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Strange Parallels, Surprising Encounters: Catholicism, Islam, and Analogist Rituals in the Late Sixteenth Century Philippines, by Romain Bertrand

November 10, 2021

4:45 pm

When he settled in 1565 in the port-city of Cebu, in the Visayas (Central Philippines), Miguel López de Legazpi had only 350 men in arms under his command. And even after the Spaniards conquered the coastal sultanate of Maynilad (Manila) in 1571, they could not muster more than a few hundreds settlers and warriors to build and maintain their colonial dominance over a vast and densely populated archipelago. Hence the « Spanish Philippines » were by no means an impregnable fortress of untainted Christian-European high culture, but an unstable mosaic of contrasting religious worldviews and overlapping ethno-linguistic identities. Despite the efforts of Legazpi and his successors to tame it, the Islamization process of the Northern and Central Philippines (that may have started only a few decades before the arrival of the Spaniards) kept unfolding, even if in a subterranean way – all the more so since it was fueled by Brunei-based preachers and textured by long-distance connections with the Moluccas and the Malay Peninsula. In such a situation of chronical colonial weakness, identity borders could be nothing but porous, and religious hybridity became the rule. Starting in the 1580s, Borneo became a sanctuary for Spanish renegades who converted to Islam and took service with Muslim power-holders. In Manila’s surrounding countryside, some impoverished Spanish soldiers « went native » and started eating, dressing, feasting and praying like « Mohammedans ». Even inside Manila’s walls, the wives or mistresses of high-ranking Spanish officials hosted curing and bewitching maganito rituals that had more to do with the art of local babaylan healers than with Christian angelology – or that unproblematically appealed to both. By peering through Inquisition trials’ folders kept in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, one can get a sense of Manila’s late 16th and early 17th century multi-faceted ritual world, and of the role that Islam played in subaltern lives and imaginations.

Additional Information

Program

Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Southeast Asia Program