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Because of their Islamic faith (introduced from Borneo and Malaya in the 14th century), the Moro have remained outside the mainstream of Philippine life and have been the object of popular prejudice and national neglect. Moro conflict with ruling powers has a centuries-long history: from the 16th to the 19th century they resisted Roman Catholic Spanish colonialists, who tried to extirpate their “heresy”; in the first decade of the 20th century they battled against U.S. occupation troops in a futile hope of establishing a separate sovereignty; and, finally, they spawned insurgencies against the independent Philippine government, especially from the late 1960s on.

Historically, Muslim Filipinos have never constituted a collective entity. The various groups or tribes have often been fiercely independent, have clashed with one another at times, and have independently grafted Islamic tenets and practices onto their distinct local cultures. Nevertheless, internal differences have been outweighed by the common grievances that the Moro have experienced vis-à-vis non-Muslims in the Philippines. After World War II, their traditional grievances as religious and economic outcasts were exacerbated by the great migration of northern Christian Filipinos into the southern provinces, where they bought up land and tried, Moros alleged, to Christianize the schools and other institutions. In 1971 the Manila Times estimated that 800,000 Muslims were refugees turned out of their lands by Christians.

The main contemporary resistance group espousing Moro separatism—the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), founded in 1968—instituted a terrorist insurgency that left 50,000 dead, drew in about half of the Philippine armed forces, and drove some 20,000 Muslim refugees to Sabah, East Malaysia, before a cease-fire was arranged in late 1976. In 1976–77 the Ferdinand Marcos administration in Manila offered regional autonomy to the various Moro groups, but in 1977 the MNLF president, Nur Misuari, renewed a demand for total independence for the southern Philippines and gained diplomatic and military support first from Libya and then from Iran. The war nevertheless dwindled to Moro raids and ambushes, and the MNLF itself was reported to have split into factions, partly on the lines of traditional ethnic and regional Moro rivalries.

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