ABSTRACT
Faith-based education is central to the Muslim religion and has been a major element in the ideological discourses and changes in leadership and authority in Thai Muslim society since 1860. Thai pondoks are broadly traditional. The vision in many pondoks is of a spiritual renewal, and social and moral cohesion, providing society with purity and ethics, and less of the principles essential for enterprise and economic empowerment. The physical discipline, mental attitudes and intellectual development are all marshalled towards religion. The pondoks of the modernizing Salafist Kaum Muda did engage with a world of industrial scientific progress but they also emphasized moral discipline to ensure they remained true to Islam, resisting succumbing to material greed. This Kaum Muda perspective is similar to the philosophy of Syed Ahmad Khan of Aligarh (1817-98), who saw education in the European model as the route to socio-economic empowerment alongside the preservation of Islam and its moral codes.1 “Scientific knowledge and socially useful disciplines derived from Europe” were to be assimilated into Islamic scholarship.2
