The Magindanaon

The largest indigenous ethnolinguistic group in the Cotabato River Basin are the Magindanaon.^[1] For most of the recorded past they have also been the politically dominant population. The 1980 Philippine census estimated their number at 644,548 persons, or 25.7 percent of the total Philippine Muslim population. This figure places them as the second largest of the thirteen Philippine Muslim ethnolinguistic groups (IBON Databank 1981; Abbahil 1984).^[2] Two major dialects of the Magindanaon language are spoken in the Cotabato Basin.^[3] The terms for these two dialects—tau sa Laya (upriver people) and tau sa Ilud (downriver people)—are place-names indexing the fluvial orientation of a people living along a great river. This dialectal separation reflects demographic, cultural, and political polarization between the two major historical population centers on the Pulangi, one at its mouth in what is now Cotabato City and the other thirty-five miles upstream near the present-day Datu Piang. These two settlements were, respectively, the traditional seats of the Magindanao Sultanate and the Buayan Sultanate—interdependent but dueling realms for most of their histories.^[4]

The distinction between downstream (ilud) people and upstream (laya) people has as much subjective as objective import. Downriver people tend to view themselves as the "true" Magindanaon, citing their "purer" dialect, their (somewhat) earlier exposure to Islam, and their connections to the Magindanao Sultanate, the first and hence noblest Magindanaon royal house. They hold this view in spite of (perhaps because of) the fact that the Magindanaon of the interior have dominated indigenous cultural and political life in the valley for the past 150 years. Many continue to distinguish tau sa laya (upriver people) from "Magindanaons" in the same manner as my downriver neighbor in Cotabato City, who remarked of tau sa laya immigrants to the city: "How can they call themselves 'Magindanaon' when they cannot even speak our language?"

Despite some dialectal and cultural differences, the upriver and downriver Magindanaon in the historical period have shared social and political institutions, a profession of Islam, certain symbols of collective identity in dress and ornamentation, and similar means of subsistence. Traditional Magindanaon communities tended to be dispersed along the banks of the numerous waterways of the Cotabato Basin. Thomas Forrest, writing in 1775, describes the pattern:

In a country thinly inhabited, and where ground is of no value, Mahometans especially choose not to crowd together; each desiring a house on the bank of a river. Peculiarly is this visible here, where upon the winding [river] banks . . . and the sides of the many creeks that intersect the ground between . . . rivers, at the distance of almost every three hundred yards, sometimes we see a single house, sometimes a group of houses, with gardens of coconut, mango, and plantain trees, sugar canes, and rice fields, for many miles up those rivers . . . Wherever is a house, there is a small portion of the river sufficient for bathing, railed in, against alligators. (Forrest 1969)

For the Magindanaon, the Pulangi River system, with its tributaries, channels, and estuaries, has been a source of food and water, a principal thoroughfare, and the means of trade and communication with the outside world. Control of the Pulangi has thus been crucial for the acquisition and maintenance of political power by the rulers of the Cotabato Valley throughout the historical period. The traditional Magindanaon were horticulturists, growing either dry rice in upland fields or wet rice in lowland paddies. In the modern period many Magindanaon have shifted to plow and harrow methods of wet rice cultivation (Stewart 1977).^[5]