instead incorporated into the economic system as clients to perform this specialized role. Tiruray communities were compelled to collect forest products to meet the trade and tribute demands of

Magindanaon datus, as well as to satisfy their own consumption needs. The terms of exchange probably shifted according to changes in the external market and were constrained, on the one hand, by datus needing to avoid exploitation so extreme as to drive Tiruray communities beyond their effective reach, and, on the other, by the awareness on the part of those communities of their need for externally derived goods and the long-range capabilities of Magindanaon slave raiders.

Relations between the upriver and downriver sultanates were also centered on internal and external trade. The upriver Magindanaon were in need of the very same salt, metals, and cloth that they provided to the Tiruray. They obtained these, as well as prestige goods and bullion, in trade with the downriver sultanate. In exchange they provided rice, tobacco, forest products and, occasionally, upland banyaga slaves for domestic markets and further trading. Although external trade was sometimes carried on directly, it was more commonly channeled through the downriver sultanate. Despite periods of political tension and warfare, trade relations were always maintained, even when the downriver sultanate was occupied by the Spanish. After 1755, the river trade between the sultanates was increasingly facilitated by Chinese traders (see below).

While the upriver and downriver sultanates were similarly structured, the Magindanao Sultanate, because of its location at the river mouth, exhibited certain important differences. The Sultan of Magindanao probably had no more success than his upriver counterpart at collecting all the taxes and tribute due him from his client datus—especially those from outlying ingeds (compare Gullick 1958, 127). However, he did possess a greater number of alternative sources of revenue than did the Buayan sultan. In addition to collecting river tolls on vessels engaged in internal trade, the Sultan of Magindanao levied customs duty on arriving merchant ships and collected anchorage fees from warships.

The capital of the Magindanao Sultanate was wealthier and more cosmopolitan than that of the interior sultanate. William Dampier described the capital (located then in Simuay, just across the Pulangi River and downstream from present-day Cotabato City) in 1686 as "the chiefest City on [the] Island . . . of Mindanao" (1906, 335) and reported that Malay, the trade language of insular Southeast Asia, was spoken widely and well there.^[14]

A key element in the maritime orientation of the Magindanao Sultanate was its relationship with the Iranun populations that resided

within its territory. European accounts beginning in the mid-eighteenth century identify the Iranun as specialized maritime raiders who channeled large amounts of externally acquired wealth—in the form of slaves, plunder, and occasionally external tribute—back into the sultanate (Warren 1981).^[15] Swift Iranun warships set out south from Ilana Bay to harry coastal villages, merchant vessels, and Dutch settlements in Sulawesi (the Celebes) and Maluku (the Moluccas) (Warren 1981).^[16] Larger Iranun raids were directed against Spanish territories in the Philippines. The coastal towns of southern Luzon and the Visayas were the victims of persistent, large-scale attacks from "Moro" sea raiders. Captives were sold externally, usually to Bugis or Brunei slave traders, or internally along the Pulangi River.^[17] Spaniards or other prominent captives were usually allowed to redeem themselves by ransom immediately after their seizure (Warren 1981, 229).^[18]

The Iranun occupied an important niche in the socioeconomic system of the precolonial Cotabato Basin. They formed autonomous coastal communities headed by datus or petty sultans. Although living in close proximity to the Magindanao Sultanate and often aligned with it, the Iranun were never incorporated into the sultanate as subjects, and they assiduously guarded their political independence.^[19] When allied with the downriver sultan, the Iranun provided him with very significant economic and political support. The internal circulation of the wealth seized externally by Iranun raiders was also a vital component of the economic prosperity of the Magindanao Sultanate.

One nonindigenous population played a significant role in the commercial life of the precolonial Cotabato Basin. The Chinese have lived continuously in Cotabato longer than any other non-Muslim immigrant group. Chinese permanent presence in the Magindanao Sultanate almost certainly predates the Spanish occupation of the northern Philippines. Dampier found an established Chinese community in Cotabato in 1686, some of whose members worked as accountants for the sultan (1906, 364).^[20] In 1755, the expulsion of most of the Chinese in the Spanish-held Philippines was carried out by colonial authorities. Some of those expelled settled in the Magindanao Sultanate (Wickberg 1965). That resettlement would account in part for the larger and more visible Chinese community described by Forrest in 1775. He reports Chinese in Cotabato working as carpenters and herbalists and operating commercial rice mills and palm wine distilleries (1969 [1779], 183, 216, 224). They were also apparently well-engaged in the intersultanate trade in local products for Chinese goods. According to

Forrest, the Chinese settled in the Magindanao Sultanate were not permitted to trade farther upriver than Buayan, the upriver capital, because the Magindanaons were "jealous of their superior abilities in trade" (1969 [1779], 185).

Despite their commercial success, the social and legal status of the Chinese in the Cotabato was precarious and certainly no better than that of the Chinese of Manila.^[21] While the Chinese possessed skills and provided economic benefits to the Magindanao Sultanate comparable to those of the Iranun, their lack of political and military power tended to relegate them to the status of the Tiruray or other upland client groups.

Precolonial Cotabato and European Mercantile Expansion

In his watershed work, Europe and the People without History , Eric Wolf cautions that the operation of a tributary mode of production in any particular state is "at least in part determined by whether that state is weak or strong in relation to other polities . . . Successful surplus extraction cannot be understood in terms of an isolated society alone; rather, it is a function of the changing organization of the wider field of power within which the particular tributary constellation is located" (1982, 82). The proposition that power relations between societies have a determining influence on local political-economic orders is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the Cotabato sultanates. Within decades of their establishment (which occurred most probably in the first half of the sixteenth century), the Cotabato sultanates began to feel the severe effects of the intrusion of European powers into the region. The most intense collisions were with the Spaniards, who occupied the northern Philippines in 1571 and almost immediately sought to subdue the Muslim South. The first three Spanish military expeditions against Cotabato were failures. On the third, in 1596, the commander of the expedition was slain and the Spaniards forced eventually to abandon the fort that had been their foothold in Cotabato. Before doing so, the acting commander reportedly "cut down or set fire to all the coconut and sago palms within reach of his patrols, to the number of 50,000 trees" (de la Costa 1961, 279), a tactic foreshadowing the economic strangulation to be applied to Cotabato in place of direct armed assault.^[22]

The Spaniards withdrew to Zamboanga where they established a garrison at the tip of the Zamboanga Peninsula in order to control the sea lanes leading to and from Cotabato. The Spanish fort commanded the channel between the peninsula and the island of Basilan, the normal route of sea travel between Cotabato and the rest of the archipelago. Patrol boats based at the fort rerouted Chinese junks coming from the north bound for Cotabato. When manned, the fort was quite effective in impeding the direct China-Cotabato trade. It was much less successful at curtailing maritime raiding. Iranun marauders easily eluded Spanish patrol boats in the Basilan Straits to raid throughout insular Southeast Asia, with the Spanish Philippines becoming their preferred destination. By the mid-eighteenth century, Spanish colonial authorities had largely disarmed the Philippine populations subject to Spanish rule but had not provided them with adequate coastal defense forces. The Iranun responded to those changed circumstances opportunistically, launching annual slave raids against the Spanish North that rarely met with significant armed resistance.

The power and prestige of the Cotabato sultanates intensified during the periods when the Zamboanga garrison was abandoned (1599–1635, 1663–1718) and subsided when the blockade was reestablished. In the first part of the seventeenth century the China trade flourished in Cotabato and the political and economic might of the downriver polity—the Magindanao Sultanate—reached its peak under Sultan Kudarat. By 1775, however, Forrest was able to describe economic conditions in the Magindanao Sultanate as follows: "Spaniards have long hindered Chinese junks, bound from Amoy to Magindanao, to pass Samboangan [Zamboanga]. This is the cause of so little trade at Magindanao, no vessels sailing from Indostan thither; and the little trade is confined to a few Country Chinese . . . and a few Soolooans [Tausug] who come hither to buy rice and paly [palay , or unhusked rice], bringing with them Chinese articles: for the crop of rice at Sooloo can never be depended on" (1969 [1779], 280).

By 1800, the Magindanao Sultanate had begun an inexorable economic decline that coincided with the expansion of another Muslim polity of the South. The Sulu Sultanate encompassed the islands of the Sulu archipelago, which forms the boundary between the Sulu Sea and the Celebes Sea. Its favorable location at the juncture of several trade routes ensured its continuation as a maritime entrepôt. The Magindanao Sultanate, no longer able to obtain trade goods directly, was

now reduced to providing rice to the expanding Sulu Sultanate in exchange for Chinese goods formerly obtained directly at much more advantageous rates of exchange (Forrest 1969 [1779]). On the basis of evidence from Forrest and others, Warren (1981) suggests that, after 1780, Iranun raiders, who formerly had sailed as economic allies of Magindanao datus, began to raid independently or shift their allegiance to the Sulu Sultanate.

Spanish economic and military pressure also impinged on relations between the upriver and coastal sultanates of the Cotabato Basin. The two rival power centers alternately aligned with the Spaniards against one another as their fortunes waxed and waned. In 1605 and 1635, the Spaniards signed treaties with the reigning upriver (Buayan) sultan recognizing him as the paramount ruler of Mindanao. In 1645 and 1719, similar agreements were made acknowledging the paramountcy of the Sultan of Magindanao. In 1734, the successor to the Magindanao throne was crowned sultan by the Spaniards, and by 1837 the downriver sultanate was a virtual protectorate of the Spanish colonial domain, with the government in Manila controlling trade and choosing the successor to the sultan (Ileto 1971). The Buayan Sultanate, on the other hand, was increasing its influence during this period and annexing tributaries who had abandoned the Magindanao Sultan.

With the introduction by the Spaniards of steam-powered gunboats in 1846 to patrol the Basilan Straits, Iranun raids against the northern Philippines from liana Bay were, for the first time, effectively curtailed. This was the final blow to the economic viability of the Magindanao Sultanate. In 1861, the Spanish flag was raised without resistance over the palace of the Sultan of Magindanao, and the downstream sultanate became a colonial possession of Spain. The occupation of the Magindanao Sultanate was accomplished without bloodshed, and plans were soon underway to force the submission of the upstream polity.

The suppression of Iranun slave raiding in the Spanish Philippines coincided with an increased demand for slaves in the Sulu Sultanate to meet the labor needs associated with its recent position as a powerful commercial link in the European trade with China. In the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company was looking for a way to redress its adverse trade balance with China. In particular, it sought a means to stem the flow of silver from British India to China in exchange for the tea so highly desired in Britain. British merchants discovered the long-established Sino-Sulu trade—wherein marine and forest products were exchanged for Chinese goods—and interposed

themselves to the commercial benefit of both the Company and the Sulu Sultanate. The British provided textiles, guns, and other manufactured goods in exchange for the marine and forest products valued in China. The greatly expanded demand for these products led to the rapid growth of the Sulu Sultanate and an increased need for the recruitment of a large labor force to do the work of procurement of trade produce. This need had been met by the seasonal slave raiding conducted by the Iranun and other seagoing raiders (Warren 1981).

With slave raiding in the Spanish Philippines greatly diminished after 1846, the gap in the supply to Sulu was filled through increased raids by Cotabato Muslims on upland groups in eastern Mindanao. The Cotabato Chinese became active intermediaries in the expanded slave trade from Mindanao to Sulu (see Warren 1981; Wickberg 1965). During the 1872 smallpox epidemic and famine in Cotabato, Jesuit missionaries bought for redemption children from Chinese middlemen, who had purchased them from their Muslim owners or parents with the intention of reselling them in Sulu (Bernad 1984). An 1890 Jesuit report describes Chinese traders on the upper Pulangi purchasing slaves from slave raiders. Cotabato Chinese merchants were also involved in the gutta-percha boom of the 1880s. They exported this forest product (used as insulation in the building of the transatlantic cable) to Singapore via Sulu (Wickberg 1965). These late nineteenth-century export opportunities gave impetus to Chinese enterprise in Cotabato, and by the turn of the century the external trade of Cotabato as well as Sulu was controlled by Chinese merchants (Warren 1981).

His need for firearms to resist the Spaniards, along with his recognition of the shortage of marketable slaves for Sulu, provided Datu Utu, the last independent Sultan of Buayan, with an irresistible incentive. He and his datus ignored the centuries-old clientage arrangement between the Magindanaon and the Tiruray and began to raid them to acquire slaves to exchange for firearms. Hundreds of Tiruray were enslaved and taken to Sarangani Bay at the southern tip of Mindanao to be sold (along with rice, cacao, coffee, and forest products) to Chinese, Bornean, and European traders in return for the supplies needed to resist the Spaniards who were pushing upriver (Ileto 1971). Responding to new political exigencies and new economic opportunities, upriver datus, in the final decades of precolonial Cotabato, sold their Tiruray clients into slavery in the distant Sulu Sultanate. A combination of Spanish military pressure and British-impelled economic incentives had

produced a dramatic (if predictable) alteration of production relations between Magindanaon datus and the Tiruray, whereby collectors of commodities became themselves commodities as datus reduced former clients to chattel slaves.

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.