Filipinos were NOT originally muslims as the Balik Islam Group claims but  ANIMISTS or spirit worshippers.

Sixth and last of the prehistoric migrations, occurring between 300 and 200 BC, brought from the south our most numerous and advanced prehistoric people - the Iron Age group usually known as Malays. They filtered in fleets of dugout boats, up from thr west Coast of Borneo into Luzon via Palawan through the Celebes Strait to Mindanao and the Visayas. In addition to advanced, irrigated agriculture, these migrants brought four new industries: 

(1) the smelting, forging and manufacture of tools, weapons, utensils and ornaments of iron and other metals; 
(2) the manufacture of a great variety of turned and decorated pottery; 
(3) the art of weaving cloth on a hand loom; and 
(4) the manufacture of beads, bracelets and other ornaments of green and blue glass. 

These crafts seem to have originated in India, and to have spread from there to Indo-China and Southern Malaysia, finally reaching the Philippines by way of Borneo and Celebes. This culture eventually was carried on north into Formosa, southern Japan, Korea and central Manchuria, where it finally disappears. These Iron Age folk built bamboo and wooden houses on elevated platforms raised high above the water or he earth. 

The original religion of the early Filipinos was Animism (the worship of spirits). The Filipinos of that era practiced an animist religion which featured rituals aimed at pacifying malevolent spirits. The Muslim missionaries had come to Mindanao and the Sulu islands during the 15th century and, by the middle of the following century, a number of barangays, and some small communities in Cebu and Manila had submitted to the rule of Muslim sultans. While Ferdinand Magellan arrived on Cebu at the head of a Spanish expedition in 1521, and started baptizing animists and pagans to Christians in Visayas and Luzon islands. Manila was established seven years later and the Spaniards had gained effective dominion over the coasts and lowlands from Luzon to northern Mindanao by the close of the sixteenth century. The Spanish army had been accompanied by Catholic missionaries who converted the population to the faith, in their midst perhaps some bears of the illustrious family name Yanto. The Church in fact became a powerful institution in the Philippines, being frequently looked to by the people for guidance in political and social matters. 

Though Chinese merchants dwelled in the Philippines from circa 1000 AD and a system of writing based upon Sanskrit was employed in some areas, neither Chinese nor Indian civilization exerted much influence in the islands. It is also noteworthy that the two great religions of the Asian mainland, Hinduism and Buddhism, found few adherents in the Philippines. On the basis of descriptions provided by the first Europeans to arrive in the islands, it has been suggested that 15th century Filipinos, including the esteemed ancestors of the Yanto family, subsisted largely from hunting and fishing, with sedentary agriculture being limited to the highlands of northern Luzon. Most of the lowland-dwellers were organized into kinship groups called "barangays", each headed by a "datu" (chieftain). Within a barangay, which normally had no more than several hundred members, there were three social classes: the nobility, the freeholders and the "dependents", composed of share-croppers, debt peons and prisoners-of-war.

By Erica

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