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The Moros in the Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Edward M. Kuder
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Extract

The Moros are those natives of the Philippines who are Mohammedans. They did not give themselves this name, nor do they use it among themselves; but they recognize it when applied to them by others.

Misnomers are often validated by time or history. The ancient Romans took a small community of the Hellenes for the whole population and called them Greeks. A Mediterranean sailor thought the New World was India and called its people Indians. In extreme western Europe the Christian Iberians, in seven bitter centuries, drove their Mohammedanized Berber cousins back to their native Mauretania, and in the process made Mohammedan a synonym for Moro, or Mauretanian. And so, although the appearance of the Iberians two-fifths of the world around in the extreme fringes of eastern Asia in the 16th Century was a remarkable feat, it was not strange that they called the Mohammedans they found here, Moros.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , February 1945 , pp. 119 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1945

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References

1 The Romanized Malay alphabet has been used to spell Philippine (Moro) words in this article. It has been modified by the addition of the apostrophe to represent the Arabic httmza or glottal check; of è for the vowel as in English belt; and of the diphthong aw for the diphthong as in English how. Without such an adapted alphabet Philippine names and words as commonly spelled cannot be pronounced, due to the mixture of orthographies currently used, except by long-experienced residents of the country.