The Sultanates of the Sulu Sea

At the far south-eastern edge of the Muslim world, in the islands at the southern end of the great Philippine archipelago, lay the Muslim sultanates of the Sulu Sea: the Sultanate of Sulu, on its chain of islands between Borneo and Mindanao, and the sultanates of Maguindanao and the Maranao lake country on the great southern island of Mindanao itself. Islam had spread to these islands along the trade routes of the monsoon seas, carried by merchants and teachers from the Malay world and beyond, and had taken root among the sea peoples and the river and lake communities, who organised themselves into sultanates and chiefdoms under their datus and sultans before the coming of the European powers. Their world was a maritime one: villages of timber houses raised on stilts over the shallows, the grand carved timber halls (such as the Maranao torogan) of the chiefs with their flowing okir ornament, and the slender outrigger boats with tall, brightly coloured sails (the vinta) in which a sea people lived by fishing, trade and seafaring. When the Spanish colonised the northern Philippines and pressed south, these Muslim sultanates, the people the Spanish called the Moros, resisted them for centuries and were never fully conquered, keeping their faith and their independence at the eastern frontier of Islam. This scene depicts that world around the mid-seventeenth century: the stilt village over the bright shallows, the carved royal house with its sweeping roof, the outrigger boats with their coloured sails drawing up among the palms and forested islands of the southern archipelago. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.