Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines' Muslim South

2—Disruptions

2 Disruptions while colonial officials in Mindanao often succeeded in constructing a reified, homogeneous, and philosophically manageable Moro, these officials also encountered severe challenges to their imperial taxonomies and disruptive anomalies in an otherwise fluid historicist discourse. Though circumscribed within a narrative of primitivism, savagery, and uncontaminated potential, Filipino Muslims proved much more heterogeneous and complex than american imperialists would have liked. Moros exhibited certain cultural and historical characteristics that could not be ignored or overshadowed by colonial narratives and dramatic representations of primordial, untamed ignorance. Filipino Muslims often pressed the definitional parameters of “civilization” by challenging notions of an impoverished Moro past and uncivilized practices when compared to those of the United states. islamic civilization and Moro slavery in particular caused great difficulties for american imperialists who sought simple epistemological contextualizations of discernable historical and contemporary Moro characteristics. The specter of misrepresentation also plagued colonial officials as Moros both embraced and resisted imperial taxonomies, thus proving troublesome as objectified colonial subjects. To overcome these difficulties american imperialists had to locate and synthesize such disruptions within a comparative context of knowable histories . This meant critically evaluating their own american and broader anglosaxon pasts to pinpoint similar episodes of development in the master narrative of evolutionary history. The danger, however, of relating anachronistic points of connection along parallel (if unsynchronized) historical trajectories, was the ever-present possibility of revealing anomalies and disjunctures in their own narrative of progress. These inconsistencies threatened not only to undermine the legitimating historicism of the imperial project but also to 55 Disruptions destabilize the americans’ own sense of teleological history that supported their current notions of anti-historical motionlessness and panoptic hegemony . in the end, however, disruptive anomalies and subaltern challenges were effectively subsumed and managed by a malleable and adaptive historicist discourse that was able to maintain the integrity of the United states’ colonial project in Mindanao and sulu. Challenging Islamic Authenticity Primitive though the Moros may have appeared, american colonial officials could not ignore the foundational influence of islam in virtually every aspect of Moro life. Much of the scholarship over the past 110 years concerning Filipino Muslims has tended to view islamicization in the islands as a relatively organic phenomenon driven by uncoerced conversion. its adoption, therefore, is considered volitional and was presumably accomplished according to the desires and dictates of indigenous societies. This interpretation has prompted scholars to allow Filipino Muslims possession of their own history. That is, the perceived historical trajectories of “natural” indigenous development are thought to have been fundamentally undisturbed by the advent of islam, thus allowing Moros to maintain their independent spirit. This view contrasts sharply with the perceived religious origins of christian Filipinos, which are typically regarded as coerced and ultimately, for good or evil, disruptive to normative or authentic historical development.1 Though Filipino Muslims have assumed the mantle of this paradigm over the past 50 years, its origins are found in the americans’ struggle to locate Moros within simultaneous narratives of primitivism and islamic civilization. Though colonial officials ultimately came down on the side of primitivism to preserve their imperial historicism, the notion of a self-consciously historical Muslimness among Moros has persisted. in 1905 najeeb saleeby,2 a syrian-born american physician and superintendent of schools in Mindanao and sulu, wrote a scholarly and insightful study of the “History, law, and religion” of the Moros as part of the government ’s serial “ethnological survey Publications.” “with islam came knowledge , art and civilization,” he announced in the manuscript’s introduction. Unlike the parochial spanish imperialists, saleeby argued, “the Mohammedan conqueror of Mindanao was neither an admiral of a fleet nor a leader of an army of regular troops. He had no nation back of him . . . nor a royal treasury M a k i n g M o r o s 56 to support his enterprise. His expedition was not prompted by mere chivalry or the gallant adventures of discovery. He was not looking for a new route to rich lands nor searching for spices and gold dust.” rather, early Muslim settlers came to the islands seeking peace and “a new land to live in.” out of these early efforts “a new dynasty which stood for islam, for progress, and for civilization arose on the ruins of barbarism and heathenism.”3 saleeby’s account of islamicization in Mindanao and sulu bespoke a familiar narrative to americans. like the english pilgrims who also merely sought...