Islam in the Philippines
The Islam reached the southern islands of the Philippines for the first time the end of the 14th century and spread to the whole Philippines until the 16th century. Today it is mainly found in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago . About 4 million Filipinos are Muslim .
history
Islamization
Traders and Muslim missionaries from Malaysia and Indonesia brought Islam to the Philippines. The Islamization of the islands is due to the power of the then Muslim India .
1380 reached Arabian Sharif Maqdum as an Islamic missionary to Mindanao . He paved the way for Raja Baginda , who took possession of the Jolo Islands along with Malay settlers. More Malay conquerors followed, who founded Muslim sultanates in southern Mindanao and thus promoted Islamization, which, however, largely tolerated the old customs of the local people. One of them, Shariff Mohammed Kabungsuwan of Johor , a member of the Malacca royal family , invaded central Mindanao in the mid-15th century. He married a local princess there and founded the Sultanate of Maguindanao in 1475 . Here he began to spread Islam in and around his territory.
During this time, Manila was also founded as a fortress at the mouth of the Pasig River by the Malay Muslim Raja Sulayman . He comes from Brunei , where he was called Raja Muda, and was the son-in-law of the then ruling Sultan of Brunei, Abdul Kahar.
Although Islam spread to Luzon , the local animist religions continued to dominate the islands of the Philippines. Muslim immigrants introduced a political structure in their areas of influence, which provided for individual territorial states, which were ruled by Rajas or sultans . These supreme leaders were in turn placed above the datus. But neither the conception of individual political states, nor the strategy of a limited territorial distribution, as with the settled farmers of Luzon, could spread beyond the region in which they had established themselves.
During the Catholic proselytizing
When the Spanish reached the islands in the 16th century, the majority of the estimated 500,000 residents were living in settlements that corresponded to the category of a barangay. In the south of the Philippines, by the time the Spaniards arrived, Islam was already deeply rooted, so that the Muslims there, called Moros by the Spaniards , could never be completely subjugated by them. The Spanish estimated in 1625 that about 100,000 Moros lived in Mindanao (about 12 percent of the total population). The hill tribes in northern Luzon , called Igorots, also opposed Christianization.
Filipino Muslims
In the 1950s, the systematic immigration of Christian settlers to Mindanao was promoted by the Philippine central government in Manila. The Muslim inhabitants thus became a minority in their traditional areas. (See: Conflict in the Southern Philippines )
According to the 2000 census, 5 percent of the population is Muslim. Compared to other parts of the country, the proportion of Muslims among the population of Mindanao is particularly high (almost a third Muslim). Only on the Sulu Islands do Muslims make up the majority of the population with over 85 percent.
literature
- Thomas M. McKenna: Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines . University of California Press, Berkeley 1998.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Philippines: A Country Study , Ronald E. Dolan, GPO for the Library of Congress, ISBN = 0844407488, 1991-3