Free Muslim Mindanao?
Manuel Quezon III in his blog opines that Muslim Mindanao cannot be successfully integrated into the Philippine nation-state and must therefore be set free. According to Quezon:

...the history of Mindanao itself, and the history of Muslim minorities in other nations, makes it impossible to integrate Muslims into a Filipino state. We have tried since the 1930s but only turned ourselves into little brown imperialists in the process.

Muslim Mindanao should be given independence, with an indemnity to set any such state firmly on its feet, and then securely cordoned off.

Resty Odon of the Expectorants also agrees. IMHO though independence for Mindanao is no longer a workable solution-although admittedly it once was. The Christian populations in most Mindanao provinces are burgeoning. Carving a Muslim Mindanao nation-state would be so demographically challenging for our legislators. Only Sulu, I have heard it said, remains demographically pure.

Were there to be a referendum among Muslims on self-determination, there is also reason to believe that the choice for integration/status quo would prevail. The SWS in 2000 had a survey on national attitudes and a look at the attitude of the subsample of Muslims in that survey bodes well for further integration rather than independence.

In that particular SWS survey, 75% of the Muslim subsample said that they were Filipinos first of all, while only 18% said that they were an ethnic group first of all. Furthermore, the survey showed that it was mainly the non-Muslims, NOT the Muslims, who self-identify as ethnic members rather than Filipinos.

The above finding of the SWS cannot de considered conclusive since the Muslim respondents were merely a small subsample, but, as Mahar Mangahas put it, it shows that Filipino Muslims "do not consider themselves any more separate from Filipinos in general than, say, Visayan-speaking Filipinos do."