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Reviving the Reconquista in Southeast Asia: Moros and the Making of the Philippines, 1565–1662
Abstract
In medieval times, Christians on the Iberian peninsula fought wars to expel Muslim rulers from Europe. This protracted conflict, known as the Reconquista, was concluded in 1492 when the last of the Muslim rulers surrendered. Less than a hundred years later, in 1565, the Spanish Empire’s conquering impulse had carried it across two oceans into Southeast Asia, where Christian Spaniards, once again, confronted and fought against Islam. Though there are distinct differences between these two Christian-Muslim conflicts, there are also important similarities. As the Reconquista had done in Spain, Christian-Muslim conflicts in the Philippines—known as the Moro Wars—shaped local perceptions of Islam, established political and cultural boundaries, and attached personal loyalties to one or the other of these two global religions. This paper analyzes this process by focusing on two Christian conquests of Moros. The first of these was the conquest of Manila. When the Spanish arrived, Manila was a developing Moro settlement with ties to Islamic rulers on Borneo, Mindanao, and Jolo. Over several decades the Spanish gradually coopted Moro authority in Manila, and then finally expelled it through the prosecution of several conspirators involved in the Tondo conspiracy. This conquest established the political and cultural center of the colony and its emerging multiethnic colonial community. The second conquest happened on Min danao. Unlike the conquest of Manila, the conquest of Mindanao was never completed. Though the Spanish colony won several battles, Moro authority continued to thrive in the region. By focusing on the triumphal entry of a Spanish army following one of these victories, this paper shows how the constant Christian-Muslim conflict reaffirmed and gave personal meaning to the boundaries separating the Moros and the Christians in the archipelago. Together these two different conquests demonstrate how the revival of the Reconquista contributed to the creation of the Philippine colony.
... Symbolic depictions of Christian God's triumph over the opponent Moros included burning venomous snakes and restoring stolen Christian treasures, in addition to destroying religious literature and artifacts. (Hawkley, 2014)Furthermore, a theatrical performance is known as "moro-moro" or "komedya" reenacts the Christian-Muslim battle and portrays Muslims as failures in the end. ...
... In terms of politics, the Spanish formed agreements with local political entities, promising to protect the warring tribe in exchange for their conversion to Christianity. (Hawkley, 2014, p. 306) The Spanish psychologically crafted an anti-non-Christian narrative, most notably against Muslims. This colonial mentality is still visible in certain Filipinos today. ...
The 2014 Bangsamoro Peace Agreement and the creation of BARMM challenge Mindanao's decades-long conflict. Despite the ratification, more work remains to be done to secure long-term peace in the region. Using discourse analysis and comparative analysis as research methods, this paper investigates the normalization of violence in Mindanao. This study asks, 'How does history play a role in the normalization of violence in today's Philippines? Why do people form groups and commit acts of violence?' This paper argues that one of the main reasons why violence is normalized in Mindanao is rooted in the colonial influences in the region. Because of the colonial threat, narratives that justify violence emerged to protect social identities. These are the narratives used by the colonial subjects to extricate themselves from colonialism. These same narratives, however, are being used to justify the violence of radical and extremist groups, through the lens of political cooptation, psychological othering, and theological justification, this study highlights the similarities of colonial violence and Islamist violence as expressed by radical groups in the contemporary Philippines. Thus, without addressing the narratives that justify extremist violence (rooted in the colonial experience), the author hypothesizes that conflict will remain in the region despite ratifying numerous peace agreements.
... The increasing interest in theorisation from 2012 was visible also in the number of papers published per year in peer-reviewed indexed journals (Fig. 1). The majority of scholar papers and handbook on reenactments still pertain about issues regarding the practicalities of the performance like the balance authenticitytourists' entertainment (Erickson, 2015; D'arcens, 2011; Gapps , 2009, Decker, 2009; Dudley, 2009), the impact of different practices and voices interpretation (van Dijk et al., 2012,Crang, 1996), the importance of reenactment groups' ideology and discourse in performance(Hawkley, 2014; Decker, 2009;Norman, 2009;Dudley, 2009), mutations in site interpretation(Hurt, 2010), the roles and functions of material reproductions or substitutes of historic artifacts in reenactment performances(Auslander, 2013) etc. ...
The Reenactment as Tourism Exploitation through Heritage Interpretation of Heritage Sites in Transylvania. Beside the need of reviewing up to date the theoretical progress in the field, we aimed at reviewing the challenges the reenactment performances in Romania have to face as presented in the literature. Another aim of this paper was to furnish an inventory of all tourism objectives in Transylvania where heritage interpretation in the form of reenactment is performed as a form of tourism exploitation of numerous sites. Another objective of this paper was to investigate the main issues of audience's expectations regarding the performance of reenactment at Romanian historical tourism sites and issues practitioners have to challenge in their relatively recent activity. No theoretical meta-analysis or literature review paper on theoretical progress was found. The theoretical preoccupations for unifying the terminology and conceptualization seems to date since the Gotteborg (2012) Conference Re/theorisation of Heritage Studies, but from 2012 the interest in theorization was increasing, being visible in the number of papers published per year in peer-reviewed indexed journals. The results on the Romanian context were consistent with previous works stating that audience's expectations, in their nature and information content, were very diverse. Half of the subjects investigated through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires assessing the expected level of satisfaction with the reenactment performance and the actual level of satisfaction after the performance showed positive differences. The (historical) reenactment represents a viable modality of heritage interpretation in Romania and an efficient mean of tourism exploitation with positive results especially for the citadels in Transylvania.
... To the extent that local raiders or warriors, particularly from the southern Philippines or adjacent parts of the Indonesian archipelago, were labelled pirates, they were generally identified by the different islands or parts of the archipelago that they inhabited, such as Borneo, Sulu, Mindanao, or Ternate. They were also frequently described collectively as "Moros" (e.g., Combés 1667; Blair 1906), a term taken by the Spanish from the Mediterranean, where it had been used in the context of the reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula to denote the Muslim adversaries of the Christian Iberian kingdoms (Hawkley 2014). In the course of the so-called Moro Wars in the Philippines, a series of wars and hostilities during the Spanish colonial period in the archipelago from the end of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, maritime raiding was frequently used by both Spanish and Moros, both as a tactic of war and for the sake of plunder and the capture of slaves. ...
This article traces the long historical background of the nineteenth-century European notion of the Malay as a human “race” with an inherent addiction to piracy. For most of the early modern period, European observers of the Malay Archipelago associated the Malays with the people and diaspora of the Sultanate of Melaka, who were seen as commercially and culturally accomplished. This image changed in the course of the eighteenth century. First, the European understanding of the Malay was expanded to encompass most of the indigenous population of maritime Southeast Asia. Second, more negative assessments gained influence after the mid-eighteenth century, and the Malays were increasingly associated with piracy, treachery, and rapaciousness. In part, the change was due to the rise in maritime raiding on the part of certain indigenous seafaring peoples of Southeast Asia combined with increasing European commercial interests in Southeast Asia, but it was also part of a generally more negative view in Europe of non-settled and non-agricultural populations. This development preceded the notion of the Malays as one of humanity’s principle races, which emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. The idea that Malays were natural pirates also paved the way for several brutal colonial anti-piracy campaigns in the Malay Archipelago during the nineteenth century.
... An early work on this topic isFelix 1996. Also understudied are the Japanese residents of Manila and local indigenous groups as participants in the galleon trade, although seeBorao 2005, Tremml-Werner 2015, and Hawkley 2014. Objects that survive overwhelmingly date from the eighteenth century, so our view of what was desired, created, purchased and used is uneven. ...
This article describes the spiritual experience of being a Muslim and minority in Manila, the capital of Asia’s most populous Catholic country, the Philippines. This research used an ethnography approach to understand how Muslims in Manila negotiate their identity as Muslims as well as Filipinos who live in Barangay as a minority and face bad sentiment, especially after the Battle of Marawi and the Maguindanao Massacre. This research found that even when facing negative stigma on most of the national media coverage after the Battle of Marawi and the Maguindanao Massacre, Muslims in Manila feel that they are free to express their identity as Muslims, as Anak Bansa, and as Filipinos with their limitations.[Artikel ini menggambarkan pengalaman spiritual Muslim minoritas di Manila, Filipina, negara dengan umat Katolik terbesar di Asia. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan etnografi untuk melihat bagaimana Muslim di Manila menegosiasikan identitasnya sebagai orang Islam sekaligus sebagai orang Filipina yang hidup di Barangay sebagai minoritas, terutama dalam menghadapi sentimen buruk pasca Perang Marawi dan Pembantaian Maguindanao. Penelitian ini menemukan bahwa meskipun menghadapi stigma buruk dalam hampir semua media nasional pasca Perang Marawi dan Pembantaian Maguindanao, orang Islam di Manila tetap merasa bebas mengekspresikan identitas mereka dengan segala keterbatasannya sebagai Muslim sekaligus sebagai Anak Bangsa dan orang Filipina.]
While there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.
The Philippines and Iran are two important players in the geopolitical transition of Asian and the Pacific region. The geopolitical values that these two countries held over many decades exposes them to rivalries and competition among regional and international powers. In some part of history, they became a closed ally to the United States, while regime change in Iran in the late 1970s had created some sort of difficulty for both countries to improve bilateral relations amidst normalization. This paper therefore seeks to investigate existing domestic and external factors that can help explain the underdeveloped state of their bilateral relations. In doing so, the paper advances the idea that although the Philippines and Iran are sovereign and independent countries, the course and direction of their relation since the post-1979 event was heavily affected by the US policy vis-à-vis the Philippines and Iran.
The discriminatory treatment of the Philippine Muslim minority dates back hundreds of years due to Spanish colonial politics that were highly allergic to Islam. Furthermore, minority nationality and ethnicity issues relate to national integration, class struggle, and economic dispossession. This study aims to explain the historical forces that shaped the identity of the Filipino Muslim community. The research method used is the historical research method, where the collection of research sources is done by literature study. This research analysis uses a political history approach closely related to power as a governmental tool in policymaking. The results show that the identity issues experienced by the Muslim minority in the Philippines in positioning themselves in the process of national integration are caused by several factors, such as history, religion, and the concept of the nation-state. However, in contemporary times, political and economic issues, in addition to religious issues, have emerged as new forces in the matter of Muslim identity in the Philippines.
Cambridge Core - South-East Asian History - Pirates of Empire - by Stefan Eklöf Amirell
Over the past half-century historians have endeavoured to moderate the exaggerated importance long attached to 1498 and the arrival in the Indian Ocean of a small band of Portuguese. The carriage of goods between the various key centres of production in maritime Asia grew in sophistication as southern Chinese, Javanese, Tamils and Arabs became more active in it. The origins of the Aceh sultanate at the mouth of the Aceh river in northwestern Sumatra appear no older than the late fifteenth century, although Muslims were well placed since the thirteenth century in the older port of Lamri. Islamic influence in Siam also peaked in the mid-seventeenth century, both in Sunni and Shia forms. In South-East Asia, the carriers of the Islamic literary and philosophical tradition were primarily Sufi masters, who accepted to a lineage of esoteric and literary learning to their particular teacher and beyond that to a chain of other masters of the tradition.
This chapter examines the extension of Islam to South-East Asia up until the fifteenth century in several major stages. The activities of those Muslim maritime traders who were ‘surnamed’ Pu in the Chinese records were not greatly affected by the Cola attacks of the early fifth/eleventh century suggests that a large number were based in the ports of Champa rather than Sriwijaya. The expansion of Islam within the peninsula is likely to have been stimulated by the existence of the sultanate at Melaka, and the spread of Malay people throughout this region. The history of Islam in South-East Asia obviously cannot be understood without examining the component phenomena on a global scale. Throughout the processes of Islamic expansion a multitude of changes took place in the physical as well as mental topographies of the region. The Malay languages of the archipelago began to absorb the terminology of Islamic theology and law.