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.