Introduction

Before the arrival of Spaniards in 1521 in the Philippines, several small kingdoms ruled over a number of different islands in and around the Sulu Sea, and these formed, variously, opposition to and alliances with the Spanish colonial ventures. For the Spaniards, resistance created constant headaches and the Spanish sought ways to overcome and suppress rebellious political moves. The religious differences between the colonisers and the colonised was a visible line of demarcation for the Spanish officials, who often made contrasting comments on the faith and dedication of Muslims in the region and identified their religion as one of the principle roots of the resistance. They judged the Islam-ness of local Muslim communities on the basis of their awareness or ignorance of Islamic law (in terms of the European understanding thereof), despite the fact that the law constituted only one of several ways for a believer to identify with Islam. Against this background of sympathetic or hostile official comments on the relevance and practices of Islamic doctrines in the Philippines, this chapter explores the role of Islamic law in the contemporary political and religious entanglements between Spaniards and Philippine Muslims, and the contribution of the intellectual networks of the wider Indian Ocean in the making of an Islamic legal tradition.

In the eighteenth century, the Sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao were preeminent among the kingdoms that opposed the Spanish colonial enterprise.1 At the time, both polities were moving towards a codified Islamic law, a project that would last for the next two centuries. As available today, the codes illuminate a number of interesting aspects of Philippine history, with strong influences of the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law, adherence to its particular legal-textual tradition, and the region's involvement in the broader circulation of Islamic legal ideas, scholars, and texts. In this chapter, I explore the issues that necessitated and facilitated the codification in both kingdoms starting in the mid-eighteenth century, and I analyse the contents of both codes and their intertextual connections with the larger Shāfiʿī scholarly tradition. Through this analysis, I examine the implications of these codes on analysing the Philippines at the historical crossroads of the Indian Ocean networks.