Imperial ambiguities: The United States and Philippine Muslims

This article examines relations between American imperial personnel and indigenous Muslims in the southern Philippines from the colonial advent to the post-colonial present. American officials initially established imperial linkages with Muslims that bypassed emerging political arrangements in core Christian areas. In ruling different Filipinos disparately, Christian and non-Christian zones of the archipelago assumed separate developmental trajectories. Muslims were racialized and forcibly modernized, but stood apart as a peripheral minority. Although sub-national imperial connections were severed after 1913, Muslims retained a memory of a distinct relationship with the United States that benefited local interests and contained government violence when the Americans returned to fight a war on terror at the beginning of the 21st century