ABSTRACT
In February 2019, voters in the southern Philippines ratified a historic peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) ending a 46-year-old separatist conflict and granting political autonomy to Philippine Muslims, or Moros, in their traditional homeland where they make up about 4 percent of the Philippine population. It was a hard-earned victory for the politically pragmatic MILF and a notable success story for the Moros, a Muslim national minority, at a time when political conditions in most of the world have worsened for Muslim minorities, and when some of them – including the Rohingya of Burma and the Uighurs of China – find themselves in great peril.
The news of the long-awaited breakthrough agreement was overshadowed in the national and global press, however, by the bombing of an iconic cathedral in the South, which killed 23 Catholic churchgoers and injured more than a hundred. It was an act of sectarian terror clearly intended to undermine the peace agreement, and responsibility was claimed by the Philippine branch of the Islamic State (IS). Islamic extremist groups in the Philippines, aligned either with al-Qaeda or IS, are few in number with a few hundred adherents compared to the 15,000 armed fighters claimed by the MILF, but they have become more active and visible in recent years. They have engaged in terror bombings, hostage taking, and sectarian murders, all acts that have been officially shunned by the MILF during its long struggle against the Philippine government.
It is that profound tension between the nation-building pragmatism of the MILF and the destructive extremism of the IS-aligned armed groups that frames this discussion of political Islam in the contemporary Philippines. I will examine the distinctive colonial history of Philippine Muslims, their long struggle for political self-determination, and the unique challenges they face in trying to find their place in the Islamic world while living as a religious minority in the most thoroughly Westernized country in Asia.
