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This book focuses on the written heritage of Muslims in the Philippines, the historical constitution of chancelleries within the Islamic sultanates, and the production of official letters to conduct local and international diplomacy. The standard narrative on Muslims in the Philippines is one that centres political and armed struggles within the region. However, two important aspects remain unattended: the cultural and intellectual production of the sultanates, and the Moro involvement in Southeast Asian Islamic civilization. This book connects the development and personality of the Philippine sultanates into the regional context of local communities that adopted an international faith. Political alliances and religious missions altered different ethnolinguistic groups and furnished them with the Word, the Qur'anic message, and the Arabic script. Indeed, customary orality and Adab shaped a way of being and acting modelled after what was called the Bichara. Particularly, the book studies the Moro Letter as cultural craft with political meaning, and Jawi heritage in the Philippines. A general catalogue of Jawi manuscripts from the National Archives of the Philippines is provided as appendix.
List of contents
I. Sources on Philippine Islam1. Sources internally createda) Silsila / b) Bichara / c) Kitab / d) Khu ba / 2. Sources externally created3. Towards Philippine Islamic StudiesII. History of Arabic script in the Philippines1. From Kawi to Jawi2. Letra de Meca: Jawi script in the Tagalog region3. Aljamiado hispanofilino4. Epistolography, Bichara and the Moro chancelleriesIII. Jawi manuscripts in the National Archives of the Philippines1. Sections2. Contents3. Categoriesa) Letter: Sura / b) Treaty: Kapiturasyun / c) Licensed) Others4. Dates5. Language6. Physical descriptionCATALOGUECriteriaMalay LettersTausug LettersMaguindanao LettersSpanish Letters
About the author
Isaac Donoso, PhD, specializes in Philippine and Islamic Studies. He is the author of
Islamic Far East: Ethnogenesis of Philippine Islam (2013) and editor of
More Islamic than We Admit: Philippine Islamic Cultural History (2017). He is a Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Alicante in Spain.
