Grated coconut makes good dialogue, literally and figuratively
In popular Filipino consciousness, mention Quiapo, and a center of Filipino Catholicism comes to mind: The early-year bustle of the Black Nazarene procession every Jan. 9, where tens of thousands of devotees gather; the near-hourly Sunday masses in the Minor Basilica and National Shrine of Jesus Nazareno or more popularly known as Quiapo church; and of course, the many religious objects hawked in the surrounding area.
Think icons, crucifixes, and rosaries, meant to be blessed in said church, as it’s believed that the most potent blessings come from the Black Nazarene, a holdover from folk religious practices.
But just across the street from Quiapo Church, cutting through stalls selling anything from surplus bike parts to folk medicine, a sprawling golden dome with a crescent moon gleams in the sun, overlooking the rooftops.
Five times a day, and especially on Friday, a muadhin, through speakers, will call Muslims to prayer. And the same festivity seen during the Feast of the Black Nazarene can be seen here in the Masjid Al-Dahab, or the Golden Mosque and Cultural Center, each Eid Al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan.
On normal days, students in hijab walk from the mosque’s school and library, vendors prepare palapa paste or grill tuna in open-air stalls, and many cats—considered ritually pure in Islam—sleep on motorbikes or prowl the mosque grounds.
This is Manila’s Barangay 384, popularly known as Muslim Town.
An emerging gastronomic center
Despite the marks of poverty and institutional neglect—unfortunately not unique to Muslim Town—eateries here notably do not scrimp on soap and running water, relative to other eateries around the metropolis. The roads may get puddles, the sidewalks may play hide-and-seek, but each eatery in Muslim Town is a safe haven for hand hygiene, as Muslims prefer to eat with their right hands.
Such is the case in open-air, turo-turo Wakilah, consisting of two buildings across each other: one a Maranao restaurant, the other, a bakery specializing in indigenized roti (wrapped around mango, banana, and yes, Nutella, too). Spoons and forks are offered, but diners are encouraged to eat with their right hands, and so, I did.
The dining practice, which we know as kamayan, is also a Sunnah. It’s tradition based on the Prophet Muhammad’s life, the most important prophet in Islam (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and John the Baptist are also esteemed prophets for Muslims).
“’Yong mga kapwa-Muslim galing sa ibang parte ng Manila, sa Cubao, sa Greenhills, ganyan, tuwing homesick sila, dito sila dumadalaw,” Jamil (not his real name), a Maranao cook working in Wakilah, says of his current home. He’s been in Manila for just two weeks, following relatives living in Quiapo, who egged him on to move to the capital for economic opportunities.
A 2023 paper published in the Kritika Kultura journal by Mark Tallara observed that “Quiapo is an emerging gastronomic center in Manila,” in part thanks to the Muslim-Maranao cuisine prevalent in Muslim Town.
I visited twice, first out of curiosity, and next, for this assignment. And each time, the meals made me look forward to the next visit. There is an unmistakable soul to the cooking, geared as it is to homesick Manila veterans and Muslims “fresh off the boat” from Mindanao. How? With methods that largely adhere to toyyib, a Maranao cooking ethos described by Tallara, which builds on Halal cooking by incorporating environmental consciousness and organic farming.
If you’re in Muslim Town for the first time, you can’t go wrong with spicy savories, like beef randang, veggie murtabak, and chicken or (seafood) piaparan, whose spice levels can be adjusted for visitors. There’s a lot of dessert pastries, too, with teh tarik and kopi. You might even want to take home a tub of palapa, a banana leaf housing pastil, or a stick of grilled yellowfin tuna.
Social enterprises like Meaningful Travels PH also organize educational walking tours here. By coordinating with Maranao homeowners in Quiapo, they can re-enact the Pagana, a feast normally held at Eid Al-Fitr, where special dishes are served on vibrant dining sets such as dulang and tabak, all as a Singkil dance is performed accompanied by a kulintang percussion ensemble.
Aside from academics, bloggers—Erwan Heussaff included—have also revisited the unique cuisine and long-standing restaurants in Muslim Town, with each visit shedding more light on ingredients as well as substitutions in light of scarcity.
In her works, culture historian and food critic Doreen Fernandez described how palapa and piaparan are prepared, and these are indeed markers of Maranao identity, as it involves using ingredients unique to Lanao: sakurab, a kind of chive often paired with white chilies not found elsewhere, and arowana, a freshwater fish.
To ethnicity and beyond
But how did the Muslim communities in Manila start, and what led them away from their ancestral lands?
“Before colonization, Manila was originally Muslim,” Shiraz Nole, an American Muslim now based in the Philippines, reminds me. The rulers of Maynila, like Rajah Matanda and Sulayman, who fought the Spanish invaders, were Muslim. It’s more accurate to say that Nole is a Sri Lankan migrant to Hawaii, who gained US citizenship, thanks to an uncle, who married a Filipina naturalized in Hawaii.
Despite growing up in a Muslim household, Nole only took the faith seriously in his mid-20s. Life’s challenges led him back and he founded the website Muslim in Manila, an educational but also commercial platform that aims to connect Muslims across denominations and ethnic groups.
Nole and I shared a meal, eating with our hands. Here, I was finally able to try the “legendary” tortang talong by the Golden Mosque, which cultural worker Clara Balaguer raved about. Jamil, the Maranao cook, seeing that we opted out of utensils, grinned as he served our sides of palapa and sawaw. “Modern science is finally catching up to what Muslims knew for ages,” Nole shares, “eating with your hands is healthier.”
From here, we discussed topics, such as neocolonialism, how poverty forces some Filipino Muslims to take desperate measures, and the internal divisions between Filipino Muslims. As Akiko Watanabe observed in a 2007 paper published in “Kasarinlan: The Philippine Journal of Third World Studies,” many Filipino Muslim migrants to Manila moved because of Spanish, American, Japanese, and yes, Filipino conquest, colonization, and land-grabbing, which was prevalent during Martial Law.
Despite these external threats, Filipino Muslims also must contend with intra-Muslim ethnic and religious differences.
Such disparities can also be seen in how Muslim communities, such as in Quiapo and Greenhills, are largely dominated by Maranaos, who hail mostly from the two provinces around Lanao Lake, on whose northern shore Marawi City sits, while other groups such as the Tausug and Maguindanao concentrate in other parts of Metro Manila. There are also the Balik-Islam or Filipino Muslim converts, who eventually established their own province, Sarangani, in 1992.
Before the 2017 Marawi Siege, the city was one of the Philippines’ major Islamic cities, replete with sprawling mosques and educational, commercial, and recreational centers. These are all complemented by a distinct culinary heritage, visual arts and crafts, architecture, and literary epics and dances with strong ties to Maritime Southeast Asia and South Asia.
Even before the siege, it’s sad to think that this heritage was largely ignored in the larger discourse about Filipino identity, nationhood, history, cuisine, and culture, save for paltry nods at grade school Linggo ng Wika celebrations. Given the Muslim contributions to astronomy, health sciences, higher math, and even coffee culture, what are we missing out on in excluding Muslim thought?
It’s not just Marawi, either, there are storied cities like Cotabato, Lamitan, and Jolo with distinct Filipino Muslim traditions and heritage.
It’s precisely this heritage and pride-of-place which many Muslim communities in Manila have tried to recreate, mainly through building mosques and schools with varying degrees of success. Watanabe notes how many faced opposition from Metro Manila’s city governments, so the communities instead turned to NGOs from the Middle East for such initiatives. Even the Golden Mosque itself was funded in part by the Libyan government.
Access to government services has also been historically slow, and this is seen in how many Muslims communities in Manila are barely above shantytowns, in contrast to the sprawling Muslim-majority cities in Mindanao. Some Filipino Muslim ethnic groups also practice schools of Islam that have significant divergences from the schools practiced by other Filipino Muslim ethnolinguistic groups.
Just as denominations across Christianity may disagree with some doctrines, so it is within Islam. If anything, Filipino Muslims are united as a minority in a Christian country.
Salam, salamat
Cognizant of all this, Shiraz hopes Muslim in Manila, which is co-run by one of his friends and two Muslim women based in Mindanao, a Maranao and a Maguindanaoan, can serve as a cross-ethnic platform that can connect Muslims in the Philippines across denominations—starting with easier access to certified halal goods, connecting suppliers with traders, and eventually, community news and events.
Our Filipino word for giving thanks, “salamat,” is derived from the Arabic word for peace, “salam.” Arabic missionaries brought Islam to Maritime Southeast Asia, impacting not just architecture, but thought and language, too. “Selamat” as a greeting in Bahasa, memes on Filipino versus Bahasa aside, makes sense if you think of it as “peace be with you!”
Tallara concludes his paper with the observation that Black Nazarene devotees are often patrons at the halal restaurants around the Golden Mosque and Quiapo Church. And that they also hold interfaith solidarity activities, such as the Duyog Ramadan.
Here, he writes: “In the promotion of peace, the role of religion and culture can be instrumental where non-state actors are involved,” referring to Quiapo Muslims and their non-Muslim visitors and patrons. The first group of whom were generous in opening their doors and dining tables, while the latter were generous in opening their minds and palates.
Salamat, selamat, salam, gratitude and greetings, all rooted in peace. In a small world, what’s left to fight over? Well, there sure is a lot to fight—and live—for.
