Article

Illanuns

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Illanuns

The Illanun (also rendered Iranun) are a Muslim maritime and agricultural people whose historical presence spans the Sulu–Mindanao region of the southern Philippines, the coast of Borneo, and the Straits of Malacca. Their significance in the historical record is twofold: as the principal mobile military force of the Sulu sultanate’s redistributive economy during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as a settled peasant community in North Borneo by the mid-twentieth century. The two facets of this history—the raiding and the farming—have been separated in the literature by a century of colonial conquest, administrative reclassification, and the deliberate construction of a “savage” stereotype that served imperial interests [1, pp. 43–69].

Origins, Migration, and Social Structure

The Illanun are the most recent arrivals among the Muslim communities of the Kota Belud district in North Borneo, having come from Mindanao some 150 years before the 1951 ethnographic record of D. Headly [2, p. 159]. The history of the closely related Bajau people of the same district is obscure, though it is probable that they too came originally from the Philippines [2, p. 159]. The two groups speak different languages, but proximity and a common religion make intermarriage easy and usual [2, p. 159].

Illanun society in Kota Belud divides itself into two main classes, known as Dato and Pitu, the former comprising two grades and the latter three [2, p. 159]. The Dato are said to be descendants of the leaders who originally brought their people in from Mindanao [2, p. 159]. The highest Dato grade is the 15 pikul class, for which a dowry of $300 was payable; the second Dato grade is the 10 pikul class at $200 [2, p. 159]. Within the Pitu class, the highest grade is the 8 pikul class ($160), representing ordinary commoners of pure Illanun descent; below them come the 7 pikul class ($140), one of whose parents was a Bajau and the other an Illanun, also called Lima Sinantan; and the lowest, the 6 pikul class ($132) [2, p. 159]. It is thought in Kota Belud that very many Bajaus can trace some Illanun blood in their pedigrees, and even if they cannot, their dowry seems to be fixed at $132 [2, p. 159].

Marriage between persons of a different class is common, but in theory the children of such unions are reduced one step in the social ladder: if either the mother or father is a 15 pikul person and the other of any lower class, the children are each worth only 10 pikuls [2, p. 160]. Headly notes that this rule is modified in practice by the social position held by the person of lower class, and that although the classification is the basis for negotiations about dowry, modification is made in many, and possibly the majority of, cases [2, p. 160].

Maritime Raiding and the Global Economy

The earlier phase of Illanun history, as reconstructed by J.F. Warren, is inseparable from the integration of the Sulu sultanate into the emerging global capitalist economy. The opening of the China trade to European merchants in the 1770s and 1780s created an insatiable demand for exotic commodities—sea cucumber, birds’ nests, camphor, rattans—that the Sulu sultanate could only supply through the forced labour of tens of thousands of captives [1, pp. 43–69]. The Iranun, under Taosug sponsorship, were the mobile military arm of this redistributive economy [1, pp. 43–69].

Between 1774 and 1798, an estimated 150 to 200 raiding vessels departed annually from the Mindanao–Sulu area; the largest lanong exceeded 130 feet in length [1, p. 65]. A Bugis chronicler recorded Iranun double-decked prahus of 90 to 100 feet, rowed by more than a hundred slaves and armed with bronze swivel cannon, operating in the Strait of Malacca and Riau Islands [1, p. 43]. Colonial authorities in Singapore and the Straits Settlements designated August, September and October as musim lanun (“Lanun season”) due to the regularity of raids during those months [1, p. 44]. Estimated annual losses from maritime raiding reached several million pounds sterling; most cargo insurers, including Lloyds, were effectively helpless against the onslaught [1, p. 53].

Warren’s central intervention is to reframe this activity not as a symptom of cultural savagism or civilizational decline, as Raffles and Brooke claimed, but as the operational logic of a trading state competing in a global market [1, pp. 43–69]. The British East India Company itself was complicit, selling arms and opium to the Iranun as a tacit privateering system to undermine Dutch competitors in the Moluccas and Sulawesi, before turning to condemn the very people it had armed once they became ungovernable [1, pp. 43–69].

Marriage Customs and Economic Rituals

The 1951 record of Headly documents a stratified dowry system, reciprocal payment obligations, and wedding ritual practices among the Illanun and Bajau of Kota Belud [2, pp. 159–161]. Dowries were originally paid in weight of brass cannon, but this custom has been in abeyance for many years and has been substituted by cash payments; the basis, however, is still the weight of brass cannon and is so referred to locally [2, p. 159].

A complex set of associated payments accompanies the dowry. The Pelit is a reciprocal obligation practised when Illanun blood is present in either party: a brother (or, if there is no brother, a sister or other relative of a married woman) accepts a reciprocal obligation with a similar relative of whoever his or her nieces or nephews marry, for payment of a certain sum of money [2, pp. 159–160]. The amounts payable are the same whether the child is male or female, but they differ for each class [2, p. 160]. The bridegroom’s side must also supply oxen (sapi) for the wedding breakfast: 7 head for all Pitu 7 grades and 10 head for all Dato 10 grades, with a sapi valued at $4 for this purpose against a current market price of $70 per head [2, p. 160]. The Peramaian-Peramaian is a collection in which each of the bridegroom’s guests gives a few cents to his father, who hands it to the bride’s father for distribution amongst the cooks and other helpers; the total amount rarely exceeds $10 [2, p. 160]. The Benga (or Getasrirai) is a sum of between $5 and $10 handed by the groom’s father to the Master of Ceremonies, who then divides it among himself, the lecturer, and other elders who have sat with the couple and given them their moral support [2, p. 161].

The wedding ceremony itself is a colourful affair. The bridegroom rides to the bride’s house on a pony with his best man up behind him; the saddle and bridle are usually gaily decorated, and the bells worn on the pony’s breastplate are certainly old [2, p. 159]. On arrival, the groom and his friends follow a line of flags to a convenient open space where they occupy themselves by letting off Chinese crackers [2, p. 159]. The formal Muslim marriage ceremony takes place before the bride is brought from behind the draperies which form her room; at its close she is carried in by her father and deposited at the groom’s side, and an elder makes a short address while the couple sit side by side, as at a Malay bersanding [2, p. 159].

Marriages are usually arranged by the parents, but the children concerned do have some say in the matter, to the extent that they are asked whether they agree to the person selected [2, p. 161]. Run-away love matches do occur: the boy and girl elope quietly in the evening and go to the house of the Chief, Headman or any respected person, who keeps the girl for the night and endeavours to settle matters between the two fathers [2, p. 161]. When settled, the proper dowry is paid, but neither party wears the customary dress for the wedding and there is no public berganding and only close relatives are asked to the feast [2, p. 161].

The dowry is by no means always paid in full, but the balance is payable if the husband divorces the wife through no fault of her own, which acts as a kind of insurance against too hasty action by the husband [2, p. 161].

Conquest, Erasure, and Literary Representation

The last Iranun stronghold at Tungku on the east coast of Borneo fell in 1878; Spanish naval campaigns against the Iranun began after 1848 and culminated in the late 1880s with the occupation of the old ruling families of Mindanao [1, pp. 54]. Warren argues that the dehumanizing “moro/Illanun” stereotype was systematically constructed in colonial official discourse and perpetuated in the fiction of Joseph Conrad, whose Indonesian novels drew on the same imperial sources—Raffles, Brooke, Royal Navy captains—that had justified the conquest and erasure of the Iranun as a people [1, pp. 43–69].

Conrad’s only maritime exposure to the region was nineteen weeks as first mate on the SS Vidar, a Singapore-based Arab-owned steamer in the Celebes Sea; his knowledge of the Iranun was derived from port gossip and published colonial accounts rather than direct contact [1, p. 59]. In The Rescue, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad’s “Illanun” characters—Daman, Babalatchi, Omar el Badavi—are rendered through the lens of the Spanish reconquista “moro” image: bloodthirsty, fanatical, inherently savage [1, pp. 43–69]. Warren reads these novels as instruments of what he calls “linguistic reappropriation,” in which the Anglo-Saxon imperial project is naturalized through the binary of civilization versus savagism, and the Iranun are destined to be eliminated by superior British moral values, technology and juridical processes [1, pp. 43–69].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on the Illanun spans a century and a half and reflects a dramatic shift in analytical framework. The earliest contributions, implicit in the colonial administrative record, treated Iranun raiding as a civilizational pathology requiring military suppression. Headly’s 1951 note, while modest in scope, represents the ethnographic tradition of the British colonial service in which district officers recorded local customs for the Society’s journal; its value lies in documenting a classificatory dowry system and associated payment customs at a moment when the brass-cannon standard had long been replaced by cash but the old terminology persisted [2, pp. 159–161]. The study draws entirely on Headly’s direct observation and local informants in Kota Belud; no archival or documentary sources are cited.

Warren’s 2001 article marks a decisive historiographical turn. Extending his own earlier work on the Sulu Zone (1981, 1998), he explicitly links ethnohistorical analysis with postcolonial literary criticism, challenging the long-standing orthodoxy—articulated by Raffles, Brooke and Conrad—that “piracy” signified the decline of the Malayo-Muslim world rather than its integration into global capitalism [1, pp. 43–69]. His method is to hold the colonial literary and administrative record against the material evidence of the global economy, exposing the ideological function of the “piracy” label. The primary sources he draws upon include British Admiralty Records, East India Company Straits Settlement Factory Records, Parliamentary Papers, Spanish colonial chronicles, Brooke’s published journals, and oral traditions preserved among descendant communities in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia [1, pp. 43–69].

The gap between these two records—one a brief administrative ethnography of a settled farming community, the other a sweeping revisionist account of a maritime people—illustrates the extent to which the Illanun have been fragmented in the historical record: their raiding past attributed to “savagism,” their present reduced to a footnote in district administration. The challenge for future research is to bridge this discontinuity and recover the continuity of a people whose history has been systematically divided by the very institutions that documented it.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. J.F. Warren (2001). Savagism and civilization: the Iranun, globalization and the literature of Joseph Conrad JMBRAS 74(1): 43–69. Read on JSTOR
  2. D. Headly (1951). Some Illanun and Bajau marriage customs in the Kota Belud district, North Borneo JMBRAS 24(3): 159–160.