Search Results

This chapter provides a historiography of modern education in Thailand's Muslim society. The study focuses on the Malay-Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, where the vast majority of Thai Muslims reside and where issues related to Islamic education are most challenging. It is argued that the Malay-Muslim community has increasingly exercised agency in its attempt to navigate between pressures generated by the need to preserve culture, knowledge, and identity on the one hand, and the demands of modernization and nationalism on the other. One consequence of this attempt to transform Islamic education, however, has been the emergence of contestations within the structures of Islamic education, creating cleavages that mirror general changes in Thailand's Muslim society.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how counterinsurgency practices contribute to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a modern state formation with roots in the premodern Buddhist empire of Siam that secures its survival by constructing the southern Muslim population as essentially and hierarchically different. Reinforcing notions of the racialized, religious, and gendered Otherness of Patani, counterinsurgency thus fuels the very conflict it has been designed to resolve. From this perspective, it is possible to understand the marginalization of the southern conflict in official discourse, the denials of obvious connections between the insurgency and the August 2016 bombings, and the culturalization of a deeply political conflict as integral parts of imperial policing practices. The counterinsurgency motto “Understanding, Reaching Out, Development” has guided military operations in the southern region under various governments and juntas, and it encapsulates how counterinsurgency discourse is predicated on and produces the essentialized differences of the southern population. Most conspicuously, the motto positions Thai military as the paternal caretaker of the South and relocates the causes of insurgent violence in the differences of the southern population.

This chapter discusses how checkpoints were the most obvious signs of the militarization of southern Thailand. In general terms, the installation of road blocks from the beginning of the conflict has marked Patani as a different country within Thailand. More specifically, in day-to-day encounters between soldiers and those crossing, racialized ideas have emerged as a key marker to differentiate peaceful from dangerous subjects. The chapter outlines how the racialization of the southern population has historically extended itself to include certain ideas of dress and language, and it details how these differentiations are drawn in contemporary checkpoint interactions. It also shows the gendering of ideas of the Malay khaek, which entails attributing Orientalized and often sexualized beauty to young local girls.

This chapter examines a handbook produced for military officers stationed in the South, relating some of its central notions to an imperial construction of history in the modern Thai state formation that simultaneously erases the state's conquest of the Islamic sultanate while marking Patani as its Muslim feminized Other. The epistemological grounds on which the handbook rests are central to the whole military project of building understanding. In this narrative, Patani emerges as an ancient Buddhist land incorporated into Siam by mere administrative reform, Siam's crushing of the legal and political power of the former Islamic sultanate is elided, and the Patani population is characterized as adhering to a private Muslim culture. Based on this narrative, the handbook constructs state officers as paternal protectors of the southern population. The military aligning itself with objectivity is especially noteworthy in a conflict region where claims to knowledge — about history, in particular — are among the stated reasons for violence, and in a country where the government restricts open discussions about Patani's history.

This chapter focuses on the efficacy of Buddhist spiritual practices for Westerners attending a Buddhist meditation retreat in Southern Thailand. At the same time it shows how the introspective self-study involved in Buddhist meditation enacts a form of ethnographic research. The retreat in question had initially limited the options for the author to conduct his research, as it was structured to quiet the mind and draw attention to the immediacy of the moment. Despite initial setbacks, however, it became possible to conduct research through direct observation and limited interviews. Moreover, the author was able to employ a methodology to which Buddhist mindfulness training is particularly amenable through its emphasis upon introspective awareness: self-analysis.

The introduction places this book in the fields of social history, Southeast Asian Islamic scholarly traditions, Islamic revivalism, and the history of Patani and the contested Malay-Thai border zone. It outlines the theoretical and historiographical underpinnings of the work. Chapter one also notes the contemporary relevance of the work on a region