Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas M. McKenna is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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"Thomas McKenna has provided the first convincing explanation of a major insurgency that continued on its bloody course for nearly a quarter century. Given the enormous complexity of the revolt, the patchwork of ethnicities involved, and the opaque quality of the literature, McKenna's accomplishment is a considerable one."--Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

"Superb as both ethnography and social history . . . offers significant new insights into the changing direction of Muslim politics in the Philippines and how to understand comparable movements elsewhere. It will be a basic reference for those interested in the dynamics of ethnoreligious political movements in general."--Dale Eickelman, author of Knowledge and Power

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Muslim Rulers & Rebels

University of California Press

That ordinary men and women spill their own blood and the blood of others in armed nationalist struggles seems an intractable reality of the modern world. We attempt to make sense of such conflagrations by identifying their propellants; yet this is frequently the most difficult puzzle to solve about any instance of armed ethnonationalism: whence the willingness of the rank and file to fight and die in the cause of a would-be nation? This book investigates the meanings and motivations of one such struggle—the movement for Muslim separatism in the Philippines. It traces the development of a Muslim nationalist identity in the Philippines, the origins of the Muslim insurgency against the Republic of the Philippines, and the mobilization of popular support for the separatist movement in both its armed and unarmed phases.

The present study, it should be noted, is neither a report from the "front lines" nor a depiction of the political command centers of the Muslim nationalist movement in the Philippines. This ethnography portrays the view from a community of urban poor Muslims, many of them made refugees by the armed rebellion. There are two principal reasons for my choice of perspective. First, when I began my research in 1985, there already existed a number of journalistic reports and one excellent scholarly work (Majul 1985) on the leadership of the Muslim separatist movement. There had also been some careful ground-level reportage of the armed rebellion (see, e.g., Ahmad 1982) but nothing at all about Muslim civilians other than unanalyzed accounts ofmilitary atrocities against Muslims or unadorned statistics on Muslim refugees. It was my opinion that an account of the separatist movement from the point of view of "ordinary Muslims" was most needed, especially as separatist leaders had just begun to rely on unarmed mass politics as a new tactic in the separatist struggle.

The second reason relates to more practical and ethical concerns. In 1985 when I began my fieldwork, the Muslim regions of the Philippines were under de facto martial law rule and military occupation. Habeus corpus remained suspended until the end of the Marcos regime and membership in a Muslim separatist organization was an activity punishable by both legal and extralegal measures. The effective reach of the Philippine military did not extend to rebel camps in the hills but did to urban communities. Under such circumstances it was not possible for me to study both rebels under arms and urban Muslims without the risk of endangering my urban informants. As a result, I did not spend any time in rebel camps while conducting my urban research. Philippine and Western reporters did regularly travel to rebel camps, mostly, it seemed, for photo opportunities. That was another source of my hesitancy about making trips to rebel camps. I did not want to be viewed by rebel commanders (who were very well aware of my research in the city) as yet another Western writer come to Cotabato looking for Muslims with guns. While conducting my research among Muslim civilians I also never inquired directly about an individual's separatist affiliations and only interviewed community residents about previous or current separatist activities after the subject had been broached by an interviewee. Despite those self-imposed restrictions, I held conversations with, and obtained significant information from, a considerable number of current and former separatist insurgents, both midlevel commanders and rank-and-file fighters.1

There are approximately 3 million Muslims in the Philippines, the only majority Christian country in Southeast Asia. Though they represent only a small percentage of the Philippine population (about 5 percent), Muslims are geographically concentrated in the south of the country and are distinguished from Christian Filipinos not only by their profession of Islam but also by their evasion of three hundred years of Spanish colonial domination. Although Spanish colonizers had consolidated their hold on the northern tier of the Philippine archipelago by 1600, they never accomplished the complete subjugation of the Muslim South. Philippine Muslims are also separated from one another in this archipelagic nation by very significant linguistic and geographic distance. They are divided into three major and ten minor ethnolinguistic groups and are dispersed across the southern islands. Cotabato, a traditionally Muslim region on the large southern island of Mindanao, is the general setting for this study, and home to the second largest Muslim ethnolinguistic group, the Magindanaon. It has also been the site for many of the key events of the Muslim separatist rebellion.

The modern movement for Muslim separatism originated among a small set of Philippine Muslim students and intellectuals in the late 1960s. It gained popular support after the eruption of sectarian violence in Cotabato in 1970 and emerged as an armed secessionist front in response to the declaration of martial law by Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos in 1972. Muslim separatist rebels, numbering as many as thirty thousand armed insurgents, fought the Philippine military to a stalemate, obliging the Philippine government to negotiate a cease-fire and peace treaty in 1977. Muslim civilians overwhelmingly supported the separatist insurgents and suffered cruelly at the hands of the Philippine military.

The peace settlement, which called for the establishment of a "Muslim autonomous region" in the southern Philippines, was never genuinely implemented by the Marcos administration. As a consequence, fighting broke out once more before the end of 1977, but it did not again approach the level of intensity experienced prior to the ceasefire. The Muslim separatist movement entered a period of disarray marked by factional infighting and a weakening of popular support. By the early 1980s it had refashioned itself in Cotabato into a mass-based and self-consciously Islamic movement guided by Islamic clerics. With the fall of the Marcos regime in 1985, movement leaders (with the now-modified aim of genuine political autonomy for Philippine Muslims) fully adopted the practices of popular politics, organizing mass demonstrations to petition the government for political autonomy and forming an Islamic political party to contest provincial elections. In most of those endeavors they received substantial support from ordinary Muslims.

My investigation into the origins and meanings of the struggle for Philippine Muslim separatism as it occurred in Cotabato uncovered two intriguing paradoxes. The first was revealed by historical evidence suggesting that the Muslim nationalist identity that undergirds the separatist movement—a movement that describes itself as Islamic and anticolonial—originated only during the American colonial period(1899–1946) with the active encouragement of American colonial authorities. My interpretation of that evidence contradicts the prevailing view among scholars of the Muslim Philippines that Philippine Muslim (or Moro) identity was forged over the course of three hundred years of resistance to Spanish aggression against the Muslim polities of the South and tempered by Muslim resistance to American colonial rule.

A second paradox was presented by ethnographic...