ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the institutional location of shari’a within the structure of legal pluralism in Thailand. It treats the issue of shari’a alongside legal pluralism in two historical contexts: first, under King Chulalongkorn and, second, in the period after the abolition of the Absolute Monarchy. There is a strong diasporic heritage, and the ensuing hybridity and pluralism of Thai Islam and its local historical interpretations is extremely pronounced. Thai Muslims, while accommodating of competing faiths, were also influenced by selective appropriations of the ideologies of a few modernizing intellectuals, ranging from the liberalism of Muhammad Abduh and Sayyid Jamaluddin al-Afghani, to a more radical form of rapprochement with Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), to Ali Shariati (1933-77), the latter two emphasizing the distinctiveness of Islam and the need to insulate Muslims from ignorance surrounding them. A tone of caution is necessary here. Thai Muslim intellectuals, while accepting the indivisible sovereignty of God, did not advocate the use of jihad and a shari’a state to restore this Islamic order. Violence in the south is not about religion but about Malay cultural identity compounded by evidence of growing economic distress in a resource-rich region.1 What is argued throughout the monograph is that the Muslims are imaginatively engaging with the changing Thai state, and any religious violence is essentially sporadic and “conducted by a small group of dedicated revolutionaries”.2 Here I take the discourse still further and see the economic grievance complicated by a strong Malay identity and sense of history, and this pervasive rhetoric is further energized by a form of “living law” of shari’a and adat. This is similar to the position in Aceh described by Michael Feener, where shari’a is recast “as a tool of development” of self-preservation and light social engineering. So any Malay separatist agenda in Thailand is not a struggle for the centrality of shari’a in preference to formal Thai law but as a confessional cause for “equality, rights and good governance”.3 This accords with Ehrlich, that “[a]t the present as well as at any other time, the centre of gravity of legal development lies not in legislation, nor in juristic science, nor in judicial decision, but in society itself ”.4
