Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaagainst the Dutch and inspired by the raging war in Aceh, the perana-
kan Arab named Syarif Mansur from Buol led around fifty (likely Sufi
tarekat) followers in a suicidal attack on the colonial fort in Manado.^17
Less explicitly political but nonetheless significant were the conversion
of north Sulawesi’s ruling elite from Dutch-prescribed Protestantism to
Islam as Dutch power declined in the late eighteenth century and during
the brief and religiously-neutral British regime in north Sulawesi in the
early nineteenth century.^18 These elite conversions and the 1870s dis-
course on a “holy war” appear completely unrelated with the affairs of
Maguindanao. Yet one could argue that long before the rise of political
Islam in north Sulawesi and indeed before most of its inhabitants be-
came Muslim, Maguindanao had already offered an alternative religious
and political path for north Sulawesi elites.
The Dutch East India Company archives reveal that in 1769
Company functionaries discovered that two aristocratic children from
north Sulawesi were studying Islam in Maguindanao. Marapati, a vassal
(leenman) of the Company and chief of Tombelo, was obliged to admit
that one of those children was his own. Likely fearing retribution, he
had to re-assure the Company that he was a Christian and that he had
to declare if not feign that the children were brought to Maguindanao
without his knowledge by a brother-in-law who hails from Sulu.^19 But it
was likely that Marapati consented to the sending, aware perhaps that an
able religious teacher lived in Maguindanao. A good contemporaneous
candidate would be the Shafiite scholar named Abdul Majid Mindanawi
who wrote an introductory theological treatise while in Aceh,^20 perhaps
on the way back to his Mindanao homeland.
- This event is memorialized in popular lyric poetry (pantun), Boek panton deri
waktu Bwool masok di Menado pada tahoen 1876 (Menado: Menadosche Drukkerij,
1900). It is somewhat reminiscent of the well-studied Banten revolt of 1888.
Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants’ Revolt of Banten in 1888; Its Conditions, Course
and Sequel (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). - ANRI, Manado 48, no. 4, Verslag van de Rijkjes en Negorijen ten Westen van
Manado Gelegen, D. F. W. Pietermaat, Resident van Manado, 31 December 1833,
fol. 13. - NA, VOC, 8137, Letter of the Governor of Ternate Hermannus Munink to
Governor-General Albertus van der Parra, May 1770, fols. 35–36. - See Midori Kawashima & Oman Fathurahman, “Islamic Manuscripts of Southern
Philippines: A Research Note with Descriptions of Three Manuscripts”, The
Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 29 (2011): 254.