Colonial Subjection and the Constitution of Philippine Muslim Identity

We turn next to another arena of cultural domination to review the consequences of American colonial rule for Muslim identity in Cotabato. Various anthropologists have in recent years considered the complex connections between colonial domination and identity formation in postcolonial societies (see, e.g., Fox 1985, 1989; Kahn 1993; Kapferer 1988; Spencer 1990; B. Williams 1991). A brief review of the work of two of these writers will serve to bracket the case at hand.

Two books by Richard Fox (1985, 1989) examining the colonial construction of indigenous identities in India have furnished critical analytical insights into the articulated nature of identity formation and resistance under colonial rule. In his more recent work (1989) Fox has placed the colonial construction of identities in India in the context of a global process he describes as "a world-systemic orientalism"; a process whereby colonized populations "come to define their own culture according to the 'indigenations' asserted in Western Orientalism" (1989,

98, 92). According to Fox, "by the late nineteenth century, there was a world system of cultural domination—that is, a set of dominating cultural meanings constructing identity and self-perceptions in most corners of the globe" (1989, 98).

Applying a global perspective to the various "indigenations" associated with colonial situations allows comparison and the discovery of parallel processes. Indeed, Fox's earlier (1985) work on Sikh identity and resistance offers some rather striking parallels to that of Philippine Muslims under American rule.^[2] The British colonial constitution of Sikh identity and its subsequent use as a basis from which to contest colonial domination provides an analog to the colonial origins of Moro identity in the Philippines. It also illustrates Fox's thesis, developed expressly in his later work (1989), that effective resistance to colonial domination emerges not from some unaffected or "untamed" sector of traditional culture but develops "within the Orientalist hegemony of the world system" (1989, 100). While this "unavoidable accommodation to hegemony" allows effective and sometimes successful cultural resistance against colonial domination, that resistance is unable to accomplish a complete escape from cultural domination because it accepts the "indigenations . . . encoded in the world system" (1989, 103).

Fox's thesis carries us quite far along in understanding the origins and uses of Moro identity in the Philippines but does not provide the analytical tools to make sense of the multiple layers of resistance witnessed in Cotabato. There is also a certain slippage in his usage of the notions of hegemony and cultural domination. At times Fox interprets hegemony as "attempted cultural domination" (1989, 92). More often, however, he follows Raymond Williams's conceptualization whereby hegemony references accomplished cultural domination—situations, that is, in which domination is "internalized and appears natural" (1989, 91). A second problem arises with the meaning of "cultural domination" itself. Surely, Fox does not mean to say that alternative cultural meanings and identities are necessarily extinguished as a result of "world-systemic orientalism," but only that cultural practices and definitions authorized by colonial powers become the most salient ones, especially for elite political actors. Yet there are also passages in his work that may be interpreted to suggest that "orientalist hegemony" paralyzes all definitions and identities other than those constructed by the world system of cultural domination (see, e.g., 1989, 99–100).

Another recent work on the colonial construction of local identities comes at the problem from a somewhat different angle and appears directly to challenge Fox's position. Joel Kahn (1993) traces the constitution of Minangkabau identity in colonial Indonesia. In doing so he launches a powerful critique of the notion, first formally introduced by Eric Hobsbawm and colleagues (1983), of "the invention of tradition," or the proposition that indigenous cultures in the postcolonial world are predominantly colonial constructs.^[3] Kahn finds that argument problematic for various reasons, among them the following: "Traditions appear to be the sole inventions of westerners . . . What is often overlooked is that these very westerners were . . . ruling those peoples by means of the traditions they were inventing; that [colonized peoples] were creating their own traditions within those same colonial societies; that indigenous elites often constructed their traditions in conscious opposition to those of their colonial masters—in short, that a variety of groups and classes, usually in a cultural and hegemonic situation, were all 'inventing tradition' in the same social arena" (1993, 29).

Although not as severely contradictory as they first appear, the arguments of Fox and Kahn do present glaringly different perspectives on the generation of group identities in colonial situations. Fox accents the intensely constraining effects of a world system of dominating cultural meanings on identity formation among colonial subjects. Even indigenous resistance to colonial domination is overwhelmingly "secondary resistance" in that it "grows up within, and is compelled by, the world system of domination" (1989, 100–101). Joel Kahn underscores the strategic and creative capabilities of colonial subjects. The dominant cultural meanings and identities authorized by colonial authorities may constrain the cultural productions of subordinates in various ways but do not determine their content. Cultural forms, including forms of resistance, are created for different reasons by a wide range of actors and interrelate on the same social scape.

These cannot be mutually exclusive analytical stances. Both cultural domination and strategic cultural resistance are evident in virtually every colonial situation. The task is to sort them out and gauge their relative significance. Both elements were clearly at work in colonial Cotabato. The creation of a transcendent Philippine Muslim (Moro) identity during the American colonial period accords closely with Fox's orientalist hegemony thesis. The term "Moro" itself (with all its colonial connotations) exemplifies the process whereby members of a colonized population define themselves according to the "indigenations"

advanced by their Western rulers. Key colonial agents (especially Najeeb Saleeby) sifted out the favorable attributes of "Moro" culture for administrative enhancement: Moros were uncivilized but not savages, fierce fighters though not religious fanatics, politically undeveloped yet not politically unsophisticated. American colonial practice (especially educational policies) encouraged the self-conscious development among certain Philippine Muslims of the Moro identity that had, until then, been only a Western ascription.

The American colonial promotion of Moro identity had a profound effect on the first generation of postcolonial Muslim leaders. They shared a rationalized and ethnicized identity as Muslim Filipinos—self-consciously Muslim citizens of the new Philippine republic. Their announced efforts to make Muslim Filipinos better citizens by making them better Muslims both acknowledged the legitimacy of the new Philippine state to rule Muslims and recapitulated the American colonial postulate that the principal cure for Muslim underdevelopment was Muslim self-improvement. The colonial notion of a single Moro identity had a dissimilar, yet equally profound, effect on the young, second-generation intellectuals who developed the movement for Muslim separatism. Those leaders manifestly rejected the underlying goal of American colonial policy toward Philippine Muslims—their integration into a unified, Christian-dominated, postcolonial state—yet embraced the idea of a transcendent Philippine Muslim identity as well as the term "Moro" itself. They made Morohood, and the presumed cultural essentials it referenced, the fundament of their political ideology. Those essentials included, most prominently, the recognition of the entitlements of a traditional aristocracy and the espousal of a glorious history of unified Muslim resistance to Western imperialists.

Strategic Maneuvers and Unauthorized Inventions

The unapproved activities of America's Moros at the St. Louis World's Fair provide a metaphorical reminder of how inaccurate it would be to regard the Muslim colonial elite as simply (or even primarily) objects of colonial manipulation. There were other cultural "inventions" by indigenous elites during the colonial period, by no means all of them authorized, or even noticed, by colonial agents. New datus constructed genealogies to link themselves to the precolonial nobility. Those cultural creations went hand in hand with actions that, if not intended to subvert colonial rule, certainly amounted to individual resistance to

colonial supervision. We have seen that collaborating datus used their colonial offices to enrich themselves and fortify their local power bases at the expense of colonial coffers.

It is the strategic nature of the endeavors of the collaborating datus of the colonial period that appears most prominent. Members of the nouveau Cotabato nobility—Datu Sinsuat comes most readily to mind—managed to use American presumptions about the reverence felt by ordinary Muslims for their "traditional" leaders to strengthen their own political positions. They also sometimes used their new colonial posts to conduct "traditional" adjudications and collect "traditional" fines. Even the relatively more impressionable recipients of American educations—the Muslim elites born under American rule—did not routinely comply with American plans. Writing in 1941, Florence Horn reports that Princess Tarhata Kiram, who was sent by Colonial Governor Frank Carpenter to the United States for schooling, disappointed American authorities on her return: "Tarhata had such a fine time in the U.S. that for a while Carpenter was afraid she would never return to her own people. However, she did come back, apparently thoroughly Americanized, looking and behaving just like the short-skirted American girl of the twenties. The experiment seemed to have worked—until Tarhata left Manila and arrived in Jolo among her own people. She quickly reverted, put on Sulu clothes, filed her teeth, became one of the wives of a middle-aged Sulu datu, and with him, in 1927, fomented a minor uprising against the American Government" (1941, 155).^[4]

The utilitarian aspect of the Muslim embrace of colonial meanings is no surprise when one remembers that Muslim elites were local rulers as well as colonial subjects. Colonial institutions were viewed by those rulers primarily as resources for power enhancement. Datus sent their slaves rather than their sons to American schools until convinced of the practical benefits of a Western education for continued local dominance.

It is unmistakable that American meanings powerfully influenced the self-awareness of numerous Philippine Muslims during (and after) the colonial era and permeated cultural resistance to Western domination, especially in the Muslim separatist movement. Just the same, it is important not to regard that process as either overpowering or entirely unidirectional. The "indigenations" of American colonialism may have constricted the political imaginations of Philippine Muslims but cannot be said to have paralyzed them.

It is left to ask about the cultural effects of American colonialism on non-elite Muslims. Joel Kahn (among others) reminds us that when juxtaposing local elite versus non-elite responses to colonial rule, it is a mistake simply to assume that precolonial meanings and identities—a "Little Tradition"—survived among subordinates while elites embraced (or were overcome by) "hegemonic modernist or orientalist discourse" (1993, 154). In Cotabato, despite significant legal transformations (in particular, the abolition of slavery and the introduction of private property in land), local relations of domination remained remarkably unaltered under American colonialism. Nevertheless, colonialism did occasion the creation or refashioning of cultural meanings and identities among non-elite Muslims.

Stories are still told today by ordinary Muslims of early encounters between Magindanaon notables and American colonizers. Imam Akmad told me about the first meeting between the Sultan of Magindanao and an American colonial official.

The Sultan and his brother the Amirul were invited to the ship of the American. The American put on an exhibition for the Sultan. He said, "I will throw a bottle in the air and shoot it through the neck with my rifle. The bottle was thrown and the American fired and hit it just where he had promised. The sultan admired the shot and said, "I will do the same." When the bottle was thrown, the Sultan did not look at it but shot in the opposite direction. His bullet turned in midair and hit the bottle in the neck. When the American saw this he exclaimed, "You have bested me; I must give you a gift." He presented the sultan with a walking stick and a pair of golden slippers.

Such magical stories of the colonial era are clearly compensatory, relating how Cotabato Muslims answered American technical supremacy with magical prowess. They also speak more particularly to two colonial developments. First, such stories acknowledge symbolically that, despite the presence of a new and seemingly omnipotent external power, local rulers had retained their political potency. That was also the message expressed in the popular story of the magical finger of Datu Piang, which could call down the wrath of the colonizers on recalcitrant followers.

The stories also signify the development of an oppositional identity among ordinary Muslims. The full occupation of Cotabato by an alien power spurred the formation among Muslim subordinates of an identity bound up with the notion of an invaded homeland—an identity that drew a sharp distinction between indigenes and outlanders. They

identified themselves as Muslims as opposed to outsiders, almost all of whom were non-Muslims. It was (and still is) an oppositional identity but one quite different from the self-conscious and objectified Muslim Filipino identity enunciated by most Philippine Muslim political leaders in the late colonial and postcolonial period. The unself-conscious cultural identity of ordinary Muslims has been illustrated by Patricia Horvatich's (1997) observation that the Sama (a Philippine Muslim population) "define almost everything they do [including gathering sea urchins] as Islamic because they are Muslim." The contrast between that sort of identity and the objectified Muslim identity of most Muslim elites is similar to the distinction made by Jonathan Friedman (1990) between two forms of Greek identity in a discussion of the phenomenon of Hellenism in the ancient world. In reference to Greek colonists in Asia he notes: "Colonists tend to develop a strong cultural identity, primarily as a means of distinction: 'I am Greek because I live like this, have these symbols, practice such-and-such a religion, etc.' But this kind of identity expresses a separation of the person from that which he identifies. The content of his social selfhood may become distanced from his immediate subjectivity: 'I am Greek because I do this, that and the other thing' does not imply the converse, i.e., 'I do this, that and the other thing because I am Greek'"(Friedman 1990, 26). Muslim colonial and postcolonial elites, with the assistance of American colonial agents, developed a self-regarding identity as Muslim Filipinos and engaged in rationalized Islamic activities (including most prominently the development of "Islamic" organizations) to demonstrate that identity to themselves and others. Ordinary Muslims, by contrast, continued to do what they had always done, with these activities now considered to be "Islamic" activities (rather than Sama or Magindanaon or Iranun activities) only because those engaged in them had begun to denominate themselves as "Muslims" to distinguish themselves from increasing numbers of non-Muslim outsiders.