Mucha-Shim Lahaman Quiling

Local Researcher for Sama-Sulu

Mucha-Shim Lahaman Quiling (Local Researcher for Sama-Sulu) belongs to the Panglima Saipuddin clan of Laminusa island, Sulu Archipelago. Sama and Tausug by ancestral origin, she self-identifies as Bangsa Sug. 

As educator and researcher on Traditional and Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Processes, she has been university lecturer of over 20 years. 

Awarded as Asian Public Intellectual (API) in 2011-2012, she furthered her research on the lost language and vanishing nomadic lifeways of the Sama dilaut (sea-nomadic and land-based) and Suluk in diaspora around the Borneo-Sulawesi-and-Sulu sea-basin. 

She was Minority Expert for the United Nations Working Group on Minorities (2004-2010). 

In 1998, she founded the LumahMaDilaut Center for Living Traditions that provided culture-integrated and values-based education for the Sama Dilaut (Sea nomadic Sama) of Sulu Sea. 

As Secretary general of Asian Muslim Action Network in the Philippines (AMANPHIL), Mucha initiated an alternative educational scheme integrating Islamic traditional knowledge and values in highschool curricular program called QALAM or Qur’an-based Alternative Learning Module, piloted in three public highschools in Jolo, Sulu in 2002-2007. 

Briefly she was faculty while concurrent director of the Sama Studies Center at Mindanao State University of Tawi-tawi. She now serves the Local Government Unit of Jolo, Sulu as Sangguniang Bayan Secretary, even as she remains actively involved among Suluan professionals, think-tanks, and public intellectuals advocating for conservation of Sulu traditional knowledge and cultural heritage and institutionalizing Sulu peoples’ vital wisdom. Given more “me-time”, she hopes to concentrate in freelance writing and research in traditional knowledge and advocating for the “One-Sulu” under the Sulu Current Research Institute and Sharif Ul Hashim incorporated that she helped found together with other Sama and Tausug professionals where she is its current senior researcher and secretary of the Board of Trustees. / 24 May 2022 updated on 15 October 2022 /