Maguindanao

Local tradition holds that the ancestors of the Maguindanao lived alongside the Teduray in the lowlands of Cotabato before the arrival of Islamic preachers. In the early sixteenth century, Sharif Muhammad Kabungsuwan, described as a preacher of Arab and Malay descent connected to the royal house of Malacca, converted the population to Islam and founded the Sultanate of Maguindanao. Under Sultan Kudarat, the kingdom came to extend its influence from Zamboanga in the west to Davao in the east, becoming one of the most important political powers in the southern Philippines.

This memory of their own sultanate remains alive in the people's identity, even after centuries of political change that incorporated Mindanao into the modern Philippine state.

Traditionally tied to waterways for transport, trade and communication, the Maguindanao developed irrigated rice farming in the flooded plains that give the people their name, producing much of their own food. Society is organized around the extended family and a social hierarchy in which descent from the old Maguindanao royalty confers greater prestige.

Community life revolves around the mosque, Islamic celebrations and a rich oral tradition, which includes folk tales and riddles with deliberately ambiguous answers, used as entertainment and a test of wit between elders and young people.

The Maguindanao are almost entirely Sunni Muslims, following the five pillars of Islam: professing the faith, praying five times a day facing Mecca, fasting during Ramadan, giving alms and seeking pilgrimage to Mecca when possible. The Islamic faith is not merely personal religion but the axis around which the people’s entire communal and political life is organized.

Alongside formal Islamic practice, elements of local tradition persist, including the recognition of nature spirits, which coexist with Sunni orthodoxy without perceived contradiction for most families.

The New Testament in Maguindanaon has been completed and published, but the complete Bible does not yet exist in the people’s language. Since faith and identity are deeply intertwined, few Maguindanao have ever encountered these Scriptures, and fewer still have read them attentively. The absence of a complete Bible and of a tradition of Bible reading among them leaves most of the people without real access to the Christian message in their own language.

To be Maguindanao is, in practice, to be Muslim: the Islamic faith is fused with the memory of the old sultanate and with ethnic identity, so that abandoning Islam is seen as betraying not only religion but family and people. Add to this the historical memory of conflicts with Catholic Filipinos, viewed by many as political and cultural rivals, which leads to Christianity being associated with a foreign, adversarial identity rather than a faith that can be lived without giving up being Maguindanao.

Decades of armed conflict in parts of Mindanao have left marks of displacement, insecurity and loss among Maguindanao families, alongside the common hardships of farming communities in the flooded plains. There is a real need for lasting peace and for rebuilding trust between neighboring communities of different faiths.

On the spiritual front, the people lack the opportunity to come to know Jesus in a way that does not seem like an import of Filipino Catholic culture, historically associated with past conflicts. Few Maguindanao today have any connection to a Maguindanao Christian or to a faith community that speaks their own language and understands their own culture.