Bøger af Isaac Donoso

This book focuses on the written heritage of Muslims in the Philippines, the historical constitution of chancelleries within the Islamic sultanates, and the production of official letters to conduct local and international diplomacy. The standard narrative on Muslims in the Philippines is one that centres political and armed struggles within the region. However, two important aspects remain unattended: the cultural and intellectual production of the sultanates, and the Moro involvement in Southeast Asian Islamic civilization. This book connects the development and personality of the Philippine sultanates into the regional context of local communities that adopted an international faith. Political alliances and religious missions altered different ethnolinguistic groups and furnished them with the Word, the Qur¿anic message, and the Arabic script. Indeed, customary orality and Adab shaped a way of being and acting modelled after what was called the Bichara. Particularly, the book studies the Moro Letter as cultural craft with political meaning, and Jawi heritage in the Philippines. A general catalogue of Jawi manuscripts from the National Archives of the Philippines is provided as appendix.

The present volume is an attempt to start a new narrative for the Philippines, a Spanish-speaking-nation-to-be that was aborted along the 20th century. The first Republic of the Philippines was imagined, built and shaped in Spanish language. Ilustrados were poets, orators, thinkers and humanists that were forced to fight with the word against American military invasion and colonial cultural engineering. With thousands of teachers and a new pensionado generation, by imposing English the United States were able to divide Filipinos from their parents and from their past, jeopardizing their future in a diglossic postcolonial society. We study in this book clues to understand the process of de-Hispanization of the Asian archipelago. However, recent policies in linguistic planning, the strategic and diplomatic alliances of the fifth Republic of the Philippines and the international growth of Spanish as the second most spoken language of the world after Mandarin Chinese, make Spanish a remarkable tool for 21st century Filipinos. Spanish is not only an essential component of the Filipino self, but the classical language of the Philippines.