Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Educational Policy: Schooling and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the Southern Philippines (by Jeffrey Ayala Milligan)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Educational Policy: Schooling and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the Southern Philippines, 2nd ed by Jeffrey Ayala Milligan Joshua S. Gedacht, Visiting Assistant Professor Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Educational Policy: Schooling and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the Southern Philippines, 2nd ed. jeffrey ayala milligan Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 284 pages. School education has long been cast as a powerful panacea for the myriad of social, economic, and political ills that might afflict a society. Countless politicians and leaders have pointed to schools as the deus ex machina that can single-handedly fix intractable realities of social conflict, material dispossession, and political exclusion. Unsurprisingly, this naive faith in the redemptive power of schools has also recently generated an intense backlash. A new generation of postcolonial social theorists has turned such prevailing wisdom on its head, recasting schools as an instrument of social domination that reflects and entrenches the interests of the powerful. In between these two poles of naive celebration and postcolonial condemnation, others have tried to forge a middle path. In particular, numerous educationalists have sought to take onboard these postcolonial critiques, to acknowledge the ways in which schools have reflected the political and economic agendas of elites, while still also trying to forge a pragmatic path forward in which education might at least help to lessen social disparities and promote a healthy democratic dialogue between communities. Into this fraught debate over the role of schooling and asymmetrical power dynamics enters Jeffrey Ayala Milligan's ambitious study titled Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Educational Policy: Schooling and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the Southern Philippines. In many ways, Milligan argues, the "educational experiences" of the approximately five million Muslim inhabitants of Mindanao and Sulu in the southern area of the Philippines comprise an ideal test "case through which to study the potential and the pitfalls of educational policy as a tool for addressing ethno-religious tensions both in the Philippines and other societies." (p. 5) Before 1900, the 13 ethnolinguistic groupings of Muslims in Mindanao and Sulu had enjoyed effective independence, despite the centuries-old imperial claims of Spain that the area belonged to their Philippine colony. In the 120-plus years since, however, Milligan argues that the American colonial state and their Philippine postcolonial successors based in Manila effectively "made good Spain's territorial claims" and imposed their writ over these southern areas, transforming Mindanao and Sulu into an "internal colony" in which [End Page 123] "Muslims became a subordinated and largely despised minority within the emerging Philippine nation" dominated by a Christian "majority" (p. 4). This process of subordination and internal colonization, in turn, contributed to "a century of on-again, off-again armed conflict" that caused at least 10,000 Muslim deaths during the U.S. colonial period, claimed more than 100,000 lives in a series of secessionist struggles between 1978 and 2006, and as recently as 2017 resulted in the death of more than 1,000 people in one city alone during the "Siege of Marawi." Throughout this tragic historical arc, however, Milligan notes that a wide variety of actors past and present have nevertheless continually articulated "faith" in the power of education as perhaps the best hope for defusing this cycle of violence and fostering lasting peace. Milligan devotes his study to the question of whether such campaigns to promote schooling simply entrench the hegemony of dominant colonial powers or can, in fact, empower Muslims to exercise their own agency in shaping a democratic future. Over the course of his book, Milligan essentially stakes out three separate but interconnected arguments. Chapters 3 and 4, which are mainly historical in methodology, cover the formative period of direct U.S. colonial rule between 1899 and 1935, the transitional period of the Philippine Commonwealth and World War II, and the first decades of the independent postcolonial Philippine Republic from 1946 until the demise of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. In this section, Milligan upholds the core tenets of postcolonial theory by contending that education basically served the hegemonic interests of those in power. In chapter 3, for example, the author argues that however much individual teachers might have been motivated "by what they see as...