Islamic Far East: Ethnogenesis of Philippine Islam

by Isaac Donoso

Islam is a universal civilization built on the foundations of the classical world that has spread to the four corners of the earth. This book, Islamic Far East: Ethnogenesis of Philippine Islam, is a preliminary attempt to integrate/unify the Islamization of the North, South, West, and East into one worldwide phenomenon, and locate the beginnings of Islamization in the Philippines within an Islamic historical framework. Describing the keys of Islam as a revolutionary message that linked nations in a shared civilization from West to East, from the Iberian Peninsula to China, in a global human and commercial network, the book tries to contextualize how the Philippine Archipelago became the Islamic world’s easternmost edge.

From the marvels of the Indian Ocean’s maritime lore, to the arrival of Muslim preachers in the East as makhdūm, the book recounts how communities in the islands eventually developed incipient sultanates beyond the barangay. It concludes with the arrival of the Portuguese and Spaniards in Asia, illustrating how both sides of the Islamic world came together.

The book also includes a corpus of classical Arabic sources on the easternmost edge of the world: from the legendary Andalusian in Women’s Island in the 10th century to Ibn Mājid’s Sūluk in the 15th.

Genres: History, Islam

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

He obtained his PhD in Islamic Studies (2011) and his master’s degree in Humanities (2003) and Hispanic Philology (2003) from the University of Alicante (Spain). He completed his Master of Arts degree in Islamic Studies at the University of the Philippines in 2008. He is soon to finish his Master in History and Sciences of the Music at the University of La Rioja (Spain). Winner in 2004 and 2008 of the research prize Ibn al-Abbar—the most important Spanish award in Islamic Studies—he was also granted the Premio Juan Andrés de Ensayo e Investigación en Ciencias Humanas for the study “Literatura hispanofilipina actual” (2010). Donoso has also published a critical edition of Noli me tangere (2011) and other prose writings of José Rizal (2012), as well as that of the legendary novel Los pájaros de fuego by Jesús Balmori (2010)—the first of their kind. He has worked as well with Jeannifer Zabala promoting Catalan Studies in the Philippines through the publication of the study Romanços Filipins del Regne de València (2008) and the translation into Filipino of the Valencian novel Tirante el Blanco (2010). He also edited the volume “More Hispanic than We Admit: Insights into Philippine Cultural History” (2008), which will soon be published as More Islamic than We Admit. A specialist in Islamic and Philippine Studies, he currently teaches at the University of Alicante in Spain.