The Emergence of a Muslim Counterelite

Two quite dissimilar education projects begun in the 1950s produced a distinct but variously composed Muslim counterelite by the late 1960s. The first project was a government program expressly designed to "integrate" Philippine Muslims into national life by providing a number of them with postsecondary educations in the national capital. The sec-

ond effort was an externally funded Islamic education project designed to enhance Islamic faith and practice among Philippine Muslims by granting some of them the opportunity to study at Islamic centers in the Middle East. The graduates of these two scholarship programs constituted a new and differentially educated Muslim elite that was joined in Cotabato to an emergent Muslim commercial elite composed, for the most part, of former smugglers. These groups forged an alliance that provided the leadership for the separatist rebellion begun in 1972 and posed a direct challenge to the established postcolonial elite. We begin by considering these two education projects and their political consequences.

The Commission on National Integration and the Generation of Muslim Separatism

In 1954 the Philippine Congress, prompted by an intensification of Muslim "banditry" in Mindanao and Sulu, appointed a Special Committee to investigate what were by then the conspicuous economic disparities between Philippine Muslims and Christians generated by Christian migration to the Muslim South.^[1] The committee, headed by Domocao Alonto, a prominent Muslim congressman from Lanao, selected a familiar object of study—"the Moro Problem"—and adopted the colonial discourse of Muslim backwardness and guided integration in its report. The Moro Problem was redefined to accord with the ideology of the postcolonial Philippine nation, referring now to "nothing less than the problem of integrating into the Philippine body politic the Muslim population of the country, and the problem of inculcating into their minds that they are Filipinos and that this Government is their own and that they are part of it" (Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives, 1955, quoted in Gowing 1979, 208). The Congressional Report acknowledged the poverty plaguing Philippine Muslims but ignored the evidence linking the relative impoverishment of Muslims to Christian in-migration and blamed only Muslim culture for Muslim poverty: "In their ignorance and in their trend toward religious fanaticism, the Muslims are sadly wanting in the advantages of normal health and social factors and functions" (Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives, 1955, quoted in Glang 1969, 35).^[2]

The Special Committee recommended the creation of a Commission on National Integration (CNI). A 1957 act of Congress established the commission, authorizing it to "effectuate in a more rapid and complete

manner the economic, social, moral and political advancement of the Non-Christian Filipinos" (Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives, 1957, Republic Act 1888, quoted in Gowing 1979, 208). One of the few substantive accomplishments of the Commission on National Integration was to provide scholarships for a significant number of Muslim students to attend universities in Manila. Majul reports that the number of CNI scholars increased from 109 in 1958 to 1,210 in 1967 (1979, 191–92). While political maneuvering ensured that many of the CNI scholarships went to the children of datus, the scholarship program also represented the first opportunity for considerable numbers of non-elite Muslims to attend universities.

The total number of Muslim college graduates for the period between 1958 and 1967 was 1,391, many of whom received professional degrees. Although that number represents only about 16 percent of all CNI scholars, it is nonetheless a notable increase over the handful of Muslim students (probably never more than ten to fifteen per year) graduated from Manila universities during the late colonial and immediate postcolonial period. The CNI graduates, most of them from nonelite backgrounds, gradually constituted themselves as a new professional elite in their home communities. The shared experiences of the more than 8,000 Muslim CNI scholars studying in Manila between 1958 and 1967 also profoundly affected Muslim politics after 1968. Much of their political education was gained outside university lecture halls from observing and participating in campus political activism. They also experienced firsthand the magnitude of popular anti-Muslim bias in the national capital and, after the election of Ferdinand Marcos as president of the Philippines in 1965, witnessed an increasing antagonism toward Muslims by the same Christian-dominated state that had provided them scholarships.

In 1968 an event came to light that politically aroused the Muslim student community in Manila. In March of that year the newly elected Senator Benigno Aquino told the Senate of a report that Christian army officers had shot dead a number of Muslim recruits on the island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. According to a survivor who had told his story to Aquino, 180 Muslim trainees had been recruited in 1967 as part of a covert force connected with the Philippine Army and administered by the Civil Affairs Office. The trainees had reportedly protested the conditions of their training and demanded to be allowed to return to their homes. In reaction, at least 14 of them (and perhaps as many as 28) were executed without investigation or trial (George

1980; Majul 1985). Despite four separate congressional and military inquiries, and a great deal of press interest, the true purpose of the clandestine "Jabidah Project" and the reason for the execution of the Muslim recruits have never been made clear. The most widely repeated interpretation was that the project was part of a Marcos administration plan to invade the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo by a force from Sulu that could not be directly linked with the Philippine Army.^[3]

The so-called Jabidah Massacre had a galvanizing effect on the Muslim student community in Manila. Throughout the year, Muslim students demonstrated against the Jabidah killings. The Jabidah protests transformed one campus activist in particular into a Muslim separatist. Nur Misuari was a Tausug from Sulu and the son of a very poor family. Supported by a CNI scholarship, he had graduated from the University of the Philippines and by 1968 was teaching there in the Department of Political Science. Misuari had been active in progressive student politics for some time but, shortly before 1968, had begun to focus his efforts on issues specific to Philippine Muslims.^[4] In 1967 he helped to found the Muslim Nationalist League and became editor of its official publication, the Philippine Muslim News (George 1980). Misuari has stated that it was the Jabidah protests that inspired his political career and motivated his rise to the leadership of the Muslim separatist movement (Majul 1985, 45). In a 1968 editorial in the official organ of the Muslim Nationalist League, he wrote: "Separatism is a costly and painful process and few ordinary mortals are prepared to pay the price. But this world has been a witness time and again to the division of certain countries into smaller ones. For, political division is a matter which is not fully within the control of men, nor yet a sole product of their whims and caprices. It is in fact mainly the creation of the actual conditions in which men find themselves. It is the creation of the system" (quoted in George 1980, 200). The rhetoric employed by Misuari here in one of his very first published statements on Muslim separatism borrows the language of revolutionary Marxism and reflects the political influences of the university-based activism of that period. Significantly, Misuari has redirected the revolutionary rhetoric of the Manila student movement (and of student movements elsewhere in that period) toward the goal of Muslim nationalism rather than adopting a specifically Islamic discourse.

That the assimilationist efforts of the Commission on National Integration should yield in ten years' time a Western-educated revolutionary

poised to lead a Muslim nationalist rebellion against the Philippine state is as illuminating as it is ironic. It presents a characteristic instance of the genesis of ethnonationalism—a sweeping political phenomenon for which Brackette Williams has recently offered an innovative reading. According to Williams, any adequate analysis of ethnonationalism must treat ethnic differentiation as "an aspect of a total system of stratification"(1989, 421). In such a system, the most powerful members of any particular nation-state "determine who, among persons of different 'tribal pasts,' is trustworthy and loyal to the political unit" (1989, 419).

Following Williams's schema, in the new Philippine republic only Christian Filipinos were deemed entirely trustworthy and thereby considered "non-ethnic" despite the quite considerable ethnolinguistic diversity found among them. Non-Christian Filipinos (comprising Muslim-Filipinos and "Tribal-Filipinos"), deemed culturally suspect, were labeled "ethnic" (by assigning them hyphenated designators) and regarded as socially and morally substandard. Muslim-Filipinos, comprising the largest single category of non-Christians, were judged to be dangerously disloyal because of their long history of armed enmity toward Philippine Christians.

The distrust and devaluation of Muslims by the Christians who controlled the Philippine state is evidenced in the 1954 report of the Special Committee, which depicts Muslims as socially problematic by nature—mired in poverty as a result of their own ignorance and religious fanaticism. Official expenditures aimed at integrating them into the "body politic" were thought necessary precisely because Muslims were viewed as "holding the nation back" (B. Williams 1989, 435). It is worth noting that while the legislation establishing the Commission on National Integration authorized the commission to institute a broad spectrum of development programs and services ranging from irrigation projects to legal aid to road building, the only component to receive more than token funding was the scholarship program for higher education. In this respect, the postcolonial Philippine government continued the practice established during the American period of "developing" Philippine Muslims not by providing them the material resources of the West but by endeavoring to remove (by the selective provision of university educations) the cultural disabilities perceived to be impeding their advancement and, indirectly, that of the Philippine nation.

An unintended consequence of the CNI scholarships was the creation of a group of young Muslim intellectuals schooled in political ac-

tivism and able to articulate the frustrations of a much larger group of Muslim students disaffected by their encounters with Christian cultural hegemony in Manila. Nur Misuari and other Western-educated leaders of the separatist movement that began to take form in 1968 had inherited an ethnicized Muslim-Filipino identity from their colonial-era predecessors and experienced its contradictions in their frustrated attempts at integration in the national capital. The Jabidah Massacre provided both provocation and metaphor. Philippine Muslims who had volunteered to serve the republic had been deceived, exploited, and treacherously murdered by Christian agents of the state. Efforts by Muslims to contribute to the Philippine nation as Muslims were repaid with abuse and betrayal. Misuari and other young Muslim activists saw only one proportionate response: Philippine Muslims had to "separate themselves from those against whom they [were] judged unfavorably and . . . in relation to whom they [were] materially disadvantaged"—they must proclaim themselves a "new people" (B. Williams 1989, 429). The separatist intellectuals rejected their ascribed hyphenated identities as Muslim-Filipinos (Muslim citizens of the Philippine nation) and proclaimed themselves "Moros." In a bold piece of semantic alchemy they appropriated and transfigured a colonial and Christian pejorative to denominate the citizens of their newly imagined nation. Henceforth, "Moro" would denote the descendants of those unsubjugated peoples whom the Spaniards and their colonized subjects feared and distrusted.

Middle Eastern Educations and the Formation of an Islamic Counterelite

Before tracing further the path of Nur Misuari and his fellow Manilabased intellectuals toward Muslim separatism, the genesis of a second group of Philippine Muslim intellectuals needs exploring.

Between 1955 and 1978 the government of Egypt, as part of the pan-Islamic programs of Gamel Abdul Nasser, granted more than two hundred scholarships to young Philippine Muslims, the great majority of whom studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo (Mastura 1984; Majul 1979; George 1980). In the previous few years, some graduates of al-Azhar (mostly Indonesians) had been sent to teach in the Muslim Philippines, but it was only with Nasser's ascent to power in 1954 that significant numbers of Philippine Muslim students were able to undertake advanced studies at Islamic institutions in the Middle East.^[5] A number of those students were scions of datu families, but many others

were not, and the scholarships thus became another avenue for ordinary Muslim students to gain higher educations. Al-Azhar graduates returned to the Philippines after overseas stays averaging eight years, and most became religious teachers in their home provinces. While far fewer Philippine Muslims studied in Cairo than in Manila, the influence of Islamic graduates was out of proportion to their numbers. That influence initially took a political-symbolic form as al-Azhar graduates became involved in the leadership of the separatist movement. It was much later before the presence of indigenous Islamic teachers had a commensurate effect on popular Islamic consciousness in the Philippines. As in Manila, the Philippine Muslim student community in Cairo became a center for the development of activism in pursuit of social and political change in the Muslim Philippines, but, unlike that in Manila, student activism among Philippine Muslims in Cairo was explicitly and exclusively Islamic in character.^[6]

One of the most politically inclined of the Cairo students was Hashim Salamat, a Magindanaon from Cotabato. Salamat, who left for Cairo in 1959, was related to Congressman Pendatun but his family was neither wealthy nor prominent. Salamat was a member of the fourth cohort of Cotabato Muslims to receive scholarships to al-Azhar. He returned to Cotabato in 1967 and obtained a position as provincial librarian. However, his real interest, as he stated in a 1977 interview, was to work to reform Muslim political and religious affairs in the province at least partly by participating in politics. Salamat and his al-Azhar cohort were frustrated in their attempts at political participation because, as he said, "the old Muslim traditional and political leaders wouldn't even allow us to get near them" (quoted in Mindanao Cross , February 12, 1977). Salamat eventually became associated with established Muslim politicians and, more consequentially, with Nur Misuari through a most unlikely intermediary, Datu Udtug Matalam, the recently retired governor of Cotabato and renowned champion of Muslim-Christian cooperation.^[7]

Datu Udtug Matalam and the Muslim Independence Movement

In May of 1968 the establishment of the Muslim Independence Movement (MIM) was announced by its founder and chairman, the newly retired governor of Cotabato, Datu Udtug Matalam. The MIM had as its formal goals the secession of Muslims "from the Republic of the

Philippines in order to establish an Islamic State" (MIM Manifesto quoted in Glang 1969, 103). A contemporaneous editorial in the Cotabato City newspaper (Mindanao Cross , June 1, 1968) noted the irony in the fact that Datu Udtug, the former governor of the province and prominent advocate of Muslim-Christian political harmony in the region, had now founded a Muslim secessionist movement. The proximate cause for the sudden political transformation of Datu Udtug may be found in the circumstances of his retirement from the governor's office. In 1967, Datu Udtug became a political casualty of the national party politics about which he cared so little. Following the lead of his brother-in-law, Congressman Salipada Pendatun, Datu Udtug had been aligned for some years with the Liberalista Party. After an exceedingly bitter presidential election campaign in 1965, won by the Nacionalista Party challenger Ferdinand Marcos, Marcos led a Nacionalista push to unseat Liberalista officeholders in the 1967 local elections. One of the targeted provinces was Cotabato, previously considered the unassailable territory of Pendatun and Matalam. Marcos personally selected a Muslim Nacionalista candidate for the governorship of Cotabato, Datu Abdulla Sangki. Sangki was a member of the Ampatuan clan,^[8] which was closely aligned with the Sinsuats, the persistent political rivals of Pendatun and Matalam. The Sinsuats and Ampatuans had, that year, affiliated en masse with the Nacionalistas.

Datu Udtug, who disdained electioneering, was unimpressed by this challenge, but Pendatun, a modern campaigner, took it quite seriously. Presumably, he was also aware that were a Nacionalista to attain the governorship of Cotabato, his own position as congressman for the province would become untenable. Pendatun persuaded the sixty-eight-year-old Udtug to withdraw from the election by offering to run for governor himself in his stead.^[9] Pendatun chose Simeon Datumanong, a political protégé, as his running mate for vice-governor. Datumanong was a member of the Ampatuan clan and was chosen at least partly as a counterweight to the Nacionalista candidate. Pendatun won the governor's race by a slender margin but decided not to give up his seat in Congress after all. He never took the oath of office and Datumanong automatically became governor.

Datu Udtug thus found himself in 1968 involuntarily retired from public office and far from the reins of provincial power, which were now held by a youngster closely related to his political foes. He reportedly felt abused by his old comrade Pendatun and more disgusted than ever with national party politics. His resentment was intensified as the

result of a separate incident. In August of 1967 his eldest son, Tuting, was shot and killed by an off-duty agent of the National Bureau of Investigation. Datu Udtug was anguished at this loss and then deeply offended when none of the newly elected provincial officials (with the exception of Pendatun) visited him to pay their condolences. The compounded frustration of Datu Udtug at his sudden powerlessness apparently led to his willingness to attempt a dramatic gesture to seek renewed respect and recognition. In his effort to be once again taken seriously he was successful beyond his expectations, at least in the short term.

Datu Udtug's MIM was never a popular secessionist movement. Its only public political actions were pronouncements in the form of manifestos and declarations of policy publicized in the national and international press and disseminated to politicians and Muslim leaders in the Philippines and abroad. There was little apparent public support for the secessionist goals of the movement among ordinary Muslims (George 1980, 152; McAmis 1974), and Datu Udtug himself eventually retreated publicly from his initial positions.^[10] Nevertheless, the published statements of the Muslim Independence Movement were taken more seriously by Cotabato Christians, the national media, and the state than they were by Cotabato Muslims and, evidently, more seriously than intended by Datu Udtug. In the months following the initial manifesto, the national press carried headlines announcing that "War Brews in Cotabato." Christian settlers left some towns in anticipation of a Muslim uprising, and the national government transferred combat-ready troops to the province (George 1980, 135).^[11]

The manifestos of the MIM also drew the prompt attention of those who controlled the state. President Marcos met with Datu Udtug publicly in October of 1968. Marcos acknowledged Datu Udtug's self-proclaimed role as "the leader of the more than four million Muslims in the Philippines," presented him with his gold watch as a token of friendship, and appointed him presidential adviser on Muslim affairs (Mindanao News-Bulletin October 25, 1968, quoted in Glang 1969, 28–29). The apprehension induced by Datu Udtug's essentially notional movement appears clearly related to its timing, coming just six weeks after the disclosure of the Jabidah Massacre. From the perspective of Manila, MIM appeared to be "a spontaneous southern backlash against the notorious Jabidah shooting" (George 1980, 133). Despite appearances, and notwithstanding Datu Udtug's implications to the contrary, the evidence suggests that the Jabidah Massacre was less

an impetus for Datu Udtug's movement than were his own personal motivations. As George (1980) has argued, any provincial Muslim reaction to the Jabidah Massacre would have emanated first from Sulu, the home province of the recruits, rather than from Cotabato. By referring to the incident, Datu Udtug was, in all likelihood, merely making use of media attention and Muslim anger generated by Jabidah, for personal ends.

The Muslim Independence Movement did, however, serve purposes and produce consequences quite apart from the intentions or actions of Datu Udtug. The MIM acted as a lightning rod, attracting mostly young, educated Muslims either disenchanted with or debarred from Muslim electoral politics. For a period of time Datu Udtug's homestead at Pagalungan again became a center of political activity.^[12] Udtug himself played a very limited role in MIM activities after his initial efforts. He appeared content with the recognition he had garnered by signing his name to manifestos and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1983 at the age of eighty-four, farming his land.

While credible information on the covert political activities associated with the Muslim Independence Movement is hard to come by, enough data are available to indicate how the MIM, though never a broad-based movement, became a vehicle for the convergence of old and new, established and anti-establishment, Muslim interests. In 1969, Hashim Salamat established an organization, Nurul Islam, to promote Islamic renewal in Cotabato. By 1970 Salamat had aligned himself and his organization with the MIM. Presumably, Salamat was attracted to the MIM by Datu Udtug's break with party politics, his call for an Islamic state, and his willingness to associate himself with young and idealistic men. It is known that by early 1969, Nur Misuari had also made the acquaintance of Datu Udtug and, more important, had made common cause with the two most prominent Liberalista Muslim politicians of the day, Salipada Pendatun of Cotabato and Rashid Lucman of Lanao. Misuari most likely had cemented his relationship with these men as a result of the Jabidah protests in Manila, which received significant support from opposition Muslim politicians.

Misuari became most closely associated with Rashid Lucman, a prominent Muslim congressman and Pendatun's counterpart in Lanao. Lucman was also closely acquainted with Tun Mustapha, the chief minister of the Malaysian federal state of Sabah. Mustapha had been angry with the Philippine government since it first announced a claim to Sabah. Mustapha was also an ethnic Tausug with many relatives

living in Sulu and had become incensed both at the recruitment of Sulu Muslims to invade Sabah and at their subsequent treatment at the hands of Philippine agents (Noble 1983). The Jabidah Massacre served to confirm his worst suspicions of Philippine intentions. At some point in early 1969 a decision was made within this group to initiate a training program for Muslim guerrilla fighters. In late 1969, ninety young Muslim recruits, most of them Lucman's fellow Maranaos from Lanao—but also Magindanaons and Tausugs—began military training in the forests of Malaysia by professional instructors (Mercado 1984; Noble 1983). Nur Misuari was among the group, as was the son of Rashid Lucman and eight young Magindanaons. Although there is no evidence that Datu Udtug actively participated in the decision to train Muslim fighters, and although only a small percentage of the trainees were Magindanaon, this training has been referred to as an MIM program (see Mercado 1984; Noble 1983). The training was evidently financed as well as sanctioned by the government of Malaysia through the intercession of Tun Mustapha.

Misuari's intentions in taking part in (and probably initiating—see George 1980) the training program are rather easily discernible. It is apparent from his 1968 editorial quoted above that he had already accepted the inevitability of armed struggle to achieve Muslim secession. Given those convictions, Misuari's association with established Muslim politicians was pragmatic. With no resources of his own, and having disengaged himself from the campus-based Marxist nationalist opposition, he turned to those apparently sympathetic Muslims who had their own resources and, more important, access to potentially significant quantities of external resources.

The intentions of the Liberalista Congressmen, Pendatun and Lucman—both of whom publicly denied any association with the MIM or guerrilla training—are much less easy to discern. There is no evidence to suggest that their secret sponsorship of an armed force was a defensive response to any immediate threat to their persons, or even to their positions. It was more likely conceived as a new tactic in the evolving national party politics of the period. Both men found themselves in 1969 aligned as bitter foes of an increasingly aggressive national president who was actively strengthening (with money and arms) their Nacionalista Muslim rivals in their home provinces—in Cotabato, the Sinsuat-Ampatuan alliance; and in Lanao, Congressman All Dimaporo. Pendatun and Lucman most probably saw the creation of a welltrained armed force, whose instruction and supplies they did not have

to finance and whose existence they could deny, as a useful new resource in a mixed political strategy.

The Magindanaon recruits returned from Malaysia to Cotabato to train additional young men and form part of the nucleus of the MIM youth section—the only dynamic segment of the MIM. The rest of the active core was composed of Hashim Salamat and some of his fellow al-Azhar graduates. Datu Udtug pledged to finance arms purchases but, according to Datu Adil, spent most of the allocated funds on farm improvements.

Although never a popular secessionist movement, the MIM did have political consequence as both a notion and a provocation. By articulating the idea of Muslim separatism at an opportune time it galvanized a new non-datu and anti-establishment group into political action while offering established Muslim politicians a novel weapon for opposing an unusually aggressive ruling party.

The focus thus far has been entirely on the formation of new Muslim political elites and their relation to the beginnings of a movement for political separation from the Philippine republic. To understand how ordinary Muslims became inclined toward armed separatism requires the investigation of an unprecedented string of violent incidents in Cotabato beginning in 1970.