July 3rd, 2017 
(REAR VISION) By Annabelle Quince and Patrick Carey
The occupation of the Philippine city of Marawi by Islamic militants has been a regular fixture in the news cycle for over a month now.
The recent shooting of ABC journalist Adam Harvey by militants linked to ISIS brought it brutally close to home for many Australians, but conflicts of this nature are not a new phenomenon in the Philippines.
Islam has been a potent force in the country since the 1400s, predating even Christianity’s arrival.
So, as tensions in the predominantly Catholic nation are reaching boiling point, we take stock of the long and volatile history of Islam in the Philippines.
Islam’s arrival
Islam officially arrived in the province of Sulu, a small archipelago in the south, in the 13th Century. Some insist it came even earlier with the rise of Arab traders in the 10th Century.
Either way, there were well established sultanates (periods of time when sultans ruled) in Sulu and Mindanao by 1450.
As commentator Victor Taylor, who’s worked in the Muslim majority areas of the Philippines for the last 50 years, puts it:
“The country we know as the Philippines did not come into existence until the end of the 16th Century. So Islam, not just as a religion but as a political force … antedated the Philippines by a century or more.”
Patricio Abinales, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, says the sultanates were relatively civilly advanced for the time.
“The sultans that dominated this period spoke six languages, were trading with China and familiar with other sultanates in the maritime South-east Asia region,” he says.
But Filipino writer and journalist Criselda Yabes argues this progress came at a cost. “They were an economic superpower, they were wealthy, because of slavery,” Yabes says.
Invasion by the Spanish
When the Spanish arrived in 1521, they quickly became established in the central and northern regions of what is now the Philippines. They faced strong resistance though, when they attempted to move south.
As Dr. Abinales says, the Spanish were essentially “in a defensive position vis-a-vis the Muslim sultanates, especially because the sultanates were conducting so-called slave raids into central and the northern Philippines very frequently, and the Spanish couldn’t stop it”.
Only towards the latter part of 19th Century did the Spaniards get a foothold in certain Muslim areas — but they never had effective sovereign control.
In fact, it wasn’t until the arrival of the Americans that Sulu and Mindanao fell under foreign control.