Africa

Abstract

the ' backwardness' of the Muslim population through' enlightened' leadership. Furthermore, the articulation of aspirations towards the establishment of an independent Moro nationstate emerged in the late 1960s as a (largely disingenuous) response by Muslim politicians displaced by the increasingly interventionist and centralizing tendencies of President Ferdinand Marcos. These politicians worked in tandem with a new generation of radicalized Muslim students (university-educated in Manila or at al-Azhar in Cairo) much as their Christian counterparts elsewhere in the Philippines (e.g. Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr.) did with the newly formed Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its New People's Army (NPA). As McKenna shows, even the sectarian violence in Cotabato in the early 1970s was intertwined with these new extra-electoral tactics of ' traditional politicians', and ultimately the product of class, rather than ethno-religious, tensions and antagonisms. Whilst this historical backdrop is outlined with great care and considerable detail and documentation in the first seven chapters, the remainder of the book draws more on McKenna's ethnographic work and deals with more contemporary issues. Here he is keen to show how popular support for armed separatism (the MILF in particular) reflects less the ' hegemonic ideology' of elite notions of Moro ethno-nationalism than the vulnerability of ordinary Muslims to the predications of various armed groups (most notably the Armed Forces of the Philippines) and its interpretation of the appeal for ' Islamic unity' in terms of' the ideal of juridical equality for all Cotabato Muslims' (p. 282). McKenna is especially sensitive to the ways in which appeals to an undifferentiated ethno-religious ' national' unity must be understood as both masking and mediated by relations of inequality, domination, and exploitation. In his fine-grained account of sociological and political change in Cotabato, McKenna may underplay continuities and connections, drawing the lines between former smugglers, 'traditional politicians', rebel commanders, religious leaders (ulama and ustadz) far more sharply than even his own evidence suggests. But even here this reviewer suspects that McKenna knows more than he cares to reveal. This is an outstanding piece of scholarship— elegantly written, amply documented, thoroughly researched, and reflecting a critical engagement-with the existing academic literature and journalistic conventional wisdom, with questions of contemporary political salience, and with the realities of everyday life for poor Muslims in the southern Philippines. McKenna has made an important contribution to the study of Philippine politics, Islam in SouthEast Asia, nationalism and 'separatism', and hegemony and resistance more generally.