Category Archives: religion

by Joel | 6 February 2005 · 10:48 am

Covering All Religious Bases

My maternal grandparents were buried in the Philippines. Our rites for the deceased ancestors are half Filipino and half Chinese. My mother, sisters, and I were converted to Catholicism when we were in school. Following the Catholic feast of All Souls Day, November 2, the Chinese Filipinos would go to the cemetery and stay there all day. They would bring food and games to play, as for a picnic, and even books to read. My mother would bring fruit, burn paper money and incense at the grave, and make us bow. I remember my grandmother’s funeral. At a certain hour, the Catholic priest celebrated Mass. After that a Daoist priest came and said some prayers. That was followed by the Buddhist monks performing some ceremony. There was the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the side. Over at the end was the statue of Kuanyin, the bodhisattva of mercy. My father said that this way everything was covered.

SOURCE: “All Bases Covered,” by Deanna Li, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 119-120

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by Joel | 5 February 2005 · 11:08 am

A Navajo Uprooted, Then Rerooted

“I was born in 1952 on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona,” Boone said. “I was part of the generation of Navajo young people torn from our traditions by the federal government. We were made to feel ashamed of everything Indian–of our language and tribal identity–in a failed attempt to make Indians like white people.” Boone said he had been forcibly sent to an American boarding school at an early age, then placed in a foster family of Mormons from Malibu, California, a painful irony given that the Mormons and Navajos had fought a protracted guerrilla war in the second half of the nineteenth century. “I was baptized into the Mormon Church. I rebelled and went through four foster homes. I did not complete high school. It was often hard for me to talk as a kid. What I remember most about my youth is silences and embarrassments. Eventually, the Mormons excommunicated me. In 1980, I went back to the Navajo reservation, where I lived in a hogan. I asked my grandfather, a medicine man, Dan Chee, to teach me everything he knew before he dies.

“I built the sweat lodge here in 1992. According to strict Navajo tradition, there are no co-ed sweats, but we’ve made concessions to modern life. About fifteen of us, men and women, some Indians, some Mexican Americans, some Anglos, sweat together. We wear light clothes, of course; it’s not a commune. While the fire purifies us of negative energy, each of us talks about our past, where we come from, who our parents are, what our home lives as children were like. Many of us don’t want to remember our home lives, and at a certain point we stop talking. I’ve heard awful stories inside this lodge. And when I do, then would come the silence.

“Too many of us are hovering off the ground with no firm foundation beneath us. Take my own family, for instance. Half of my relatives died from alcoholism. I grew up with nothing, in a desert, with no running water, with family problems followed by a series of foster homes that completely alienated me from whatever traditions I had. But I’ll tell you something: compared to the white trash I encounter in the places where I go to install cable TV, I am pretty well rooted, actually.[“]

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 180-181

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by Joel | 3 February 2005 · 7:53 pm

Was Kafka Czech, German, or Jewish?

Early in his acquaintance with Milena, who was living at the time with her (Jewish) first husband Ernst Pollak in Vienna, Kafka writes: “Of course I understand Czech. I’ve meant to ask you several times already why you never write in Czech…. I wanted to read you in Czech because, after all, you do belong to that language, because only there can Milena be found in her entirety … whereas here there is only the Milena from Vienna…. So Czech, please.” He continues in the same vein the following month: “I have never lived among Germans. German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.” Kafka’s reference here to German as his “mother tongue” is quite literal. His mother Julie, née Lowy, who came from a prosperous bourgeois family in Podebrady, preferred to speak German. He himself, however, never felt wholly at home in that mother tongue of which he is one of this century’s greatest prose writers….

“Mutter” is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains together with the Christian splendor Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comic but strange.

Kafka’s father Herman, on the other hand, was happier in Czech. He was the son of a kosher butcher in the entirely Czech-speaking little village of Osek in southern Bohemia. Franz’s own Czech seems to have been fluent. The family member to whom he was closest, his youngest sister Ottla, married a Czech Catholic … Josef David, against her parents’ opposition and with her brother’s wholehearted support. His sister Valli was involved in founding the first Jewish public elementary school in Prague in 1920, whose language of instruction was Czech.

Was Kafka then a Czech or a German? Or both? Or neither? To what language did he belong, where could he be found in his entirety? Assuredly he was Jewish, but what that meant in relation to nationality was no clearer at the time. When in the first Czechoslovak state census of 1921 people were for the first time allowed to declare “Jewish” as their nationality, barely a fifth (5,900) of those in Prague who listed their religious faith as Judaism chose to do so. A quarter (7,426) described their nationality as “German,” more than half as “Czechoslovak” (16,342) [emphasis added]. Twenty years later, all three of Kafka’s sisters were to perish in the Holocaust at the hands of occupying Germans for whom it was quite clear that Jewish and German were mutually exclusive identities. Before she was transported to Terezin (which is better known by its German name of Theresienstadt), and thence to Auschwitz, Ottla Davidova had to divorce her husband Josef in order to protect their daughters Vera and Helena. Mercifully perhaps, Franz himself did not live to see his family massacred on the altar of “racial purity.” He died of tuberculosis in 1924 and is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery. He was not reclaimed for the national memory after 1945. For much of the latter part of this century his name was obliterated and his books banned in the “national state of Czechs and Slovaks” that rose from the ashes of World War II. When he was recalled at all–occasional moments of “thaw” aside–it was briefly and dismissively as “a Prague Jewish author writing in German”–a double exclusion. As for Milena Jesenska, we shall meet her again. She had a life, and a death, of her own, beyond being “mistress to Kafka.”

SOURCE: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, by Derek Sayer (Princeton U. Press, 1998), pp. 116-118

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by Joel | 15 December 2004 · 7:58 pm

Heirs of the Moravian Brethren

Jednota bratrska [Union of Brethren] was persecuted with varying degrees of vigor from the time of Jiri z Podebrad–who wanted a unified Utraquist hegemony–onward, and Vladislav II’s Saint James’s Mandate of 1502, which closed the Brethren’s churches and banned their writings, was several times renewed through the sixteenth century. They thrived nonetheless. From an originally plebeian, otherworldly sect rooted among peasants and craftsmen, the Brethren broadened their appeal both to burghers and to nobles, who since they controlled benefices could often provide support and protection. This expansion was helped by the Brethren’s abandonment at the end of the fifteenth century of prohibitions, deriving from Chelcicky’s teaching, on members holding worldly office, serving in the military, and engaging in business. Certain employments, like juggling or painting, remained forbidden, while office-holding and trade were deemed dangerous to salvation and thus deserving of particular moral scrutiny. The hardest times for the Brethren came, under Ferdinand I after 1547, when many of them were driven into exile in Poland, Prussia, and Moravia, which subsequently became a Jednota stronghold.

SOURCE: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, by Derek Sayer (Princeton U. Press, 1998), p. 44

As an atheist quasiacademic of Quaker heritage, it strikes me how robustly these otherworldly medieval prejudices–against holding worldly office, against serving in the military, and against engaging in business–survive among today’s thoroughly thisworldly progressives in academia and the media. At least juggling, painting, acting, and other money-grubbing artistic pursuits are no longer forbidden. And the benefice-dispensing heirs of once crass burghers and nobles are valued every bit as much as they were 500 years ago. But what salvation awaits today’s secular saints? Tenure? Emeritus status? A Pulitzer?

A quote from Robert D. Kaplan’s recent essay in Policy Review entitled The Media and Medievalism provides a caustic gloss on the passage above.

As with medieval churchmen, the media class of the well-worried has a tendency to confuse morality with sanctimony: Those with the loudest megaphones and no bureaucratic accountability have a tendency to embrace moral absolutes. After all, transcending politics is easier done than engaging in them, with the unsatisfactory moral compromises that are entailed.

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by Joel | 5 December 2004 · 9:52 am

Bohemia Un-Czeched and Counter-Reformed, 1619-1919

[By the 1600s] the Kingdom of Bohemia had for practical purposes already lost its independence, and its internal struggles could not be isolated from the religious and political conflicts engulfing Europe as a whole. It was no longer either in representation or in reality a matter of Czechs “against all.” Bohemia was a pawn in a Continental game. Where the Hussite Wars had been integrally and obviously national, the conflicts of the seventeenth century were only secondarily so. Their result, nonetheless, was to jeopardize the very existence of a Czech nation.

Dissension came to a head in the Rising of the Czech Estates, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War. Appropriately enough, the rebellion began with a second defenestration of Prague, 199 years after the first. On 21 May 1618 Protestant nobles convened a General Diet, and two days later a mob turfed three Catholic imperial officials (who survived the experience) from the windows of Prague Castle. In August of the next year a General Diet of all the lands of the Czech kingdom formally repudiated the Habsburg succession and offered the throne to Frederick, the protestant elector of the Palatinate, son-in-law of King James I of England and VI of Scotland. Frederick was crowned and moved into Hradcany on 4 November 1619. The “Winter King” reigned for just a year and four days. Despite some initial military successes, the rebellion was decisively crushed by the troops of Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-37), Matyas’s legitimate Habsburg successor, at the battle of Bila hora–the White Mountain [cf. Serbian Cerna Gora (= Montenegro) and Czech Bila Rus ‘White Russia’]–on the western outskirts of Prague on 8 November 1620. Frederick and his court immediately fled the city, leaving it defenseless before Ferdinand’s army. Bila hora settled the fate of the Kingdom of Bohemia for the next three centuries; it was without any doubt the most cataclysmic event in modern Czech history.

Ferdinand’s revenge was swift, brutal, and overwhelming. On Monday 21 June 1621, between five and nine in the morning, twenty-seven Czech aristocrats and burghers were publicly executed in Prague’s Old Town Square, Staromestske namesti. The executioner dealt with Jan Jesensky (Jessenius), the rector of Prague University, particularly cruelly; his tongue was cut out and nailed to the block before he was beheaded. The heads of twelve of the executed were displayed on the tower of Charles Bridge for ten years until, during the brief occupation of Prague by a Saxon Protestant army in 1631, they were ceremonially buried in the Tyn Cathedral. Literal was followed by social decapitation: the indigenous Protestant nobility, burgher estate, and intelligentsia were to all intents and purposes destroyed. The estates of Protestant lords were confiscated on a grand scale, and gifted or sold cheaply to Catholic loyalists. Over three-quarters of the land in the kingdom, Church and crown estates excepted, changed hands in the 1620s. Out of this a largely new–and often foreign–aristocracy emerged, even if some of the biggest beneficiaries, like Albrecht z Valdstejna, creator of the Valdstejn (Waldstein) Palace in Prague, were Czechs….

By the later eighteenth century the overwhelming majority of Czechs, from nobility to peasants, were once again Roman Catholics. Lusatia and most of Silesia were gone, and Bohemia and Moravia had been Habsburg possessions since time out of mind. Prague was little more than a provincial backwater. The upper classes, whether in origin Czech or foreign, had little organic connection to the Czech past, and oriented themselves mainly to Vienna. Like much of the urban population, they spoke German. Many town dwellers, particularly in the capital, were German incomers; Czech-speakers preponderated in Prague only among the lower classes. For the most part Czech had ceased to be a language of either learning or (higher) administration; the rich Czech literary heritage of the past had been mostly erased or forgotten. Where it was kept alive, ironically enough, it was Catholic priests who were mainly to be thanked. Bohemia’s sociolinguistic splits were reproduced in the Church; while the episcopal hierarchy was German-speaking, most ordinary parish priests were the sons of Czech peasants. Contrary to some later assertions, the Czech language as such was by no means close to death. But it had retreated to the fields, the stables, and the kitchens. It was a badge not of nationality but of ignorance, the rude tongue of the common folk. Language no longer unified or divided nations, as it had for the Hussites, but merely social classes. It was as a written language that Czech so catastrophically declined after Bila hora. The most characteristic cultural monuments of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bohemia are visual, rather than literary. The art of the baroque is a feast that appeals to the eye, not the intellect; its architecture is an architecture of sensuous power, designed to impress and intimidate. All those resplendent baroque palaces, churches, and burgher mansions that do so much to define Prague as “the magical metropolis of old Europe” (as Andre Breton once called it) are testaments to the destruction of the Hussite and Protestant Bohemia on whose ruins they were erected; and a goodly proportion of them were designed by foreigners rather than Czechs….

Had there been no medieval Bohemian state, there might very possibly have been no modern Czech nation either. But this modern nation is not so much rooted in that medieval experience as retrospectively reconstructed out of it. Bila hora fractured Czech history and identity; the links to the past were severed.

SOURCE: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, by Derek Sayer (Princeton U. Press, 1998), pp. 45, 50, 52

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by Joel | 3 December 2004 · 6:09 am

Infralapsarian or Supralapsarian?

Supralapsarians considered God’s ultimate goal to be his own glory in election and reprobation, while infralapsarians considered predestination subordinate to other goals….

Infralapsarians were in the majority at the Synod of Dort. The Arminians tried to depict all the Calvinists as representatives of the “repulsive” supralapsarian doctrine. Four attempts were made at Dort to condemn the supralapsarian view, but the efforts were unsuccessful. Although the Canons of Dort do not deal with the order of the divine decrees, they are infralapsarian in the sense that the elect are “chosen from the whole human race, which had fallen through their own fault from their primitive state of rectitude into sin and destruction” (I,7; cf.I,1). The reprobate “are passed by in the eternal decree” and God “decreed to leave (them) in the common misery into which they have willfully plunged themselves” and “to condemn and punish them forever…for all their sins” (I,15).

Defenders of supralapsarianism continued after Dort. The chairman of the Westminister Assembly, William Twisse, was a supralapsarian but the Westminister standards do not favor either position. Although supralapsarianism never received confessional endorsement within the Reformed churches, it has been tolerated within the confessional boundaries. In 1905 the Reformed churches of the Netherlands and the Christian Reformed Church in 1908 adopted the Conclusions of Utrecht, which stated that “our Confessional Standards admittedly follow the infralapsarian presentation in respect to the doctrine of election, but that it is evident…that this in no wise intended to exclude or condemn the supralapsarian presentation.” Recent defenders of the supralapsarian position have been Gerhardus Vos, Herman Hoeksema, and G H Kersten.

If I had attended the Synod of Dort, I suppose I’d have voted with the infralapsarian majority against the supralapsarians, but the older I get the more I incline toward the antilapsarians over the prolapsarians.

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by Joel | 1 December 2004 · 9:03 pm

Proto-Modern Czech Nationalism, 15th Century

In 1458, the Czech Diet elected as king of Bohemia the Utraquist leader Jiri z Podebrad (1420-71), who had been regent of the kingdom during Ladislav Pohrobek’s minority since 1453. The “Hussite King” Jiri was the first Czech to sit on the Bohemian throne since the Premyslids over 150 years earlier.

Pope Paul II excommunicated him as a heretic in 1466 and proclaimed a holy war against him. Mathyas Corvinus of Hungary invaded but was defeated in 1468.

The following year there appeared a “Call to Arms in Defense of the Truth,” addressed “to all faithful Czechs and Moravians, genuine lovers of God’s truth and disciples of your own Czech language…. [The pope] inflames and incites all the nations and languages of the surrounding lands against us.” It is a remarkable passage; but one quite typical of its time and place. Virtually all Hussite manifestos since 1420 had struck the same notes. It is evidently medieval in its Christian preoccupations and frame of reference; its fundamentalist certainty is alien, even repellent, to modern sensibilities. But it is no less evidently, and rather disconcertingly, modern–or what we are accustomed, at any rate, to think of as modern–in its identification of truth and virtue with a land, a people, and their language. The Hussites imagined their sacral community in unmistakably national terms and attributed sanctity less to Latin than to their native Czech.

All this happened without the aid of the printing press; the first known book printed in the Czech lands, Guido de Columna’s Trojan Chronicle, appeared in Plzen in 1468. But it is perhaps worth recording that when print capitalism did arrive in Bohemia, it too came predominantly in the Czech vernacular. Of forty-four books known to have been printed in Bohemia before 1500, thirty-nine were in Czech. Over the next hundred years some 4,400 books were printed in the Czech lands. Many were of course religious, among them the magnificent Czech Protestant Bible kralicka of 1579-94. But there were also vernacular histories, geographies, medical works, moral homilies, and (perhaps most tellingly) cookbooks and manuals of household economy. Melantrich, the earliest Czech publishing house (as distinct from individual printer), employed eleven people in 1577. In its thirty-year existence it published at least 223 books–111 of them in Czech, 75 in Latin, and only 3 in German. Pope Pius II, who as papal legate Enea Silvio de Piccolomini visited Bohemia and subsequently wrote Historia Bohemica (1458; first published in Czech in 1510 as Kronika teska), was one who appreciated the importance to Czechs of their native tongue. Writing to Ladislav Pohrobek in 1453, the pope suggests that the Czechs will not let their new boy-king go “until he masters Czech and–beer-drinking.”

SOURCE: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, by Derek Sayer (Princeton U. Press, 1998), pp. 40-42

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by Joel | 25 November 2004 · 1:43 pm

Hyderabad and Junagadh at Partition, 1947

Once again, however, Jinnah failed to explore all the options open to him. One possibility was to make compromises over another Princely State, Hyderabad. The Muslim ruler or nizam of Hyderabad faced the same dilemma as Maharaja Hari Singh. He wanted independence but was far from sure he could achieve it. Jinnah understood that it was never realistic to expect the nizam to accede to Pakistan: Hyderabad was entirely surrounded by Indian territory. But he always hoped that the nizam could pull off independence. He considered Hyderabad to be the ‘oldest Muslim dynasty in India’ and hoped that its continued existence as an independent state right in the heart of India would provide a sense of security for those Muslims who didn’t move to Pakistan. Once again, however, Jinnah was thinking in terms of legally possible options rather than political realities. In the long term the independence of Hyderabad, while constitutionally proper, was never going to happen. The new Indian leadership saw the issue clearly enough and when the nizam tried to strike a deal which would allow him to hang on to some degree of autonomy, Delhi flatly refused to consider the idea.

In retrospect most Pakistanis would agree that it would have been worth abandoning the aspiration for an independent Hyderabad if it had meant securing Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan. Furthermore, Jinnah had good reason to believe that such a deal could have been struck. In late November 1947 Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan met to discuss the situation in Kashmir. To understand their conversation it is first necessary to consider briefly what had happened in yet another Princely State, Junagadh.

The Muslim nawab of Junagadh ruled over a million people, 80 per cent of them Hindus. Junagadh was located in western India and, even though it was not strictly contiguous with Pakistan, its coastline offered the possibility of sea links to the Muslim state that was just 200 miles away. The nawab of Junagadh, guided by his pro-Pakistani chief minister Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto (the father of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), decided to ignore the feelings of his Hindu population and acceded to Pakistan. It was the mirror image of the situation in Kashmir. The Indian government did not accept the decision, blockaded Junagadh and then invaded it. Delhi then imposed a plebiscite and secured the result it desired: Junagadh became part of India.

When Liaquat Ali Khan met Nehru at the end of November he exposed the illogicality of India’s position. If Junagadh, despite its Muslim rulers’ accession to Pakistan, belonged to India because of its Hindu majority, then Kashmir surely belonged to Pakistan. When Liaquat Ali Kahn made this incontrovertible point his Indian interlocutor, Sardar Patel, could not contain himself and burst out: ‘Why do you compare Junagadh with Kashmir? Talk of Hyderabad and Kashmir and we could reach agreement.’ Patel was not alone in this view. On 29 October 1947 officials at the American embassy in Delhi had told the US State Department: ‘the obvious solution is for the government leaders in Pakistan and India to agree … [to the] accession of Kashmir to Pakistan and the accession of Hyderabad and Junagadh to India’. British officials in London concurred.

SOURCE: Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, 2nd ed., by Owen Bennett Jones (Yale Nota Bene, 2002), pp. 68-69

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by Joel | 21 November 2004 · 8:45 pm

Jan Hus: Spelling Reformer, Religious Heretic

The quiet and scholarly Prague canon Matej criticized the cult of saints and their relics, and anticipated the Hussites in his advocacy of communion in both kinds (sub utraque specie; i.e., with both bread and wine) for laity as well as priests. Tomas Stitny was a southern Bohemian squire who sought to popularize Milic’s ideas. His metier was not theology but books of practical moral education, and he was no rebel. But he was a layman writing about religious affairs, and he wrote, moreover, in Czech. Both, from the point of view of the Church, were threatening transgressions. Around the same time, in the 1370s to 1380s, the Bible was first translated into the Czech vernacular.

Jan Hus himself was born around 1370 in Husinec in southern Bohemia. He studied at Prague university, becoming a master of arts in 1396 and lecturing there from 1398, the same year he was ordained a priest. From 1402 he began to preach in Prague’s Bethlehem Chapel, a church in the Old Town [Stare mesto] founded in 1391 expressly for the delivery of sermons in Czech. Hus rapidly gained a large popular audience for his attacks on the vices and abuses of the Church. A follower of the English reformer John Wyclif, he enunciated many tenets of what was to become the Protestant Reformation a century before Luther. Wyclifism was a bone of contention in the university from the 1380s, and the theological conflict soon turned into a national one, dividing Germans and Czechs on the faculty. In 1403, under a German rector, the university banned all Wyclif’s books as heretical, a stance reiterated by Archbishop Zbynek z Hazmburka in 1408. The following year Vaclav IV’s Kutna Hora decree gave the Czechs a majority in the university’s government, and Hus himself became its rector. Many German professors and students left Prague in protest, to found new universities at Leipzig and Erfurt. In 1410 the archbishop publicly burned Wyclif’s works and pronounced an anathema on Hus, who continued preaching at Bethlehem regardless and organized a public defense of Wyclif at the university. The Papal Curia itself now excommunicated Hus as a heretic. Undeterred, he began to preach in 1412 against the sale of papal indulgences. When the Bethlehem Chapel was threatened by Prague Germans in the autumn of that year, Hus fled the city for southern Bohemia. Here he continued to preach and write, evidently to good effect, since the region subsequently became a bastion of the Hussite movement. Beside penning religious tracts, he found the time to reform Czech spelling; it was he who introduced diacritical marks into the written language.

In 1414 Hus was summoned to answer charges of heresy before the Council of Konstanz. Trusting to the safe conduct issued him by Vaclav’s brother Emperor Zikmund (Sigismund), king of Hungary, he complied. On his arrival in Konstanz he was swiftly imprisoned. When he refused to recant before the council, he was burned at the stake on 6 July 1415. His ashes were scraped from the ground and thrown into the Rhine, so that nothing of him should get back to Bohemia. It was a superfluous gesture. The Czech nobility had already condemned Hus’s arrest; now they assembled in Prague and sent a blistering protest to Konstanz. They defended Hus as “a good, just and Christian man,” who “faithfully preached God’s law of the Old and New Testaments.” As significantly, they portrayed Hus’s immolation as a national insult. There were 452 seals attached to the letter, including those of the highest officials in Bohemia and Moravia. The council is accused, repeatedly, of “bringing into disgrace and humiliation our kingdom and margravate.” The Czechs remind the prelates that “in times when almost every kingdom of the world often wavered and supported schism in the Church and papal pretenders, our most Christian Czech Kingdom and Moravian Margravate always stood solid as a rock and never ceased to adhere to the Holy Roman Church, giving her unblemished and sincere obedience ever since we first accepted the Christian faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

SOURCE: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, by Derek Sayer (Princeton U. Press, 1998), pp. 36-37

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by Joel | 28 October 2004 · 8:22 pm

The Moros and Muslim Separatism in the Philippines

Although Spain never achieved lasting sovereignty over the Moros, Mindanao and Sulu were included in the territory ceded to the United States in 1898. By 1913 Moro resistance to US rule in Mindanao and Sulu had been effectively subdued and administration of the predominantly Muslim areas was transferred from the US army to civilian authorities.

Although US officials made some attempt to accommodate Philippine Muslim customs and Islamic law, US policy was nevertheless aimed essentially at assimilating the Moros into mainstream Christian Filipino society. From 1914 integration was pursued through a ‘policy of attraction’. In Muslim areas, the government allocated substantial spending to roads, schools, hospitals and other services; education was made compulsory, and scholarships were provided for Muslims to study in Manila and in the United States. Muslims began to participate in the emerging political system. The United States administration also encouraged migration to Mindanao from the populous northern islands of Luzon and the Visayas through the provision of timber and mining concessions and land for plantations and cattle ranches. Between 1903 and 1939 the population of Mindanao, estimated at around 500,000 at the end of the Spanish period, had grown by 1.4 million. Increasingly, the new settlers encroached on ancestral Muslim and tribal lands.

In 1920 control of Mindanao and Sulu was passed from the United States administration to the Philippine legislature, and in 1935 to the newly established Commonwealth. In the latter year a group of 120 Moro datus [community leaders] from Lanao petitioned the US president, repeating earlier requests either to give the Moros political independence or to let them remain under US rule. Christian Filipinos, they claimed, discriminated against Muslims and treated them abusively. Under an administration dominated by Christian Filipinos, the ‘policy of attraction’ did indeed lapse, and there was an increasing incidence of clashes between Muslims and Christian settlers.

Following independence in 1946, there was a further heavy influx of settlers into Mindanao, doubling the population in several provinces between 1948 and 1960. By the end of the 1960s disputes over land between the Muslim population, tribal peoples and Christian settlers were becoming more frequent and more violent, and the growing number of settlers was threatening the electoral bases of several Muslim politicians.

In 1954 a special committee of the Philippine Congress was set up to report on ‘the Moro problem’, especially with regard to peace and order in Mindanao and Sulu. Partly as a result of its report a Commission on National Integration (CNI) was established in 1957. The CNI, however, was regarded with suspicion by most Philippine Muslims, who resented being referred to as a ‘national minority’ and saw the real objective of the commission to be the destruction of Philippine Muslim identity under the guise of ‘national integration’. Apart from providing scholarships to Muslim students, the CNI achieved little before its abolition in 1975. Two further reports were produced in 1963 and 1971 by a Senate Committee on National Minorities, which identified in-migration and land-grabbing as the major sources of conflict in Mindanao, but the Senate comrnittee maintained the view that the solution to the Moro problem should be sought through social and political integration and economic development.

In 1968 tensions between Muslims and Christians were heightened by an incident in which a number of Muslim recruits to the armed forces, reportedly being trained for an invasion of the Malaysian state of Sabah, were shot during an alleged mutiny. That year a Muslim (later Mindanao) Independence Movement was created to push for a separate Bangsa Moro (Moro nation). From this point, armed clashes between Muslim and Christian groups escalated, and by 1971 Muslim Mindanao and Sulu were in a state of rebellion. A government task force was sent to Mindanao to mediate between the rival groups, but had little success. Official sources acknowledged that by the end of the year clashes between Muslim and Christian groups and the military had killed over 1,500 people.

In the early 1970s the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) emerged at the forefront of the Moro movement, demanding a separate homeland, the return of ancestral land to Muslims and reform within Muslim traditional society. The leader of the MNLF, and its military arm, the Bangsa Moro Army (BMA), was Nur Misuari, one of several young Philippine Muslims who had received guerrilla warfare training in West Malaysia in the late 1960s. The international Islamic community also became involved in the conflict, supplying arms and finance to the MNLF, sending two fact-finding missions to Mindanao, accusing the Marcos government of genocide and threatening to cut off oil supplies.

The Marcos government’s response to the MNLF was multi-faceted. Its primary response was a military one. The decision to impose martial law in the Philippines in 1972 was partly rationalized in terms of the conflict in Minadano, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) launched a major offensive against the MNLF/BMA, which resulted in heavy casualties on both sides and a massive displacement of people. The AFP was assisted in this by local Civil Home Defense Force (CHDF) units, which acquired a formidable record for human rights abuses and general indiscipline, and extremist Christian right-wing vigilante groups. Marcos also announced a package of social and economic measures intended to placate separatist demands, including a commitment to the codification of Shari’a law and the creation of a Southern Philippines Development Authority to promote and coordinate economic development in the region. A third strategy , encouraged by reports of surrenders of BMA soldiers in the mid-1970s, was the commencement of a series of peace negotiations with the MNLF, through the mediation of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the Islamic Council of Foreign Ministers (ICFM), and Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi. These initiatives culminated in the signing of an agreement in Tripoli in December 1976, which provided for a ceasefire and set out tentative provisions for a broader political settlement. The latter included Muslim-dominated political autonomy in thirteen provinces of Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan, which the MNLF considered to be the minimum claim for a Moro homeland. Further talks were scheduled for early 1977 to discuss the details of implementation, but negotiations collapsed and the ceasefire was abandoned.

The main sticking point in negotiations in 1976-7 concerned the geographical boundaries of Moro autonomy. By 1980, as a result of heavy in-migration, the proportion of Muslims in Mindanao’s population (which had been estimated at 76 per cent in 1903) had fallen to 23 per cent. Of the (then) twenty-three provinces in Mindanao and Sulu, only five (and in Mindanao only two) still had a Muslim majority. The MNLF, which had already compromised on its original claim to the whole of Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan, nevertheless insisted that the area of Muslim autonomy should include the thirteen provinces of historical Muslim dominance. In 1977 Marcos proposed to put the issue to a plebiscite in these provinces. Realizing that this would produce a negative vote, Misuari accused the government of violating the Tripoli Agreement. Marcos nevertheless proceeded to appoint a provisional government and to organize a referendum on the form of the autonomy. The MNLF rejected an invitation to participate in the provisional government and boycotted the referendum, which predictably rejected the MNLF’s claim and endorsed a more limited proposal put forward by President Marcos. Marcos’s proposal involved the creation of two small autonomous regions in the Muslim-dominated areas of Western Mindanao and Sulu, and Central Mindanao. Elections for the two regional assemblies in 1979 were boycotted by most Muslim groups, and, with limited powers, inadequate funding and low levels of perceived legitimacy, the two regional autonomous governments were largely ineffective and did nothing to overcome the grievances of Philippine Muslims.

At about the same time, the Moro movement began to lose momentum. A number of Moro fighters surrendered to the Philippine government under amnesty arrangements, while others, as part of ‘lost commands’, turned to brigandage. More significantly, the MNLF split into three factions, along personal, ethnic and ideological faultlines. The main MNLF group, under the leadership of Misuari (a Tausug) and with the support of the OIC, was geographically centred in Sulu and ideologically the most progressive of the three….

The Moro movement received a boost, however, following the overthrow of President Marcos in 1986. Marcos’s opponents had earlier held talks with Misuari, promising to address Muslim demands if elected. In September 1986 Misuari returned to the Philippines and met with new President Aquino in Sulu. Subsequently, talks were held in Jeddah under the auspices of the OIC, at which Misuari and the Philippine government agreed to continue negotiations on autonomy through a joint commission….

Negotiations between the MNLF and the Aquino government broke down in mid-1987. By this time, however, a new Constitution had been enacted, which made specific provision for the creation of an Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), and a Cordillara Autonomous Region in the north…. Despite President Aquino’s good intentions, the new autonomy arrangements thus did little to satisfy the demands of Philippine Muslims.

In 1992 Aquino was succeeded as Philippines’ president by General Fidel Ramos, who had been closely involved with the Mindanao conflict as head of the Philippine Constabulary under Marcos. In his first year of office he visited Libya and, with backing from Qaddafi and others, revived negotiations with the MNLF. In 1996 these efforts were rewarded with the signing of a Peace Agreement between the Philippine Government and the MNLF….

In some quarters the 1996 Peace Agreement was hailed as an historic breakthrough, ending decades–if not centuries–of Muslim-Christian conflict. Among Christian communities within the SZOPAD [Special Zone of Peace and Development], however, the agreement aroused deeply entrenched fears and distrust. Some Christian leaders denounced the agreement and opposed it in Congress. The legality of President Ramos’s action in securing the agreement was even challenged in the Supreme Court. As a result of this opposition, the executive order intended to give effect to the Peace Agreement was a significantly watered down version of the document signed with Misuari….

Another limitation of the 1996 Peace Agreement was that it was specifically an agreement with the MNLF. The [more religiously oriented Moro Islamic Liberation Front] MILF, which during the early 1990s appears to have grown significantly in strength and militancy and which was said to be undergoing a transition from a guerrilla force to a ‘semi-conventional army’, was not party to the negotiations leading to the 1996 agreement and continued the armed struggle for a separate Bangsa Moro. Intermittent attempts were made during the Ramos presidency to establish a dialogue with the MILF, and formal peace talks were resumed under Ramos’s successor, Joseph Estrada. Following MILF attacks on non-Muslim communities in early 2000, however, Estrada abandoned the talks and declared ‘all-out war’ against the MILF.

In August 2001, despite objections from Misuari and the MNLF, the long-awaited referendum on the proposed expansion of the ARMM was held. Not surprisingly, of the (now) fifteen provinces and nine cities covered by the SZOPAD, only five provinces and one city voted in favour. Shortly after this, elections for the ARMM took place and in the election for governor, Misuari was displaced by a rival candidate supported by the newly incumbent president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Misuari subsequently made good his threat to return to the hills, launching an armed attack on government troops before fleeing to Malaysia, where he was arrested and repatriated.

Meanwhile, in the early 1990s another renegade Muslim group emerged in the western Mindanao-Sulu area. The Abu Sayyaf was founded by a former MNLF supporter, Abdurajak Janjalani, who had received religious training in Libya before returning to the Philippines where he became a charismatic preacher and advocate of a separate Islamic state in the south. He recruited a small but committed following, some of whom had fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan and appear to have had links with radical Muslim groups overseas, including al-Qaida. A confrontation with police in 1998 killed Janjalani but his group survived, primarily carrying on kidnapping and extortion. In 2000 Abu Sayyaf attracted international publicity with a series of kidnappings, which included several Europeans and Americans. Its ransom demands included recognition of an independent Islamic state, the release of international terrorists held overseas, the banning of foreign fishing vessels from the Sulu Sea and protection for Filipinos in Sabah, as well as payments of up to $US1 million per hostage. Some hostages were executed. Others were released following intervention by President Qaddafi.

Initially other Muslim groups, including the MNLF and the MILF, condemned Abu Sayyaf and dissociated themselves from it. Following the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, however, the situation became more complex. The United States was already providing specialist military advisers to assist with training in counter-terrorism after Abu Sayyaf groups had taken American hostages. As US air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan began, there was a protest rally in the Islamic City of Marawi, during which crowds burned an American flag and shouted support for Osama bin Laden; hundreds of Philippine Muslims reportedly volunteered to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Increasingly, Philippine Muslims have accused the Macapagal-Arroyo government of joining the United States in a war against Islam.

These developments, along with the arrest of Misuari and the continuing slow progress in talks with the MILF, are a reminder that many Philippine Muslims have little identification with the government in Manila, and retain a strong sense of being part of the international community of Islam.