Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Rahma Bourqia and Susan Miller, eds., 

In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power and Politics 

in Morocco (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 

Press, 1999); Abdellah Hammondi, Master and Disciple: 

The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); James 

Miller and Jerome Bookin-Weiner, Morocco: The Arab 

West (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998); C. R. 

Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: New 

York University Press, 2001).

Moro National Liberation Front

 

(MNLF)

This is one of several Muslim groups organized in 

the late 1960s in the p

hilippines

 after a massacre 

of Muslim military recruits and later attacks on 

Muslim communities committed by paramilitary 

groups called ilaga from 1970 to 1972. The MNLF 

was chaired by Nur Misuari with Abulkhayr 

Alonto as the vice chair. The MNLF trained and 

armed its soldiers in Sabah, m

alaysia

, with the 

strategic and financial help of members of the 

traditional Moro elite. Immediately following 

President Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of mar-

tial law in September 1972, the MNLF launched 

its first military offensive against the armed forces 

of the Philippines and thereafter seized terri-

tory in Mindanao and Sulu where they created 

revolutionary governing committees replacing 

the functions of the Manila government’s political 

apparatus. The MNLF demanded secession from 

the Philippines in favor of an independent Moro 

state in Mindanao, Sulu, and Palawan. Seeing 

itself as the legitimate representative of the Moro