The Sultanate of Sulu

A sarip, and the datus

Drafted from Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973)formation

The Sulu tradition has a foreign holy man arriving and marrying into the local ruling house. Sayyid Abu Bakr, a sarip — a descendant of the Prophet — reached Jolo around 1450 by way of Palembang, married the daughter of the ruling datu, and became the first sultan.

Before him, in the same tradition, comes Karim ul-Makhdum, a preacher who arrived around 1380 and whose mosque at Tubig-Indangan on Simunul is claimed as the oldest in the Philippines; and Rajah Baguinda, a Sumatran prince, some decades later.

The shape of the story

It is the same story Melaka tells about Parameswara, and Ternate and Pasai tell in their own versions: a stranger of prestigious descent arrives by sea, marries the local house, and the polity dates itself from the marriage.

The consistency is not evidence that it happened the same way five times. It is evidence about what these courts thought a founding was, and the two components are always the same — descent from somewhere important, and a local woman. Neither on its own would do.

Note what it implies about the local house: it was there, it had something worth marrying into, and the chronicle does not pretend otherwise. What preceded the sultanate was not a blank but a polity of datus that the sultanate was grafted onto.

And the datus stayed

That is the substance rather than the etiquette.

Sulu was a sultanate over an archipelago of communities each under its own datu, who held their own followings, their own boats and their own share of what was taken. The sultan's authority over them was real, negotiated, and variable; the sultanate's periods of weakness are periods when particular datus were acting on their own account, and Spanish and later British officials dealing with Sulu found repeatedly that an agreement with the sultan was not an agreement with the datus.

Brunei was built the same way, on ranked noble houses whose senior officers decided which member of the ruling family held the throne and for how long. So was Melaka. So was Johor. Asking what Sulu's rule of succession was is asking the question in the wrong shape: the sultan's position was an outcome of a standing negotiation with the datus, and the negotiation was the constitution.

Tripang and captives

Drafted from Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973)expansion

Sulu lived on two things: a toll on what came to Jolo to be traded, and a share of what was taken at sea.

Champa had run the same combination on the coast of what is now Vietnam, six thousand kilometres away and eight hundred years earlier — selling what the hinterland produced and taking what passed when selling was not enough, with the same fleets and the same crews doing both. Trade and raiding on such a coast are one skill applied in two directions.

What was sold

The China trade in the eighteenth century wanted things that could be gathered rather than grown: tripang, the sea cucumber, dried and shipped to Canton; pearl shell; birds' nests from limestone caves; wax; shark fin; tortoiseshell.

Sulu sat in the middle of the richest gathering grounds in the world for most of that list, and British country traders out of India wanted a place to sell opium and cloth for goods that Canton would take. Jolo became the exchange. The sultanate taxed it.

What was taken

The labour that gathered the tripang and dived the pearl shell was largely captured, and the capturing was done by the Iranun and the Balangingi — maritime peoples who were clients and allies of the sultanate rather than its subjects, who kept most of what they took, and whose fleets ranged from Luzon to the Moluccas and across to the Malay peninsula.

The scale is large. Tens of thousands of people were taken from the coasts of the Philippines and eastern Indonesia over the century in which the trade was at its height, and the Spanish coastal watchtowers still standing in the Visayas were built against it.

It is the same kind of relation Srivijaya, Melaka and Johor had with the orang laut of the straits: sea peoples attached to a polity that could not command them, serving for a share.

What differs is what the arrangement was for. Those fleets made a strait safe, and the tolls their patrons collected were a protection charge. These ones made a region dangerous, on the sultanate's behalf and for a cut of the proceeds.

The same institution, pointed the opposite way.

Baptised at Manila

Drafted from Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973)peak

In 1750 the sultan of Sulu was baptised a Catholic in Manila cathedral, taking the name Fernando de Alimudin. Two years later the Spanish arrested him for treason. He spent about a decade in prison in Manila, was released by the British when they took the city in 1762, and was restored to his throne at Jolo in 1764.

Azim ud-Din I is the obvious candidate for the height of the sultanate, and putting it there rather than in a century of successful raiding takes some defending.

What he was doing

He had been deposed once already by his own brother and by datus who objected to his accommodation with the Spanish. He went to Manila as an exile looking for the means to get his throne back, and the conversion was the price. Whether he believed any of it is not answerable; what is on record is that he had earlier commissioned a translation of Catholic texts into Tausug and had corresponded with the Jesuits for years.

The Spanish arrested him because they intercepted a letter, in Arabic, in which he appeared to be advising the sultan of Maguindanao not to admit missionaries. Both things were probably true at once, which is what a ruler in his position was for.

Why the peak sits here

Because of what came out of it. From 1764 the sultanate is at its most effective: a restored sultan with British recognition, an English East India Company settlement at Balambangan on Sulu's own terms, and the beginning of the tripang and pearl trade with Canton that made Jolo the richest entrepôt in the region for two generations.

The alternatives are worse. A raiding economy at its height is not a peak in any sense worth the word, and the fifteenth-century sultanate is barely documented at all.

It is also the most cross-pressured episode anywhere in these seas. Plenty of rulers here dealt with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the English or the Ming. This is the only one who was baptised by one European power, imprisoned by the same one, freed by a second, and restored to his throne by that second — all inside fourteen years.

A word in a contract

Drafted from Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973)contraction

In 1878 the sultan of Sulu signed an agreement with two European merchants over the territory Sulu claimed on the north-east coast of Borneo. The rights passed to a chartered company, and from the company to Britain, and from Britain into the settlement that made that coast part of Malaysia.

The agreement was written in Jawi. The operative word is padjak.

Sulu's position, and that of the sultan's heirs since, is that padjak means lease — that the territory was rented for an annual payment. The company's translation, and the position of the states that inherited its rights, rendered it as cession. The annual payment was made for well over a century by successive administrations, which is a fact both readings can accommodate and neither can settle.

Why a word matters this much

Not for the modern dispute, which is outside this period and outside what a page like this can settle. It is here because it is the clearest thing in these islands about what the ending of a polity actually consists of.

The sultanate did not fall. It signed.

In 1878 it signed away the Borneo coast in a text whose central word was contested at the moment of writing. In 1915 it signed away temporal sovereignty itself, by another document, to another power. Between those two signatures there is no siege to describe, no battle, no dynasty replaced. There is a sultan with a diminishing set of things left to concede, and a succession of counterparties arriving with drafts.

That is how a great many polities in this part of the world ended, and it is harder to narrate than a conquest because there is no moment to point at. A treaty has a date but not a fall. The Attalid kingdom was left to Rome in a will. Venice voted itself out of existence. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by its own emperor. Brunei was given away in three pieces to two companies and a private Englishman.

None of those is a defeat in the sense a siege is. All of them are endings, and what they have in common is a signature.

1915

Drafted from Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973)end

Spain attacked Jolo in 1578, in the same season it took Brunei, and did not take it. What followed is the longest continuous resistance to Spanish rule anywhere in the Philippines — three centuries of it, which the Spanish called the Moro wars and never finished.

What ended the sultanate's position was not an army. It was steam.

Spanish steamers destroyed the Balangingi settlements in 1848 and deported the survivors to Luzon. A steam vessel did not depend on the monsoon, which meant it could reach a raiding base in the season the raiders were at home — something no sailing fleet in three hundred years had been able to do. The raiding stopped being viable within a generation, and with it went both the sultanate's revenue and the labour that produced its export.

The document

In 1915 the sultan signed the Carpenter Agreement with the United States, renouncing temporal sovereignty and retaining his authority as head of the Muslim community of Sulu, which his successors hold.

It is the latest ending of any sultanate in these islands — twelve years after Aceh's sultan surrendered to the Dutch, and by a very different instrument. Aceh fought for thirty years and stopped when there was nobody left to fight alongside. Sulu's sultan signed a paper and kept his religious authority, which his successors still hold.

Where the line stopped

Sulu is the northern end of something that began six hundred years earlier and four thousand kilometres away.

Islam took a throne in Southeast Asia at Pasai on the north Sumatran coast around 1267. It reached Melaka by a marriage in 1414 and spread outward through the ports from there — to Java, to Borneo, to Sulawesi, to Maluku, and finally north through Brunei into the Sulu archipelago and the coasts beyond it toward Mindanao.

That is where it stopped, because in 1571 the Spanish took Manila bay, having crossed the Pacific in the other direction. Two expansions that had started on opposite sides of the world met in these islands and neither one finished.

The line where they stopped is still there. It is the boundary of the Muslim south of the Philippines, and everything that has happened along it since is downstream of two fleets arriving from opposite horizons within about a century of each other.

A matchbox

Drafted from Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973)afterlife

In 1899, with the Spanish gone and the Americans arriving, the sultan of Sulu wrote to his panglimas:

The Americans have come here in exchange for the Spaniards; they are a different people from the Spaniards, and it will not be good to "juramentado" against them. They did not come to take our lands, religion, or customs. They leave us our laws, and if you love yourselves and your country avoid coming to blows with the Americans, because they are like a matchbox — you strike one and they all go off.

Three centuries of resistance to Spain, and the instruction the sultanate issued about its next occupier was: do not.

What he was disowning

The juramentado was the Spanish name for the mujahid — a fighter prepared by ritual, by panditas, for an attack he was not expected to survive. It had been one of the standing instruments of the Moro wars, and Spanish officers occupying Jolo had threatened any pandita suspected of conducting the rites.

Under the Americans it became the sultan's official policy to disown them. His chief minister went further and argued publicly that the practice had no basis in the religion at all.

The panditas then produced the legal position to match. There were no longer any real juramentados, they held, and those so described were not genuine — because the condition that had made the thing meaningful no longer obtained. As Majul puts it: for all practical purposes the Sulu sultanate had ceased to exist as a political entity.

That is what an afterlife looks like from the inside. Not a defeat, but a body of scholars quietly reasoning their way to the conclusion that a category no longer applies.

The same argument, in the same decade, elsewhere

It was not only happening at Jolo.

In the First World War the Ottoman sultan issued a universal call to jihad and very little answered it. The forces working against him — nationalism, secularisation, the modern state — were the same ones working on the panditas of Sulu, and they produced the same result in both places within a few years of each other: an old claim on universal obligation, issued in the proper form, and met with a shrug.

The word juramentado survived the thing it named. It came to mean any Muslim who died fighting bravely for any cause at all, personal or otherwise, and the panditas whose predecessors had prepared such men now reported anyone who asked for the rites to the police.

What was left

A great deal, and none of it a state.

Jamal ul-Kiram II remained sultan from 1884 until his death in 1936, having surrendered his political powers in the middle of it, in 1915. The office continued as the religious headship of the Muslims of Sulu, and his successors hold it still. So does the claim descending from the word padjak in the 1878 contract, which two modern countries have been arguing over ever since.

The sultanate stopped being a polity and did not stop existing - a state dissolved by signature while the office and the family that held it carried on regardless, outliving the very sovereignty it had signed away.

The cession money

Drafted from Mazlan, Sultan of Sulu's Sabah Claim: A Case of 'Long-Lost' Sovereignty? (2013)afterlife

The 1878 agreement over North Borneo did not end with the nineteenth century. Every year since, the Malaysian embassy in Manila has paid a sum - now 5,300 ringgit - to the heirs of the Sulu sultanate, the same figure the original contract fixed once its coverage was extended to the coastal islands. A payment meant to close a transaction has instead kept the transaction legally alive for a hundred and fifty years, because nobody on either side has ever agreed on what the payment is for.

Two words, one cheque

Britain always read the 1878 agreement as a cession: North Borneo transferred outright, the annual sum a fixed tribute rather than rent. Sulu's own reading, carried down through the sultanate's descendants, was that the territory had only been leased - and a lease implies a landlord who can eventually ask for the land back. North Borneo passed from British hands into the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 and was renamed Sabah; the payments continued regardless, inherited along with the territory itself, and so did the disagreement about what they meant.

A claim that outlived every government that might have owned it

The Philippines itself pressed the Sabah claim on Malaysia's behalf when Sabah joined the federation in 1963, then formally agreed in 1977 to stop pursuing it. That did not settle anything for the sultanate's own heirs, who had never been a party to either government's negotiations and had no reason to consider themselves bound by an agreement made without them. In 2008 a former Moro guerrilla leader tried to bring the claim before the International Court of Justice; Malaysia's own authorities in Sabah dismissed it as a non-issue.

When the claim stopped being theoretical

In February 2013 it stopped being theoretical. Some two to three hundred armed men loyal to Jamalul Kiram III, who held the sultanate's now-ceremonial title, landed at a village in Lahad Datu and refused to leave, describing themselves as returning to land their own family had only ever rented out. Malaysia's counter-offensive that March spread the fighting to nearby towns and left sixty-two dead, Malaysian security forces among them, before the occupation was broken.

Nothing was resolved by it. The claim rests on a documentary disagreement over a single word in an 1878 contract, and neither the death toll at Lahad Datu nor a century and a half of annual payments has settled which reading of that word was correct - which is exactly the condition the claim has existed in since 1878, made briefly violent rather than made any clearer.