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Islam and Muslims in the Southern Territories of the Philippine Islands During the American Colonial Period (1898 to 1946)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Howard M. Federspiel
Howard M. Federspiel
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

The United States gained authority over the Philippine Islands as a result of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Treaty of Paris (1899), which recognized American wartime territorial gains. Prior to that time the Spanish had general authority over the northern region of the Islands down to the Visayas, which they had ruled from their capital at Manila on Luzon for nearly three hundred years. The population in that Spanish zone was Christianized as a product of deliberate Spanish policy during that time frame. The area to the south, encompassing much of the island of Mindanao and all of the Sulu Archipelago, was under Spanish military control at the time of the Spanish American War (1898), having been taken over in the previous fifteen years by a protracted military campaign. This southern territory was held by the presence of Spanish military units in a series of strong forts located throughout the settled areas, but clear control over the society was quite weak and, in fact, collapsed after the American naval victory at Manila Bay. The United States did not establish its own presence in much of the southern region until 1902. It based its claim over the region on the treaty with the Spanish, and other colonial powers recognized that claim as legitimate.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , September 1998 , pp. 340 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1998

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References

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2 The concept of identity used here is discussed in general terms by both Benedict Anderson and John R. Bowen. Anderson discusses the pre-national perceptions of co-fellow religionists of different language and ethnicity regarding themselves as belonging to the same community. This reflects the state of affairs for the Muslims for the late Spanish and early American periods in the southern Philippines when an imaged community depending on print media had not yet been used by the people of the area to mold their own political perceptions. That came only later and only after the Muslims had rejected membership in an imagined community put forward by the Filipinos living to the North, who did rely on print media for their own conceptualization of national life. Bowen, speaking largely of a later era in Southeast Asian existence, nonetheless also provides some pertinent comments about the nature of identity with locality, which certainly was a feature of the peoples living in the southern Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century. Strikingly, as American forces pacified the various ethnic groups, the basic identification of people with local rulers and local culture was enhanced and served as a point of identity for the local population in opposition to the plan to include them in a larger Philippine nation, largely identified with Catholic Filipinos. See Anderson, 's Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1993), especially 12–19, 163–86Google Scholar; and Bowen, 's “The Form Culture Takes: A State of the Field Essay on the Anthropology of Southeast Asia”, Journal of Asian Studies 34, 4 (11 1995): 1047–1078, especially pp. 1061–1063CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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