Converts to Islam and the Muslim Community in the Christian Philippines

Abstract

On Palawan Island, where approximately 80,000 Muslims of diverse ethnolinguistic and geographical origins reside together with a larger and similarly diverse Christian population, conversions from Christianity to Islam have become common. This paper explores how converts comport themselves individually and collectively with their interpretations of Islam and expressions of religiosity, and how the fragmented larger community of ‘born’ Muslims has in turn responded to the growing presence of converts who hope to ‘de-ethnicize’ Islam and build a single unified community whose sole criteria for membership is religious faith. Whereas born Muslims emphasize religion, whereby social and cultural authority supports literal understandings and correct bodily practices, Muslim converts are more concerned with religiosity—i.e., an emphasis on the way individual believers build and experience their relationships with God. Yet the convert community has itself taken on ethnic group-like characteristics, both by the actions of its members and by the workings of wider Philippine society, thereby insulating the ‘ethnic’ Islam of born Muslims from the very changes that converts desire. More broadly, the processes of deterritorialization and individualization sometimes attributed to global Islam are not entirely one-directional, as countervailing processes of re-territorialization and re-ethnicization are also underway.