Conclusion
As the post-Marcos era opened, the two mass rallies in the Cotabato City plaza demonstrated the promise of a popular-based Muslim nationalism led by a newly ascendant counterelite under the Islamic guidance of an independent and politically active ulama. Ordinary Muslims (and especially poor urban Muslims) were readily mobilized for collective action in support of Muslim autonomy—action that did not, to be sure, involve significant costs for ordinary participants. The MILF "prayer rally," in particular, demonstrated the considerable political influence and organizational abilities of the ulama acting on behalf of the MILF, notwithstanding the failure of the organizers to achieve their stated goals.
The gubernatorial election marked a watershed in Cotabato electoral politics. The winning candidate, Zacaria Candao, received virtually no local support from traditional elites and very little effective assistance from a national party but nevertheless defeated his datu opponent handily. An important factor in his success was the novel form of the electoral campaign itself—a structure, based on extended direct appeals to ordinary voters, that Candao had earlier cultivated and now used to his advantage in the more hospitable post-Marcos environment. The radio campaigning in the governor's race amounted to an extended broadcast debate between the two candidates over ideological as well as practical and personal issues. Almost everyone in Campo Muslim (as well as most of the Muslims in the province) has access to a radio, and the nightly arguments in that debate were followed carefully by many Campo Muslim residents. For quite possibly the first time in the history of electoral politics in Muslim Cotabato, direct ideological appeals (featuring Islam as a political language) reached mass audiences and became key considerations in the electoral choices of a great number of Cotabato Muslims.
Of equal significance was the design and content of the IPP appeal itself. The contest between the IPP and the datu coalition in the election for governor was on one level an ideological struggle, unparalleled
in Cotabato, between those who endorsed the proposition that Islam is all-inclusive and cannot be separated from politics and those who believed that religion, including Islam, should be relegated to a private domain. However, as witnessed in Candao's final campaign rally, two key elements of the Islamic renewal program of the ulama (and high MILF leadership)—doctrinal purification and the rejection of Western cultural influence—did not receive emphasis in the IPP's electoral appeal. The Islamic message of the IPP was much more populist than puritan. With the need to win the hearts of ordinary voters firmly in mind, the electoral appeal of Candao and the IPP took careful consideration of the prior responses of ordinary Muslims to the ulama's program for Islamic renewal. The IPP message reflected a praxis based on years of implicit negotiations. It emerged out of the everyday interplay between incremental pressures for religious reform and small but significant resistances, and was as much the result of the pragmatic dissidence of non-elite Muslims as of the moral authority of the ulama.
The IPP campaign utilized aspects of traditional culture because much of that culture was identity-affirming for Muslim voters. It allowed Western (or Westernized) amusements because, although most Muslim voters favored political independence from Western rule as represented by the Philippine state, they appreciated many aspects of Western culture and did not endorse its wholesale rejection. Islamic populism was underscored in the IPP appeal because it coincided with the Islamic consciousness of the poor Muslims who comprised most of the Muslim electorate.
While the mass rallies and provincial elections demonstrated the promise of popular Muslim nationalism, the city elections revealed its limitations. The pragmatically modified IPP message of Islamic populism and separatism that proved so effective in the provincial elections was overcome in the municipal elections by more narrowly defined political and economic interests. The "Islamic unity" advocated by the IPP was nowhere evidenced in that election. Competitive Muslim candidates, concerned not to alienate city Christians, shunned the IPP precisely because of its Islamic appellation.[24] Members of the aboveground ulama, and even underground MILF operatives, actively supported separate candidates on the basis of kin or other particularistic loyalties. For their part, poor urban Muslims, in the absence of substantive campaign messages or charismatic candidates, approached the city elections primarily as an occasion to enjoy the various favors offered to attract the suddenly prized political resources they possessed.
That a good number of Campo Muslim residents provided their votes to Christian candidates in exchange for material gratuities suggests only that many poor Muslims were no less astute at obtaining particular benefits from collective political processes than were the Muslim vote-brokers and politicians with whom they transacted.