The First Mosque of the Philippines

Islam came to the southern islands of what are now the Philippines, like its coming to the rest of the Malay archipelago, along the sea-roads of trade and through the work of missionaries and teachers, generations before any European sailed into these waters. By tradition the faith was first established in the Sulu archipelago, the chain of islands in the warm, shallow sea between Borneo and Mindanao, about the year 1380, when an Arab teacher and missionary known as Karim al-Makhdum (rahimahu Allah), a man of religion who came in the manner of the trader-preachers of the Indian Ocean, reached the island of Simunul. He settled among its people, taught them Islam, and built there a simple mosque, an open prayer-house of timber whose roof of palm thatch was carried on four great pillars of hardwood. The memory of his coming is preserved in the Tausug tarsila, the genealogical chronicles of Sulu that the people of the archipelago kept and recited, which name Karim al-Makhdum among the earliest bringers of the faith and remember Simunul as the place where it began. This is honoured as the first mosque in all the Philippine islands, and Simunul as the cradle of Islam in the land. From this beginning the faith spread through the islands of Sulu and on toward the great island of Mindanao, and within a century or so there arose the Muslim sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao, which would rule the southern islands and resist, for centuries, the Spanish who came later to colonise the archipelago and to whom the Muslims of the south, the people the Spanish called Moros, never wholly submitted. The original mosque has been rebuilt many times, but its four ancient hardwood pillars are kept and revered as the root of the faith in the land. This scene depicts the early mosque on its island in the Sulu Sea, with the boats of the sea-traders drawn up on the beach and the island community gathered about the prayer-house. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.