The Community of Campo Muslim
As a poor Muslim community constructed on the fringes of a city now dominated by Christians, Campo Muslim stands as an architectural testament to the peripheralization of Cotabato's Muslims under the Philippine republic. Campo Muslim is a shantytown assembled in a riverside marsh. In 1985 it consisted of 520 houses with more than forty-two hundred residents. Campo Muslim faces the Pulangi River and is bordered by two older and more prosperous communities. Just upriver and closer to the center of the city is the community of Manday. Manday has a majority Christian population, paved roads, and a large Catholic church. Adjoining Campo Muslim on the west is Lugay-lugay. The residents of Lugay-lugay are primarily Muslim and middle class. Formerly, they consisted mostly of successful smugglers or Muslim Chinese-mestizo merchants.[22] Today it is also composed of supervisory-level civil servants employed by the regional government. Lugay-lugay features paved roads, a large public elementary school, and an impressive mosque.
As its name suggests, Campo Muslim is a self-consciously Muslim community with 99 percent of residents identifying themselves as Muslims. The community contains two simply constructed mosques and two Islamic schools. Although its residents are not uniformly poor (a few households would be considered relatively wealthy by Cotabato City standards), Campo Muslim is the poorest community of its size in the city. There are no paved roads and no sewage or drainage systems of any kind. More than 70 percent of households are without toilets and three-quarters lack running water. Less than half of the households in the community have electricity hookups.[23]
The average Campo Muslim dwelling covers ninety square feet of ground (roughly the size of a child's bedroom in a typical American house) and houses eight persons. Nearly 20 percent of the houses in the community are less than sixty square feet in size. Most of these are extremely rudimentary shelters with partially open sides. Because of the community's location on the outskirts of the city, natural building materials tend to be inexpensive or, as with coconut fronds, freely available. As a consequence, relatively few houses in Campo Muslim resemble the barong-barong shanties found in Manila and other large cities, dwellings constructed of cardboard, paper, plastic sheeting, and other discarded industrial materials. Most Campo Muslim dwellings are assembled from some combination of wood (either used or flawed pieces bought cheaply at a nearby lumberyard), nipa palm, and split bamboo. About half of the houses have corrugated metal roofs. The simplest dwellings are constructed of nipa and coconut fronds. In sharp contrast to the two neighboring communities, relatively few houses (15 percent) incorporate any concrete in their construction. Most of the approximately sixteen-hectare area of Campo Muslim is owned by two individuals; the largest portion by a Chinese-mestizo Muslim who lives in Campo Muslim, and a smaller section by a Christian businessman who lives in neighboring Manday. Campo Muslim residents are not squatters. They pay monthly land rents to one of the two owners.
As a community composed largely of urban migrants, Campo Muslim exhibits considerable diversity in dialect and place of origin. In 1985, when I conducted my community census, about 30 percent of household heads hailed from upriver (sa laya) municipalities. Another 58 percent had birthplaces in downriver (sa ilud) municipalities. The remaining 12 percent included those with birthplaces in localities south of Cotabato City along the coast (taga-biwangan ) and to the north
across Ilana Bay (taga-kawanan ). Magindanaons constituted the largest ethnic category in Campo Muslim, with 58.8 percent of household heads identifying themselves as Magindanaon. Those who identified themselves as Iranun comprised the next largest category, at 34 percent. Maranaos made up only 3.5 percent of community residents. Thus, three separate languages are spoken in Campo Muslim, as well as at least four distinct dialects of Magindanaon.
The urban diversity and poverty encountered every day by Campo Muslim residents cannot be satisfactorily conveyed in quantitative terms. Enumerations alone fail to evoke the texture of daily life in a crowded community of mostly impoverished migrants. The most severe poverty in Campo Muslim is hidden away from casual observers or passersby. The community is segmented by three or four dirt roads (built using soil brought from outside) bordered by houses. The interior portions of the community, those that lie behind the roadside houses, remain at least partially flooded throughout the year. Here in the interior (sa lusud ) live most of the poorest community members in simple shelters crowded closely together. The following passage from my field notes describes a typical dwelling sa lusud:
Babu Ensay's house is two-storied and covers about 70 square feet of ground. The walls are of ragged nipa [woven palm] panels, cardboard, and paper. The house stands on very low ground and the first floor often floods. The floor is constructed of coconut fronds laid across a wooden frame. A tiny hearth sits just inside the entranceway. Other than one or two cooking pots there are very few belongings and no furniture of any kind on the ground floor.
A crude ladder leads to the second floor, which has a nipa roof and a floor of split bamboo. Upstairs are a few mats and some cardboard boxes for storing clothes and other items. At the time I was there, Babu's husband, Bapa Akub, who works as a laborer at the pier, was repairing damage to the roof from the previous night's storm. Virtually all their belongings had been soaked by the rain.[24]
Sa lusud residents enter and exit by way of narrow passageways, over ever-wet stepping stones and precariously balanced planks. It is here, inside, that one finds the highest incidence of infant mortality, malnutrition, and tuberculosis. Life is only somewhat less difficult for most of the residents sa liyu (of the exterior) bordering the roads. For the great majority of community members, Campo Muslim is a demanding and often disheartening place. Closely built houses and narrow paths offer no privacy, and the lack of toilets for most makes defecation an uncomfortably public act at the nearby Pulangi River.[25] The rapid rate
2.
A view of the interior (sa lusud) of Campo Muslim after a heavy rain.
of movement into and out of the community means that neighbors are often neither relatives nor friends and sometimes are scarcely acquainted. The threat of fire hangs over the crowded community and residents suffer repeated infections because of poor living conditions. No regular police force provides protection in the community, and burglars regularly steal clothes and cooking pots from families who own little else of value.
Residents often experience their deprivation as a sense of marginality. Christian city dwellers very rarely enter Campo Muslim. Most have never been near it. In the eyes of city Christians, Campo Muslim is a far-off place lying outside the Christian pale and harboring Muslim bandits.[26] Many Campo Muslim residents have accepted this characterization and self-consciously view their community as remote and separate from the city, even though they can walk to the city plaza in less than fifteen minutes, and despite the fact that community members play an integral part in the city economy as laborers, fish and vegetable vendors, and drivers of the motorized pedicabs that serve as the main form of public transportation in the city.
Just the same, Campo Muslim is a vibrant locality, one suffused at times with an almost buoyant energy. Each morning the main road fills with traffic as residents make their way to work or school. Every evening the same road becomes a meeting place where adults gather to share news and teenagers joke and sing, while children absorbed in exuberant street games swirl among them. A variety of musics played on scores of radios and tape players continuously enlivens the surroundings, and colorful flowers in coconut shell planters brighten the poorest dwelling sa lusud. And community residents, despite their differences and deprivations, share a strong sense of being members of a Muslim community—the largest in the city. That sense of solidarity is most evident during ritual suspensions of normal social life, in particular the puasa , or annual fast of Ramadan. But it is also apparent, in less dramatic form, in many small but significant aspects of ordinary activity in the community.
As noted, most community members are acutely conscious of being poor Muslims in a city dominated by Christians. That awareness has induced a tempered resentment toward city Christians that may occasionally be agitated into intense anger by a perceived offense.
I witnessed one such infuriation in Campo Muslim on the morning of the most important Muslim holiday of the year in Cotabato, Buka, or Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of the month of
fasting. It is customary to bathe on the morning of Buka before dressing in one's best new clothes to attend congregational prayers at the local mosque. As households awoke just before dawn that day, and members prepared to bathe, they found that the taps that supplied them with city water were dry. The unannounced shutoff of city-supplied water was not a rare event, but neither was it a regular occurrence. This shutoff was especially inopportune for community residents, as they were forced to use the available stored rainwater or bathe in the dirty Pulangi River. Young men voiced their outrage throughout the early morning, declaring that the lack of city water was a work of "sabotage" by kafirs (disbelievers—referring, in this case, to the Christians who control the city). But community frustration gradually evaporated as bathing was accomplished despite the lack of city water and residents commenced a long-awaited day of festivities. Community anger at the shutoff of water was not simply aimed at city Christians as infidels, but as immigrants, who today dominate a city and region once ruled by indigenous Muslims.
The anger of Campo Muslim residents on this occasion was unmistakably an ethnic anger, one directed at any and all non-Muslim out-landers. At other times, however, community or individual ire sparked by living conditions in Campo Muslim has been aimed at other, more specific targets—Ferdinand Marcos, the city mayor, the Muslim barrio captain, even at Islamic clerics.
We turn now to consider the history of power relations both within Cotabato and between Muslim rulers and various outsiders. The three chapters that follow survey power relations in Cotabato in the precolonial and colonial periods. The external aggression and colonial subjugation experienced by the Muslim polities of the South constitute the root causes for the marginalization of Cotabato Muslims in their traditional homeland and for the Muslim separatist movement. In addition, investigating the history of political and economic relations among Muslim overlords, their subordinates, and various agents of external powers provides the essential foundation for evaluating both the mythic representations of Muslim nationalist ideologues and the responses of rank-and-file followers to them.