BEYOND HUMABON’S MOOR:

AN EXPLORATION OF ISLAMIC PRESENCE IN THE VISAYAS

DAVID GOWEY

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

INTRODUCTION

I have previously treated the question of why the Visayan Islands generally did not figure

into what could be considered the foundational literature of Indianization and Islamization in

Southeast Asia.1 To summarize my findings, I point to two main factors: scarcity of written

records from the prehispanic Philippines in general and predominant focus on societies with

megalithic architecture such as Majapahit or Champa. Part of the issue is the imposition of the

Visayas as a geographic and ethno-linguistic framing device that ultimately relies on exonymic

constructions. While such deployment is not entirely useless, as it sets certain boundaries for a

study that could easily become lost among regional comparative cases, it is also important to

recognize that Visayan identity is contingent on sets of historical relationships.

For example, the tripartite division of the modern Philippine state into “Luzon, Visayas,

Mindanao” requires nuancing for a number of reasons. Movement of people due to migration,

slave-raiding, and trade undermines attempts to impose what Pels (2008:283) calls “spatial

discreteness” onto a landscape where charismatic leaders tended to exert more effort in the

accumulation of people than of land. Furthermore, construction of an essentialist ideal Visayan

type necessarily conjures up enough similarities with neighboring groups—the practice of

pangayaw raiding, shifting cultivation, datu leadership, spirit possession/imitation, etc.—that the

discussion would become one of ideal Austronesian types as well. For the sake of argument, I

will limit my focus on the Visayan Islands to the exclusion of Visayan groups on Mindanao like

the Lumad who have already been discussed separately and in detail.2

Expanding on my past research, this paper will also attempt to situate Spanish records

from the first fifty years of contact with the Philippine Islands into a larger framework of cultural

1 Gowey 2017.

2 Paredes 2013:26.
 Gowey 2

memory that includes Arabic loanwords, folkloric representations of Islam, and architectural

memorialization. Thus the scope of my argument moves beyond purely historical examples of

Muslim individuals in the Visayas to also explore the construction of Islam as othered category

in the Visayan social imagination. To begin, the discussion of the spread of Islam in Southeast

Asia and its interactions with Iberian Christianity should assess the repercussions of one

incipient event: the Portuguese capture of Melaka in 1511.

“CATA RAYA CHITA”

The extant record of events surrounding meetings between the Rajah Humabon and

Magellan includes many crucial clues as to the extent of Islamic presence in the early modern

Visayas, though some unpacking is required. First, the Moor from Ciama is the only Muslim

named and one of a few mentioned before the survivors of Mactan arrived in Borneo.3 Second,

his position as a merchant carried with it particular anxieties about the presence of Iberians in

Cebu. Pigafetta offers this exchange involving Enrique of Malacca and Magellan on the one side

and Humabon and Cristoforo on the other.

The interpreter told [Humabon] that the captain, as captain of so great a king as his,

would not pay tribute to any lord in the world, and that if he desired peace he should have

peace, and if he desired war he should have. Then the aforesaid merchant replied to the

king in his own language, Cata raya chita,4 which is to say, Have good care, O king, what

you do, for these men are those of who have conquered Calicut, Malacca, and all

India the Greater. If you give them good reception and treat them well, it will be well for

you, but if you treat them ill, so much the worse it will be for you, as they have done at

3 Later baptized as Cristoforo (Skelton 1977:84).

4 Alderley (1974:85) gives “cata raja chita” (Malay kata raja kita, “says our king”) in a footnote.
 Gowey 3

Calicut and at Malacca. The interpreter, who understood all this discourse, told them that

his master’s king was even more powerful in ships and by land than the King of Portugal,

and he declared that he was the King of Spain and Emperor of all Christendom.5

Though brief, this episode offers some key insights into local conceptions of power and

interconnectedness in the maritime Southeast Asian world.

First, the conversation as recorded here evidently took place in Malay, which was

mutually intelligible between the Sumatran translator, Cebuano raja, and Siamese or Cham

merchant.6 Second, the first two untranslated words are derived from Sanskrit, being literary and

hierarchical terms respectively, while the third is the Malay inclusive plural pronoun. Third, the

connections between the assembled group and Melaka were quite multivalent. Not only were

Magellan and Enrique present during the city’s capture by the Portuguese, but Cristoforo would

have had a much different relation to the event as a Muslim and as a merchant than would a local

ruler on the fringes of the Nanyang trade zone like Humabon. According to Reid (1993:272), the

city’s capture “disrupted Southeast Asian trade only temporarily, dispersing the commerce and

the merchants of Melaka to half a dozen different ports” in the region. Still, the consequences of

even a temporary disruption would likely have still been tangible with only ten years’ separation

from the event and so many involved parties assembled in one place.

If any colonial power could have been assumed to emphasize or exaggerate the presence

of Islam in the Visayas, it would have been the Spanish. Magellan’s expedition departed Spain

only a generation after the capture of Granada, and nearly three centuries of war would begin

between the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg possessions a few years after the survivors returned

5 Skelton 1977:76.

6 Skelton 1977:75 provides both Siam and Champa in a footnote.

 Gowey 4

home. These anxieties manifested themselves in part through the plan stated by Pigafetta during

his time in Cebu to mark converted Muslim villages with a stone column.7 However, he made no

record of any such columns being constructed and of those Muslims he met along the way to

Borneo, one (Cristoforo of Ciama) was baptized and the others were pilots either brought

onboard by force to take them to Borneo and later to the Moluccas.8

While Magellan’s men certainly carried out violence in the Philippines, there is no

indication in records examined here that any was perpetrated specifically against Muslims as a

result of their religion. Perhaps the sailors felt that such acts of violence were unnecessary or

unwise in dealing with the merchant willing to convert or the powerful Sultan of Brunei,

reserving force for lone natives and hypothetical villages. Regardless, the picture that emerges

from accounts of the 1521 expedition is one of more willingness to perform violence against

Muslims than there were opportunities taken to do so. Such evidence should also be considered

in conjunction with—and I believe specifically refutes—claims that Lapu-lapu of Mactan was a

Muslim khalifa.9

Four more Spanish expeditions would return to the Philippines between 1521 and the

capture of Manila in 1571. A summary of records of Loaísa’s 1525 voyage and Saavedra writing

in 1527-1528 both mention Cebu, the latter stating that the natives still practice pag-anito and

occasional human sacrifice.10 Similarly, Villalobos traveled extensively through the Eastern

7 Skelton 1977:85.

8 A second-hand account received from Martin de Ayamonte in Schreurs (2000:92-93) tells of at least three
pilots who could have been Muslims: two from Palawan, described then as a Bornean possession, and another from
Sangihe near Mindanao.

9 Gowey 2017.

10 Blair and Robertson 1903a:25-43.

 Gowey 5

Visayas, islands near Mindanao, and eventually to Ambon between 1541-1546 without recorded

incidents of violence with labelled Muslims, though many with natives of various islands and

with the Portuguese.11 It is not until Artieda’s “Relation of the Western Islands Called Filipinas”

that interactions with Muslims are recorded in 1573, but likely occurred between 1569-1571.

After a brief stay on Cebu, “the [company’s] camp was moved to the island of [Panay]”,

described as having the “same people, and trade, and customs as the islands named above”.12 The

first mention of a Moor in this account comes on Panay—possibly from Iloilo or Dumangas, two

of the earliest Spanish settlements on the island and known precolonial entrepôts—where a

“steward or treasurer” was sent by one of the local datus to Luzon to trade with other Muslim

merchants who represented the island’s “most influential inhabitants”.

To Artieda’s knowledge, there were three Muslim settlements on Luzon at that time.13

Though he does not specify where these were located, Legazpi encountered three rulers in the

Manila Bay region descended from Bornean royalty: Raja Ache el Viejo,14 his nephew and rajah

muda [heir, lit. young raja] Solimán,15 and probable close relative Lakandula.16 The fact that

there are only five Spanish expeditions recorded in the fifty years between Magellan’s arrival in

Cebu and Legazpi’s capture of Manila should not be taken as a conclusive survey of all Muslim

11 ibid. 47-73.

12 Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Limasawa, Negros, and Mactan, all in the Central or Eastern Visayas.

13 Blair and Robertson 1903b:192-196.

14 Or Rajah Matandá.

15 How surprised the Spaniards must have been to travel as far away as one could from the forces of
Suleiman the Magnificent in Europe only to find another contemporary Muslim ruler named Solimán in a key port
near the Spice Islands.

16 Santiago 1990:42.
 Gowey 6

influence on the Visayan Islands. Though cumulatively they present data from many islands in

the region, these focus either on islands in the Eastern Visayas that are noted to be not densely

populated or on major ports, e.g. Manila, Cebu, and Iloilo. As expected, these port cities that are

rich in imported prestige goods also include Muslim merchants, suggesting that the general

Island Southeast Asian pattern of religious pluralism and distribution via existing trade networks

was also followed in the Philippines.17 The next question that arises from this hypothesis relies in

part on establishing dates for when these contacts could have taken place.

Dates for the entry of Islam into Brunei vary. Reid (1993:134) suggests 1500 CE and

makes Manila contemporaneous, which allows twenty-one years before Raja Ache was

intercepted by the survivors of Magellan’s crew en route to Brunei as a young man, and another

seventy-one before the Spanish returned to his domain as conquerors. Within this time, “Manila

was in the process of becoming a Muslim port-state and the biggest trade centre in the

Philippines,” having moved gradually away from China and toward Brunei over the past century

(ibid. 206). In light of the debate presented by Maxwell (1996:90-91), the early sixteenth century

seems to be more the latest possible time frame for Islamic entry—with Western and Bruneian

scholars arguing for dates anywhere between the tenth and fifteenth centuries CE—though the

earliest dates would place Islam in Brunei well before even Quanzhou and Champa.18 While

useful for historical context, these dates would be insufficient without an exploration of how the

presence of Islam in the Visayas apparently manifested itself before the colonial period and

beyond. Evidence for this contact will be primarily linguistic and literary in order to interrogate

discursive practices for elements of discipline and pedagogy.

17 Gowey 2017.

18 1010 and 1030 CE respectively (Reid 1996:134).

 Gowey 7

LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE FOR ISLAMIC CONTACT

One indicator of relative success on the part of Islamic preachers in the Visayas is what

Comaroff and Comaroff (2009:468) refer to as the “mastery of the mundane”: entry into

everyday life sufficient that “habitual forms of social existence” bear marks of social intercourse.

Similar work has already investigated the penetration of Hindu-Buddhist cosmology into Filipino

mundane life and produced numerous word lists that trace the influence of Sanskrit, Arabic,

Malay, Nahua, Hokkien, and English on Filipino lexicons. To repeat all of their findings here as

they relate to Indian or Chinese languages would be redundant.19 However, I would like to turn

this analysis toward Visayan languages and four apparent Arabic loans that suggest attempts at

mastering the mundane: alam, wali, alak, and hukum.

Each of these is also found in languages of Indonesia and Malaysia, though with slight

differences in meaning. The pursuit of intermediate forms is frequently employed by researchers

analyzing Sanskrit loans in Southeast Asian languages, though Salazar (1968:440-441) offers the

following cautions in regards to Tagalog. First, “that the study of loanwords cannot be

meaningfully undertaken within the framework of a supposed donor language, for the simple

reason that borrowing is a linguistic event engendered in each individual recipient language,

unrelated to similar ones in other individual recipient languages.” As donor languages are

passive, sound changes and semantic drift exist inside the domain of the recipient language.

Furthermore, borrowing necessitates neither direct presence of the donor language nor its

speakers, whether Sanskrit, Arabic, or Persian, because recipient languages can draw just as

easily from the “original” language as they can from loanwords absorbed by their neighbors.

Thus, he continues that “any study of borrowing should be based on the recipient language,

19 Francisco 1968, Salazar 1968, Verstraelen 1973, and Odal-Devora 2006.

 Gowey 8

should be nourished by a less desultory knowledge of its phonemic and morphemic

mechanisms.”

With this in mind, it would be conceivable to argue that the four Arabic loanwords

discussed here are actually borrowings from Malay. This would recognize Malay’s status as a

lingua franca within early modern Island Southeast Asia, with its predominance in regional port

cities also providing one vector for the entry of Indian loans as well. However, the ultimate

derivation of these loans from what I believe to be exposure to Islamic doctrine or preaching in

the precolonial Visayas encourages labeling them as Arabic. Associating these particular words

with Islam generally instead of Arabs or Persians specifically allows for borrowing from not just

Malay, but also other regional linguistic communities participating in processes of conversion to

Islam around the 15th and 16th centuries. Manila Bay, Sulu, Mindanao, Borneo, Sulawesi, and

Maluku stand out as deserving special attention due to their relative nearness and recency of

Islamic entry.

Loanword analysis in this case focuses the Western Visayan languages of Hiligaynon,

Kinaray-a, Cebuano, Bicol, and Samar-Leyte Bisaya. These languages were chosen for their

large bases of native speakers and their use in and around port cities crucial to early modern

Nanyang trade routes. Each word is ultimately borrowed from Arabic and has an intermediary

form in Malay, while only three also appear in Tagalog. These original and intermediary forms

have been included as well. Given this wide dispersion, it is difficult to say whether each

language borrowed them directly from Malay/Arabic or from other Philippine languages.20

ālam

20 Dictionaries cited include Kaufmann 1935, Mentrida 1841, Lisboa 1865, Noceda and Sanlucar 1860,
Sánchez de la Rosa 1914, and Wolff 1972.
 Gowey 9

Arabic: der. ‘alima [to know], world, cosmos, rel. ālim [learned person]
Malay: nature, world, realm, rel. sumber alam [natural resources], pengalaman
[experience]
Tagalog: to know, science, good condition, liberal, something known
Bicol (aram): something known
Samar-Leyte (aram): to know, understand, study
Cebuano: knowledge of some special field, rel. kinaadman [general/magical]
Hiligaynon: knowledge or science, to know
Kinaray-a (aram): rel. maaram and aramon [to know, knowledgeable person]

wali

Arabic: legal guardian, governor, friend or protector, coll. “friend of God”

Malay: custodian, guardian, governor, occ. saint or missionary
Tagalog: N/A
Bicol: N/A
Samar-Leyte: to preach, advise, admonish; n. talk sermon, advice, reprimand
Cebuano: to deliver a sermon, to lecture someone; n. sermon, lecture read to someone
who has done something wrong
Hiligaynon: to counsel, admonish, preach
Kinaray-a: to counsel, admonish, preach

alak

Arabic: wine, spec. raisin liquor

Malay (arak): alcohol
Tagalog: wine, or anything distilled
Bicol: palm wine
Samar-Leyte: wine
Cebuano: liquor, strong alcoholic beverage
Hiligaynon: anything distilled, wine
Kinaray-a (arak): anything distilled, wine

hukum

Arabic: der. ḥakīm: wise, learned

Malay: law, rel. hukuman [punishment]
Tagalog: hukom: to judge, rel. hukuman [courthouse]
Bicol: judge, to adjudicate
Samar-Leyte: judge, magistrate, governor; to judge, sentence
Cebuano: pass judgment, give a verdict, to decide to do; have one’s say about an
unresolved matter
Hiligaynon: judge, to adjudicate
Kinaray-a: judge, to adjudicate
 Gowey 10

Throughout sampled Philippine languages, ālam retains meanings related to knowledge

as it does in Arabic, sometimes specified as magical or cosmological but general as well.21 For

this reason, I would suggest that Malay pengalaman and its derivations share this common origin

as the gaining of experiential knowledge. Ālam and alak both undergo a process of lallation in

some adoptions, replacing /l/ with /r/ in much the same way that already occurs with indigenous

words between Visayan languages like Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a.22 Alak appears to retain its

meaning as both a general category for all alcoholic/distilled beverages and those made from

specific plants, e.g. raisins and coconut palms.

Wali evidently underwent a shift from an actor noun signifying a Muslim saint or local

government official to a mimetic verb of one acting in a similar role, either preaching or giving

counsel, as in magwali. Thus it is plausible that at one time it could have been understood in this

way colloquially but was either used infrequently or else replaced by Spanish terms like pari or

cabeza de barangay, but was not present in sampled Tagalog and Bicol dictionaries. Similarly,

hukum can be constructed as an actor (judge), location (court), verb (to judge), and abstract noun

(ruling or sentence).

That they each retain similar pronunciation a semblance of their original meanings shows

them to be loans, but their re-association with indigenous contexts shows Salazar to be correct in

emphasizing the recipient language as a target for inquiry. Furthermore, Keane (2007:137-138)

argues that the borrowing of Spanish terms into Tagalog without translation points to mutual

construction of socio-linguistic barriers between the two languages, often used as “a common

21 Some Kinaray-a speakers in southwest Panay use ma-aram as a “generic name for such other names as
babaylan, sirhuano, manogbulong, and the like” (Magos 1992:xi-xii).

22 This often produces cognate pairs such as layo/rayu [distant, far], wala/wara [without, none], ilaya/iraya
[seaward, downstream], salakyan/sarakyan [vehicle], etc.
 Gowey 11

resource for the production of ritual power”. This presumption of a closer connection to the

spiritual world—and thus greater access to material wealth and prowess, typified by merchants

and soldiers—made available by conversion or adherence to portions of Islamic teaching was

documented among 16th century Tagalogs, Bataks, and Torajans.23 Based on Spanish accounts of

dealings with Muslim merchants in the Visayas, similar conditions seem to have prevailed there

only without known rulers like those in Luzon and Sulu.

Several possibilities merit further exploration in regards to these loanwords, given that

each relates back in some way to Islamic institutions of discipline. In the most extreme of these,

Muslim walis are imagined to have visited the Visayan Islands in much the same way as in those

noted in the mountains of Sulawesi over two centuries ago.24 Once there, they taught local

populations about cosmology (alam) and dietary restrictions (alak), all of which was supported

by systems of Islamic jurisprudence (hukum). While this is a matter of historical record in

southern islands like Mindanao and Sulu, it is unreasonable to assume that the Spanish

colonizers would have neglected to mention such institutions in the Visayas had they

encountered them.

For this reason, it seems more likely that these words were absorbed from Malay but not

from direct contact with evangelists. Rather, the presence of Muslim merchants and later states

concentrated in prominent Philippine entrepôts like Manila, Cebu, Iloilo, and Sulu suggest that

the market itself was the mode of distribution for these loans and concepts as intellectual

commodities, if not necessarily their theological implications.25 Each apparently underwent

23 Reid 1993:151.

24 George 1996:33.

25 Kitiarsa 2007:8.
 Gowey 12

processes of semantic drift such that their connections to Islamic law and theology were

obscured in the local context, and it is highly possible that said processes would have been

accelerated under Spanish colonial rule as a component of Catholicization. An analysis of this

data after Asad (2009:19-20) would be one that begins with the data itself rather than being

predicated “on the notion of a determinate social blueprint” or “integrated social totality”. In this

case, the four loanwords presented suggest the presence of Islamic discursive traditions related to

cosmology, dietary prohibitions, and law. However, without stronger evidence suggesting either

the absence or presence of such institutions in the Visayas that would support these teachings,

what evidence does exist speaks only of Muslim merchants, sailors, and rulers in the north and

south of the archipelago.

DEPICTION AND MEMORIALIZATION

Another example of commodification, this time directly from Spanish Catholic literature

into New Spain as a whole, offers additional context on how Islam was perceived by Visayan

peoples during the colonial period. The creation of “Moro” as an ethnic and religious category

emerged in the northern Christian kingdoms of Spain, initially to refer to African and Andalusian

Muslims but later extended to the Philippines. Constructed as invaders in Visigothic Iberia, the

wars between Islamic states like the Umayyad Caliphate and Sultanate of Granada and Christian

states like Castille and Aragon were thus not a conquest but a reconquest of lands—and souls—

lost to Christendom. Spanish colonial authorities and indigenous people throughout New Spain

memorialized conflicts against Islam in Europe and abroad in several ways, one of which being

the literary form known generally as Moros y Cristianos and in the Philippines as moro-moro.
 Gowey 13

While the use of these plays to other Muslims is seen in the designation of Filipinos as

Moros, Donoso (2010:101-102) points to the fact that the literary form reached the Philippines

via Mexico to explain why seemingly little localization occurred in their performance. In other

words, “while the Spaniards considered Muslims of the Philippine Archipelago as the Moro,

Filipinos considered in the theatrical form the Moro as the exotic Muslim from places like

Granada, Turkey, or Persia, and as foreigner to the Archipelago,” rendering many of these

depictions exoticized anachronisms before they even arrived in the Philippines. A later

development called the komedya typically retained anachronistic narrative elements while

presenting them in the vernacular and varied sufficiently from the older form to be called “a

product of the Philippines” by way of standardized romance plots and incorporation of local

performing arts styles (ibid. 110).

But for Pacana (2007), even the retention of Spanish anachronisms does not mitigate the

“paranoid feeling” produced by local assumptions that the Moros depicted onstage bear more

than passing resemblance to enemies past and present. This association between Islam and

violence extends to public memorials and colonial architecture, which responded to an

intensification of slave-raiding by fortifying churches and towns vulnerable to Moro attack.

Historically, Panay lay along the trade route between the Fujian coast and Sulu, making it both

accessible and valuable for raiders as a known bartering hub for porcelains and other Chinese

goods.26 Centered between the main foreign ports in Antique and Iloilo, the southern coast of

Panay was a frequent target.27

26 Warren 1985:6.

27 Fernandez (2006:116-164) mentions ten towns that were either attacked by Moro raiders or constructed
some kind of fortifications between the 16th and 19th centuries.
 Gowey 14

The utility of fortress churches like that of Santo Tomas de Villanueva in Miag-ao

becomes apparent in an episode from Leyte that was roughly contemporaneous with its

construction: a force of a thousand Moro warriors armed with native cannon [lantaka], muskets,

and tortoise-like “covers” besieged the village of Palompong and its church for seven days

before ultimately being repulsed.28 Without detracting from the historicity of these raids or

suggesting that they were not traumatic for generations of Visayans, I would argue that the

de-/recontextualization of sea-raiding as a particularly Islamic form of violence is misleading and

an artifact of colonial historiography. Comparative recency undoubtedly played a part in this

process as well, perhaps similar to the replacement of the United States with Japan as a common

enemy during World War II, though even this has faded as the generations that lived through the

occupation are themselves replaced with those who grew up with friendly exposure to Japanese

industrial and cultural exports.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Speaking on the duality of intercultural contact, Joaquin (1979) presents Lapu-lapu as a

“paradox”: the First Filipino who opposed imperial unification. Yet lauding the datu as a proto-

nationalist and dismissing his enemy Humabon as a convert or collaborator with empire are

equally incomplete, because “neither is complete without the other,” being in a sense spiritual

twins. Furthermore, the fact that Humabon later attacked the survivors of Mactan brings to mind

something of Raden Wijaya in the raja’s willingness to welcome Magellan pleasantly and with a

great show of his household’s conversion to Roman Catholicism before escorting him to a

probable death at Lapu-lapu’s hands. Perhaps he intended to kill two birds with one stone and,

failing the elimination of his local rival, at least retain his superior position by defeating an

28 Blair and Robertson 1907:37-51.

 Gowey 15

already weakened foreign imperial power that had lost its prestige along with its captain. Either

way, the memory of Melaka was certainly as fresh for Cristoforo of Ciama as it was for Magellan

and Enrique, heralding a gradual change in global markets that would recenter the spice trade on

Europeans instead of Asians.

Colonialism is a process of remaking that provokes change in all parties involved; it is a

constant state of negotiation and renegotiation. Pointing to loanwords, borrowed legal concepts,

or literature to frame Islam in the Visayas is not meant to privilege the voices of colonists over

those of the colonized, though social inequalities are sure to emerge from such an inquiry.

Rather, it is the process of transforming these foreign elements upon their reception into Visayan

societies that indicates the presence and agency of indigenous voices in redefining the terms of

their relationship to power.

Muslims from Ciama, Borneo, and various Philippine islands are mentioned from the

earliest Spanish records onward. While not a conclusive sample, these expeditions visited and/or

conquered some of the more prominent ports in the archipelago. Within a historical context that

would have made the presence of Islam particularly noteworthy for Spanish explorers, making

even scant mentions of Moro sailors and rulers crucial to understanding conditions in the islands.

Loanword analysis suggests that Visayan groups were either aware of Islamic missionization

efforts through direct contact or else these languages absorbed Arabic words from neighboring

groups who did. Taken together, these loans portray efforts to engage in “mastery of the

mundane” through acquaintance with Islamic law, though their lack of denominational qualifiers

in surveyed Visayan languages brings into question whether they were absorbed through direct

evangelization or cultural diffusion. Colonial pressures to convert to Catholicism and otherize

 Gowey 16

Muslims and animist Filipinos—combined with slave raids and their memorialization through

monuments and vernacular literature—raises the possibility that Islamic influence in the Visayas

was not only superficial but also subjected to extirpation.

Christian Filipino anxieties toward Islam are not wholly relegated to the colonial past,

especially with heightened tensions surrounding recent conflict in Marawi City, and some

common threads run through contemporary discourse. Fortresses, public monuments, and

festivals like the Bantayan in Guimbal commemorating victimization at the hands of Moros

serve as perhaps the most visible reminders. Social media has also become a venue for

recurrence of familiar imagery echoing the trauma of Moro raiders, with rumors spreading in the

weeks after martial law was declared in May 2017 that boatloads of hypothetical ISIS-affiliated

terrorists could invade Panay.

These have so far proved unfounded. However, their specificity brings to mind fears of

“government headhunters” among the Meratus of Sulawesi; ultimately, the issue is more than

just the threat of violence itself, but its resemblance to cultural memory and historical power

relations.29 Even as the moro-moro has come to take on layers of indigeneity and national unity—

as in examples presented by Briones-Carsicruz (2010) from across the former Iberian world—the

old fears remain below the surface. Fears of not just recurrence or reversal of the established

Christian hegemonic order, but perhaps also of recognizing the Visayan pangayaw raider as the

dreaded Moro pirate’s own spiritual twin.

29 Tsing 1993:90-91.
 Gowey 17

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______________________________. 1903b. The Philippine Islands 1493-1803, Vol. 3: 1569-

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______________________________. 1907. The Philippine Islands 1493-1803, Vol. 48: 1751-

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