Filipino Muslim Literature

Filipino Muslim Literature is an inventory of diverse cultures that displays features and cultures of the Muslims in the Philippines. These distinctions distinguish one Muslim cultural community from another. Yet, all these communities are unified by their Islamic faith, which has already pervaded many aspects of their folk literature since Islam is a way of life. Regardless of cultural community, all Filipino Muslims belong to one Ummah Muslimah. Yet, it has been distinguished as Filipino Muslim Literature so as to differentiate it from other Muslim countries that have different cultures from us.

 In general, the folk literature of Muslim cultural communities in Mindanao, the Philippines, may be in prose or in verse. But the style and form of expression may vary from one Muslim cultural community to another, what with the various languages that the people speak. These oral literary forms may be didactic, hortatory, entertaining, instructive, or informative.

      

Folk literature in Mindanao Muslim cultural communities as in other Filipino groups follow the oral tradition in that folktales, myths, legends, epics, poems, riddles and proverbs are handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. Moreover, as is true of folk literature of other people, folk literature in the Muslim cultural communities has a participatory audience. The audience listens, reacts, and retells what he or she hears to another audience, thereby ensuring the transmission of the folk literary material to others. Authorship is not individual; it is collective. Apparently, what the Muslim cultural communities must build and develop eventually is a body of written literature just like other Filipinos.