The unbroken path : Imamanism and historical continuity in Bangsamoro political thought

Abstract

This paper examined Imamanism as an indigenous conceptual framework for political struggle by the Moro People. Qualitative methods were employed in this study including, using semi-structured interviews of fifteen key informants—specifically senior leaders and commanders—from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), collecting oral history, and conducting a documentary analysis. It argues that dominant analytical frameworks in Bangsamoro scholarship, namely minority rights, autonomy, insurgency, and liberal peacebuilding, are insufficient for capturing the ideological dimensions of the Moro experience. Imamanism is operationalized through six interrelated features: sovereignty (unconquered), political identity, Islamic polity, historical continuity, self-determination as reclamation, and legitimacy-based authority, derived from the Magindanaon and Buayan'n term "Imaman", or collective political awakening. The results show that, across the two main organizations, Moro people broadly frame their struggle not as a demand for inclusion into the Philippine state. Rather, they frame it as the assertion and continuation of a pre-colonial political and civilizational order interrupted by Spanish, American, and Philippine colonial rule, but never fully extinguished. Imamanism, then, is both a critique of historical domination and a living political vocabulary through which Moro people interpret authority, governance, and legitimacy on their own terms. This study contributes to postcolonial and decolonial theory, comparative political thought, and Bangsamoro studies by showing that the Moro struggle is best understood not as rebellion or separatism but as the continuous reclamation of historically legitimate sovereignty rooted in Islamic governance, civilizational memory, and indigenous conceptions of political authority.