Maranao Lanao

The Maranao descend from Malayo-Polynesian peoples who settled centuries ago around Lake Lanao, forming a society organized by noble lineages. Starting in the 16th century, Muslim traders and missionaries brought Islam to the region, and Maranao tradition credits a central role in this Islamization to Sharif Kabungsuwan, a founding figure also revered by other Islamic peoples of Mindanao.

Over time, the Sultanate of Lanao formed, divided into four major regions (pat a pengampong) governed by local sultans and datus. This power structure survived Spanish colonization, which never managed to fully subjugate the interior of Lanao, and continues to shape the politics and identity of the people to this day, including in the formation of the Muslim autonomous region of Mindanao.

Life revolves around the lake and the land: many families grow rice, corn, and peanuts, or fish the waters of Lanao, while others turn to trade and craftsmanship. Communities tend to be organized around a mosque and a torogan, the great carved wooden house that symbolizes the authority of a noble family.

Clan honor, called maratabat, is the most sensitive value in Maranao culture: an offense against this code can spark long running disputes between families, resolved by traditional leaders according to ancient customary law. Marriages, festivals, and disputes all pass through this same system of authority and reputation.

The Maranao are almost unanimously Sunni Muslims, and the Islamic faith is fused with their very ethnic identity: for the vast majority, to be Maranao is to be Muslim. The city of Marawi is historically regarded as the heart of Islam in the Philippines.

Religious practice combines the five pillars of Islam with elements of local tradition, such as respect for the lineages of sultans that trace back to the first Muslim preachers in the region. Leaving Islam is understood not merely as a change of religion, but as a break with one’s own family and with the history of the people, which makes the Islamic faith the axis around which the whole of Maranao collective life turns.

The Maranao language has had Bible portions since the first half of the 20th century, a New Testament published in the following decades, and, more recently, the complete Bible. Even so, the text circulates very little among the people: distributing Scripture in Marawi has already sparked public reactions from local Muslim leaders, which shows how sensitive the subject is in a region that sees itself as the historic center of Philippine Islam.

For the Maranao, the Islamic faith is inseparable from family and clan honor, so that accepting another religion is seen as betrayal, not only spiritual but social. Decades of armed conflict in Marawi and the Lanao region, together with internal disputes between clans, make any open approach with the gospel even harder, and today only a small number of followers of Jesus are known among millions of Maranao.

Marawi and much of Lanao still bear the marks of years of armed conflict, with displaced families and communities in rebuilding. There is concrete need for lasting peace, for the reconstruction of the affected cities, and for job opportunities for a population that, despite high literacy rates, faces unemployment. In the spiritual realm, the people almost entirely lack a Christian witness lived out with respect for their culture and history, and the arrival of the gospel to this community depends above all on lives willing to walk alongside it for a long time.