Islam in the Philippines

Islam in the Philippines reached the southern islands for the first time the end of the 14th century and spread to the 16th centuries throughout the Philippines from. Today Islam is spread mainly in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. About 4 million Filipinos are Muslims.

History

Islamization

Traders and Muslim missionaries from Malaysia and Indonesia brought Islam to the Philippines. The Islamization of the islands is due to the power of the then Muslim India.

1380 came the Arabs Sarif Maqdum as an Islamic missionary in Mindanao. He prepared the way for Raja Baginda, who took the Jolo Islands with Malay settlers in possession. More Malay conquerors followed, who founded Muslim sultanates in the southern Mindanao and thus pushed forward Islamization, but the ancient customs of the locals largely tolerated. One of them, Mohammed Shariff Kabungsuwan of Johor, a member of the royal house of Malacca, penetrated the mid-15th century before in the land of Central Mindanao. He married there a local princess and established the Sultanate of Maguindanao in 1475. Here he began to spread Islam on his territory and in its radius.

During this time, Manila was founded as a fortress at the mouth of the Pasig River by the Malay Muslim Raja Sulayman. He comes from Brunei, where he was named Raja Muda, and was the son of the then ruling Sultan of Brunei Abdul Kahar.

Although Islam spread to Luzon, Animism remained the predominant religion in the islands of the Philippines. Muslim immigrants introduced their spheres of influence in a political organization, tying territorial States foresaw, which were ruled by rajas or sultans. These top leaders were again asked about the Datus. However, neither the concept of individual political states, nor the strategy of a limited area of ​​distribution as in the sedentary farmers of Luzon has spread beyond the region in which they had established.

While the Catholic missionary

When the Spaniards reached the islands in the 16th century, the majority of the estimated 500,000 residents lived in settlements that corresponded to the category of barangays. In the south of the Philippines, Islam was already rooted deep at the time of arrival of the Spaniards, so that the local Muslims, the Spanish called Moros, were completely subdued by these never. The Spaniards estimated in 1625 that about 100,000 Moros on Mindanao lived ( about 12 percent of the total population). The hill tribes in northern Luzon, called Igorots, the Christianization resisted.

Filipino Muslims

In the 1950s, the systematic migration of Christian settlers to Mindanao by the Philippine central government in Manila has been promoted. The Muslim inhabitants were thus in their ancestral lands in the minority. (See: Conflict in the Southern Philippines )

Religious affiliation, according to the census in 2000, 5 percent of the population is Muslim. Compared with the other parts of the country, the proportion of Muslims among the population in Mindanao particularly high ( almost one-third Muslim ). Only on the Sulu islands provide Muslims with over 85 per cent majority of the inhabitants.

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