Muslim-Christian Encounters on the Edges of the Spanish Empire (1565-1898)

Muslim-Christian Encounters on the Edges of the Spanish Empire (1565–1898) offers a new cultural and literary history of the encounter between Islam and Spanish colonialism in the Philippines. Spanning more than three centuries, the book traces how missionaries, officials, writers, and intellectuals represented Muslim communities in Mindanao and Sulu, and how those representations evolved from the early modern period to the final decades of Spanish rule. Drawing on missionary chronicles, archival sources, literature, popular performance, visual materials, and colonial exhibitions, the book follows these encounters across the Philippines, Spain, and the wider imperial world. Case studies range from seventeenth-century warfare and the conversion of Sultan Alimuddin to the enormously popular moro-moro—the Philippine theatrical tradition staging conflicts between Christians and Muslims—and the representation of Filipino Muslims at the 1887 Philippine Exposition in Madrid. By placing the Philippines at the center of a story usually told through Iberian and Mediterranean perspectives, the book demonstrates how inherited narratives of Christian-Muslim conflict were transformed by colonial encounters, local cultures, and emerging racial and ethnographic categories. It offers a new perspective on Spanish imperial, Philippine, Islamic, literary, and global history.