Notes on Southeast Asia

Moro Leadership, Global Islam, and the Shape of Faithful Presence

—

6–9 minutes

to read

Notes on Southeast Asia offers analysis of the region’s politics, security, and religious life, written from within the region. To start a conversation, leave a comment on any post.

When Sidney Jones of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict assessed the Supreme Court’s September 2024 ruling that removed Sulu province from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, she was terse: “The end result is a shrunken BARMM that can no longer claim to represent all of Muslim Mindanao.” One sentence. But those of us who care about the church’s presence and witness among Moro Muslims need to hear it as more than a legal verdict. It is a description of a community under compounded pressure, politically marginalized and increasingly vulnerable. And communities under that kind of pressure are precisely where the church’s presence is most urgently called for, and most likely to be absent.

The Bangsamoro’s political crisis is, on its surface, a story about delayed elections (now set for September 2026) and peace agreements under strain. But underneath it is a story about three competing kinds of authority operating simultaneously in the same community, each claiming legitimacy from a different source, and none able to absorb or eliminate the others. For the mission leader, understanding that contest is not background knowledge. It is the operational map.

Three Communities, Not One

Mission frameworks tend to treat “Bangsamoro Muslims” as a single community. But the Bangsamoro now holds at least three distinct Muslim communities, shaped by different authority structures and carrying rather different postures toward the outside world.

The first is the community of the sultanates and datu clans, whose legitimacy is genealogical and territorial, rooted in the pre-colonial order. These are the communities shaped by what scholars of Southeast Asian Islam call “contextualized orthodoxy”: a tradition of integrating local custom into Islamic practice through a jurisprudential category called ‘urf, which allows communal practices to be legitimated through scriptural reasoning rather than simply inherited unreflectively. These communities are more flexible in their theological categories, more rooted in local culture, and historically more open to the kind of cross-cultural engagement that genuine dialogue requires.

The second is the community shaped by the MILF’s political project, contractual and procedural in its loyalties, organized around the peace agreement and the parliamentary apparatus of the Bangsamoro Organic Law. This community carries the Islamist reformist vision that Salamat Hashim brought into the MILF’s founding in 1977; it is less hostile to the outside world than a Salafi frame might suggest, but its primary frame is political self-determination rather than religious conversation.

The third is the growing community shaped by Salafi training (Saudi, Pakistani, Sudanese), which is now steadily occupying BARMM’s formal religious institutions. The Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict documented this shift in 2020; the BARMM religious bureaucracy is becoming increasingly dominated by Saudi-trained clerics. This community is more rigorous in its textual commitments, more skeptical of local customary practices, more globally networked, and more resistant to the kind of contextual flexibility that the first community has historically exercised. It is also the community toward which younger, digitally connected Moro Muslims are gravitating: the Islam of YouTube and Facebook, in IPAC’s description.

Three communities. Three different relational strategies required.

Two Mistakes to Avoid

The temptation is to reach for one of two ready-made responses. The first says: Islam is Islam; the distinctions between traditionalist and Salafi are less important than the shared commitment to the Qur’an and the Prophet. Treat all Muslim neighbors the same. The second says: the reformist Salafi communities are the real Islam; they are the conversation partners that matter, since they represent Islamic thought at its most rigorous and globally connected. Both responses fail, for the same reason. They flatten a community that is internally diverse, and they substitute an essentializing preference for actual knowledge of the people.

But the mission leader who takes the time to understand these three communities gains something valuable: the recognition that the debate within the Bangsamoro about ‘urf, about whether local Islamic practice can be legitimated through communal scriptural reasoning or must conform to a globally standardized norm, is structurally parallel to debates the church has had about contextualization for more than a century. We have argued about whether the gospel can take root in local cultural forms, or whether it must arrive stripped of cultural particularity. Muslims in the Bangsamoro are having the same argument. The mission leader who knows that is equipped to be a genuine conversation partner, not merely a contrarian presence.

The Sulu Problem Is a Pastoral Problem

Sulu’s exclusion from BARMM is not merely a constitutional dispute. To remove a people from the political arrangement built in their name is a specific kind of injustice, a denial of recognized standing. Tausug communities in Sulu are now living with the consequences: politically unrepresented in the new autonomous region, economically marginal, and increasingly exposed to the security vacuum that armed groups will exploit. Sidney Jones put the long-term assessment plainly: the potential for upheaval in Sulu is high. To such a wrong the church is not meant to be silent; it carries an old charge to open its mouth for the voiceless and to defend the rights of the poor and the dispossessed (Prov 31:8–9).

The church that has long-standing presence in Sulu and the Zamboanga Peninsula faces a community under compounded pressure. This is not primarily an evangelism opportunity; resist the instinct to read suffering simply as a strategic opening. It is a call to sustained, costly presence alongside a people experiencing something that the state is not equipped to address and that the new BARMM apparatus has, by constitutional ruling, stepped away from. What Tausug communities need from their neighbors, Christian and Muslim alike, is compassion and presence, not strategy. It is the plainest of apostolic instructions, and among the hardest: to weep with those who weep (Rom 12:15).

The OFW Return Is an Unacknowledged Moment

Every analysis of Salafi influence in the Bangsamoro focuses on the scholarship pipeline, the students sent to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Sudan who return as Salafi-trained clerics. But there is a second, less-analyzed channel, the ordinary OFW economy. Moros working in the Gulf return with more than remittances. They return with practice: halal consumption patterns, dress codes, mosque-going habits, and sometimes the spiritual disorientation of having lived between two worlds for years at a time. This “OFW Islam” may reach rural barangay households that the scholarship pipeline never touches.

It is also an underacknowledged point of contact for the church. Christians from the Philippines work in the same Gulf countries, live with the same disorientation of migrant labor and religious minority status, and return to the same communities. A church that is paying attention to the OFW return (that knows which of its Muslim neighbors have come back from Riyadh or Doha, and what they carried home) is positioned to be a genuine neighbor at a moment of real human complexity. That is not a mission tactic. It is what presence looks like.

What Faithful Presence Requires

We close with a question, not a program. The Bangsamoro is approaching September 2026 elections that will determine which of the three authority structures controls the institutional architecture of the region: the religious courts, the madrasah curricula, the legal adjudication framework. Whatever the outcome, the community will still be there afterward; the Tausug will still be in Sulu; the OFWs will still come home; the debate about ‘urf will still be live inside mosque walls even if it is no longer live in the darul ifta.

The church’s question is not which outcome to hope for. It is whether the church has built a relational, theological presence, one patient enough for the long term, capable of being genuinely useful to its neighbors through whatever comes. That kind of presence is not built in response to a political crisis. It is built before the crisis, in the ordinary years of learning languages and names and histories, of being known as neighbors rather than as strategists.

It is, in the end, the old exilic posture: to build houses and plant gardens and seek the welfare of the city where God has placed us, because in its welfare we will find our own (Jer 29:7).

The Bangsamoro has been waiting for that kind of neighbor for a long time.

Sources

Leave a comment