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Thailand is usually closely associated with Buddhism, but since 1998 the country has been one of the observer members of the Islamic Conference Organization, and senior figures in the present and previous governments have been Muslim. Some 8 percent of the population is Muslim, and in the three southernmost provinces of the country they constitute a majority. Islam is ever more visible in Bangkok, where the demographic increase of Muslims is marked. Michel Gilquin, a sociologist specializing in the study of Muslim societies and a resident of Morocco, examines the origins of Islam in the kingdom of Siam, Muslim integration into the Thai nation, and the effects of globalization and modernity on a mostly traditional and rural community. In particular he considers the weight of history of the old sultanate of Patani on the present-day Yawi-speaking majority in Narathiwat, Yala, and Pattani, and the circumstances leading to "the troubles" which erupted in 2004 and which, alas, continue. Without proposing any solutions, the book explains the background to the present impasse, and considers how far integration of the minority has been, and can be, successful.
"This is a remarkable piece of scholarship that illuminates general and specific tendencies in Islamic education in South Thailand. Armed with an enormous amount of rich empirical detail and an elegant writing style, the author debunks the simplistic Orientalist conceptions of Wahhabi and Salafi influences on Islamic education in South Thailand. This work will be a state-of-the-art source for understanding the role of Islam and the ongoing conflict in this troubled region of Southeast Asia. The book is significant for those scholars who are attempting to understand Muslim communities in Southeast Asia, and also for those who want deep insights into Islamic education and its influence in any area of the Islamic world." - Raymond Scupin, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies Lindenwood University, USA "Few books address the sensitive issue of Islamic education with empathy as well as critical distance as Joseph C. Liow's Islam, Education, and Reform in Southern Thailand. He examines global networks of religious learning within a local Thai as well as regional Asian context by brilliantly revealing the intersections between religion, politics and modernity in an accessible and illuminating manner. Traditional educational institutions rarely receive such sensitive and balanced treatment. Liow's book is a tour de force and mandatory reading for policy-makers, academics and all of those interested in current affairs." - Ebrahim Moosa, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Religion, Associate Director, Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC), Duke University, USA "Islam, Education, and Reform in Southern Thailand is Joseph Chinyong Liow's critical attempt to map out the reflexive questioning, locations of authority, dynamics and contestations within the Muslim community over what constitutes Islamic knowledge and education. Through the optics of Islamic education in Southern Thailand, Liow manages to brilliantly portray the ways in which Muslim minority negotiate their lives in the local context of violence and the global context of crisis of modernity." - Chaiwat Satha-Anand, Senior Research Scholar, Thailand Research Fund, Author of The Life of this World: Negotiated Muslim Lives in Thai Society
This book addresses the complexity of Islam in Thailand, by focusing on Islamic charities and institutions affiliated to the mosque. By extrapolating through Islam and the waqf (Islamic charity) in different regions of Thailand the diversity in races and institutions, it demonstrates the regional contrasts within Thai Islam. The book also underlines the importance of the internal histories of these separate spaces, and the processes by which institutions and ideologies become entrenched. It goes on to look at the socio economic transformation that is taking place within the context of trading networks through Islamic institutions and civil networks linked to mosques, madrasahs and regional power brokers. Brown casts this study of private Islamic welfare as strengthening rather than weakening relations with the secular Thai state. The current regime’s effectiveness in coopting these Muslim elites, including Lutfi and Wisoot, into state bureaucracies assists in widening their popular base in the south, in the north-east, and in Bangkok. Such appointments were efficacious in reinforcing the elite’s Islamic identity within a modern, secular, literate, and cosmopolitan Thai culture. In challenging existing studies of Thai Muslims as furtive protest minorities, this book diverts our attention to how Islamic philanthropy provides the logic and dynamism behind the creation of autonomous spaces for these independent groups, affording unusual insights into their economic, political and social histories.
This book is an ethnography of the Malay Muslims of Guba, a pseudonymous village in Thailand’s Deep South, in the wake of the unrest that was primarily reinvigorated in 2004. It argues that the unrest is the effect of the way in which different forms of sovereignty converge around the residents of this region and the residents at the same time have cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. Rather than asking why the violence is increasing and who is behind it, like most scholarly works on the topic, it examines how different forms of sovereignty — ranging from the Thai state and the monarchy to Islamic religious movements, the insurgents and local strongmen — impose subjectivities on the residents, how they have converged in so doing and what tensions have followed, and how the residents have dealt with these tensions and cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. The phrase “We Love Mr King” or rao rak nay luang inscribed on the decorated, footed tray is one example of how the residents crafted themselves as royal subjects and enacted agency through the sovereign monarch. “This book represents one of the very few locally focussed anthropological studies to be undertaken in Thailand’s Muslim Malay border region since the upsurge in insurgent-driven violence since 2004. Just as noteworthy: the researcher is a Thai Buddhist who succeeded in establishing rapport with his Malay Muslim informants. Unlike most journalistic and academic research in this field based on hit-and-run interviews, Dr Anusorn’s work is founded on sustained in situ observation and participation with the local residents of the hamlet of Guba in Yala Province. Exploring a range of themes including local historical memory and place identification, Islamic practices, cultural rituals, complex local rivalries and violence, and interactions between villagers and military/state officials and projects, Anusorn skilfully highlights the co-existence and tensions between ‘different subjectivities’ in the context of the competing ‘sovereignties’ that inform the world of the villagers of Guba.” — Marc Askew (author of Performing Political Identity in Southern Thailand and Conspiracy, Politics and a Disorderly Border)
This volume provides an ethnographic description of Muslim merit-making rhetoric, rituals and rationales in Thailand’s Malay far-south. This study is situated in Cabetigo, one of Pattani’s oldest and most important Malay communities that has been subjected to a range of Thai and Islamic influences over the last hundred years. The volume describes religious rhetoric related to merit-making being conducted in both Thai and Malay, that the spiritual currency of merit is generated through the performance of locally occurring Malay adat, and globally normative amal 'ibadat. Concerning the rationale for merit-making, merit-makers are motivated by both a desire to ensure their own comfort in the grave and personal vindication at judgment, as well as to transfer merit for those already in the grave, who are known to the merit-maker. While the rhetoric elements of Muslim merit-making reveal Thai influence, its ritual elements confirm the local impact of reformist activism.
This book is the first to critically analyze Buddhist-Muslim relations in Theravada Buddhist majority states in South and Southeast Asia. Asia is home to the largest population of Buddhists and Muslims. In recent years, this interfaith communal living has incurred conflicts, such as the ethnic-religious conflicts in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Experts from around the world collaborate to provide a comprehensive look into religious pluralism and religious violence. The book is divided into two sections. The first section provides historical background to the three countries with the largest Buddhist-Muslim relations. The second section has chapters that focus on specific encounters between Buddhists and Muslims, which includes anti-Buddhist sentiments in Bangladesh, the role of gender in Muslim-Buddhist relations and the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiments in Myanmar. By exploring historical fluctuations over time—paying particular attention to how state-formations condition Muslim-Buddhist entanglements—the book shows the processual and relational aspects of religious identity constructions and Buddhist-Muslim interactions in Theravada Buddhist majority states.
Buddhist violence is not a well-known concept. In fact, it is generally considered an oxymoron. An image of a Buddhist monk holding a handgun or the idea of a militarized Buddhist monastery tends to stretch the imagination; yet these sights exist throughout southern Thailand. Michael Jerryson offers an extensive examination of one of the least known but longest-running conflicts of Southeast Asia. Part of this conflict, based primarily in Thailand's southernmost provinces, is fueled by religious divisions. Thailand's total population is over 92 percent Buddhist, but over 85 percent of the people in the southernmost provinces are Muslim. Since 2004, the Thai government has imposed martial law over the territory and combatted a grass-roots militant Malay Muslim insurgency. Buddhist Fury reveals the Buddhist parameters of the conflict within a global context. Through fieldwork in the conflict area, Jerryson chronicles the habits of Buddhist monks in the militarized zone. Many Buddhist practices remain unchanged. Buddhist monks continue to chant, counsel the laity, and accrue merit. Yet at the same time, monks zealously advocate Buddhist nationalism, act as covert military officers, and equip themselves with guns. Buddhist Fury displays the methods by which religion alters the nature of the conflict and shows the dangers of this transformation.
"This is an excellent and rare exploration of a sensitive religious issue from many perspectives _ legal, cultural and political. The case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand portray the important and exciting, yet very difficult, negotiation of Islamic teachings in the changing realities of Southeast Asia, home to the majority of Muslims in the world. Interreligious marriage is an important indicator of good relations between communities in religiously diverse countries. This book will also be of great interest to students and scholars of religious pluralism in a Southeast Asian context, which has not been studied adequately." - Zainal Abidin Bagir, Executive Director, Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia "The issue of Muslim-non-Muslim marriages has different connotations in the different Southeast Asian states. For example, in Thailand it is more a fluid cultural issue but in Malaysia it reflects great racial schisms with severe legal implications. This book is a welcome one as it examines the issue not only from the perspectives of various Southeast Asian nations but also from so many angles; the legal, historical, social, cultural, anthropological and philosophical. The work is scholarly, yet accessible. Underlying it, there is a vital streak of humanism." - Azmi Sharom, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Malaya
In Indian Communities in Southeast Asia thirty-one scholars provide an analytical commentary on the contemporary position of ethnic Indians in Southeast Asia. The book is the outcome of a ten-year project undertaken by the editors at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. It is multi-disciplinary in focus and multi-faceted in approach, providing a comprehensive account of the way people originating from the Indian subcontinent have integrated themselves in the various Southeast Asian countires. The study provides insights into understanding how Indians, an intra-ethnically diverse immigrant group, have intermingled in Southeast Asia, a region that itself is ethnically diverse.
When students from a Muslim boarding school were convicted for the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali, Islamic schools in Southeast Asia became the focus of intense international scrutiny. Some analysts have warned that these schools are being turned into platforms for violent jihadism. Making Modern Muslims is the first book to look comparatively at Islamic education and politics in Southeast Asia. Based on a two-year research project by leading scholars of Southeast Asian Islam, the book examines Islamic schooling in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and the southern Philippines. The studies demonstrate that the great majority of schools have nothing to do with violence but are undergoing changes that have far-reaching implications for democracy, gender relations, pluralism, and citizenship. Making Modern Muslims offers an important reassessment of Muslim culture and politics in Southeast Asia and provides insights into the changing nature of state-society relations from the late colonial period to the present. It allows us to better appreciate the astonishing dynamism of Islamization in Southeast Asia and the struggle for Muslim hearts and minds taking place today. Timely and readable, this volume will be of great interest to teachers and specialists of Islam and Southeast Asia as well as the general reader seeking to understand the great transformations at work in the Muslim world. Contributors: Esmael A. Abdula, Bjørn Atle Blengsli, Joseph Chinyong Liow, Robert W. Hefner, Richard G. Kraince, Thomas M. McKenna.