The Analysis Of Muslim Ethnic Identity From Culture Difference Perspective

Muslim minorities in Southeast Asia have received various degree of public attention during the last few decades.Their demand for more political and cultural participation challenges social security and nations' territorial integrity.After giving a certain degree of autonomy,the Muslim separatism shows a gradual appeasement in the case of Thailand,Singapore and Indonesia.However,the Moro Muslim Ethnic in Southern Philippine remains as an unsolved minority issue.The justification for choosing Moro Muslim as case study can be viewed as follows.For one thing,Moro Muslim minority(8%)is hard to identify itself with the Catholic majority(more than85%)in a Catholic-majority state.For another,the decades-old insurgencies reflects extremely complicated situation in Philippine.Thus,this dissertation sets out to make a comparative study on the Moro Muslim and Catholic majority from the perspective of cultural difference.Specifically,this dissertation attempts to give an overview of conflict issue which stems from Colonial period.Then,it will compare President Marcos' policy with President Ramos' policy,and discuss the possibility and solutions to Mindanao conflict.At last,this dissertation concludes that understanding culture difference and authoring political identity to the minority will be able to ease conflict.The persistent conflict between Moro Muslim and Catholic majority trace back to Colonial period,and the cultural difference plays a key role in the conflict issuewhich usually framed as religious conflict.Cultural difference is specific in law,land and education respectively,which illustrates cultural difference is not responsible to generates conflict.As a result has the cultural inequality in Southern Philippines gradually deteriorated to the extent that the integrity of the country is at stake.On the one hand,Moro Muslim rebellion consolidates Catholic integration.On the other hand,Moro Muslim integrates own minority ethnic power to rebel.In short,culture emerges as speech instrumentality in the interaction with politics.And Moro Muslim rebels for cultural rights which refers to political cultural identity.How to ease and solve conflict which behind culture difference arise as the research issue.By comparing the different policy orientation of President Marcos and President Ramos,we realised that ethnic identity has already been established.And the key to de-conflict is establishing national identity which above ethnic identity,while understanding and respecting cultural difference provide vital support to ease the conflict.The relations between different ethnic groups follows two routines: one is integration,the other is separation,which refers to the distinction of assimilation and diversification,In Philippine's history,it has been assimilated by the colonial government of Spain and the United State,while the Catholic majority government adopt Assimilation Policy to deal with conflict problem in the post colonial period.Form stages of assimilation,President Marcos trends to use a violent way to treat Moro Muslim groups,which presents tendency of Cultural assimilation.On the contrary,President Ramos uses structural assimilation,which results temporary peace.Thus,this thesis concludes that cultural difference plays important role in identity issue,especially in the process of political transformation.