Essays on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Sharia and their influences on the national problems in Mindanao, Philippines.

These essays are conveniently arranged from general to specific issues of the Mindanao conflict and the central relevance of the Muslim South to the problem.

"This collection brings together for the first time 22 short stories by nine Muslim Filipinos written over nearly seven decades, beginning in the 1940s. Muslims are a minority in the predominantly Catholic Philippines and the integration of Muslims into this nation has been uneven. As the stories in this anthology reflect, there is no simple or single way to capture the complex ways Muslims from different backgrounds - but especially those from the college-educated middle classes - interact with and help define contemporary Filipino identity and intellectual life. Few Muslims have seen their work anthologized in major short story collections in the Philippines: this anthology, possibly the biggest assemblage of Muslim Filipino fictionists, is intended to give readers in the Philippines and elsewhere a chance to read and enjoy their writings." --Book Jacket.

A unified nation with a single people, the Philippines is also a highly fragmented, plural society. Divided between uplander and lowlander, rich and poor, Christian and Muslim, between those of one ethnic, linguistic, and geographic region and those of another, the nation is a complex mosaic formed by conflicting forces of consensus and national identity and of division and instability.It is not possible to comprehend the many changes in the Philippines?such as the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos or the revolution that toppled him?without an awareness of the religious, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped the history of these islands. These forces formed the focus of the first edition of The Philippines. Of that 1982 edition, the late Benigno Aquino Jr., noted that ?anyone wanting to understand the Philippines and the Filipinos today must include this book in his '`'must' reading list.?The fourth edition has been updated through the final years of the Ramos presidency, and contains a new section on the impact of President Estrada.