ABSTRACT
Introduction Leadership within the Muslim community in Thailand possesses unique traits. The office of the Chula Rachamontri is the highest religious rank, yet its holders enjoyed only ceremonial power. In contrast, the imam, established in local communities, founded mosques and madrasahs, and combined religious, educational and judicial functions. This underlying solidarity and creation of a local civil society was led by the existing new generation of the old Muslim lineages of the period from the mid-nineteenth century. These elites comprised Usman Miyashi, whose family was dominant in the north from 1878, and Haji Sulong (1895-1954), in the south. However, this local space for solidarity and leadership bound by history and neighbourhood is missing in the official appointments of Muslim leaders to government bureaucracies under the Patronage of Islam Act of 1945, which created a form of hierarchical official appointments to Provincial Islamic Committees and to the Central Islamic Committee in Bangkok. These representatives commanded more status with the Thai state than with their co-religionists. This transfer of leadership from the popular religious scholars to state-approved appointees was also reproduced in the elections between 1933 and 1938. They were the same traditional Muslims who had cooperated with the state earlier. Karmukda Abdunlabut, son of the last Sultan of Yaring, and Tengku Abdul Jalal, also a descendant of the Malay aristocracy from Kelantan, thus continued the perpetuation of the hereditary Muslim elite. The tenure of Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram and his removal in 1957 introduced dramatic changes in the relations between the Muslims and the Thai state.1 Phibun had dominated through a small clique of military officers and Thai bureaucrats. However, his successor, Sarit, in 1958 transformed Thailand from being a neutral, mild partner of foreign powers to having aggressive involvement. Thailand was gradually moving into a relationship with USA more as a client state, not as a neutral participant in global politics and economy. This introduced an energized US-led market capitalism, reversing much of the aims and achievements of the 1932 revolution, in essence economic and political selfsufficiency being overturned. In accepting this Western economic aid and
technological involvement in the economy, the ancillary changes included an extreme form of crony capitalism, intensifying the relationship between the Thai state and its Sino-Thai partners. The policy fostered metropolitan economic growth through Bangkok as the core, while the Muslim periphery in the south was corralled to serve these ambitions. The direct impact on the Muslims was their displacement from the rural, resource-rich south. This led to an unfettered expansion of Sino-Thai and Western capitalists accessing rich resources of land, rubber, tin and oil in the south, with generous loans and technical support from the US. While urban Thais prospered, rural Thai Muslims in the south were facing impoverishment, having no stake in this dominant transformation of their ancestral lands. This rapid economic transformation had to be marshalled through an authoritarian leadership, first under Sarit and later under Thaksin. It is important to recall that, while an important trend of political change under Phibun had been a series of democratic reforms and elections, the state had also initiated a form of state-led violence. With the new-found prosperity under Sarit, this violence assumed a private gang culture, often assisted by institutions of the state.2 Sarit also used the media to stir up anti-left-wing ideological activism. With the Malayan Communist Party a popular bogeyman, this was supported by American ideological propaganda against a rising threat from communist Vietnam. The rising student politicization too was exploited by Sarit. The 1957 coup against Phibun was part of this fear of Phibun’s anti-Americanism. The coup in October 1958 by Sarit against his own government was to cleanse further this anti-Americanism and any lingering legacies of the past. Now violent politics resumed with the closure of parliament, and monopoly of authoritarian power was vested in Sarit’s Revolutionary Party. This extra constitutional military dictatorship was supported by an ideology of violence. The serious implications of this for the Muslim south was that the Thai state’s paranoia about the threat from communism was increasingly subservient to the USA and its patronage through the World Bank and CIA operatives. As part of this Cold War ideology, American international power was twinned with her promotion of Thai economic growth through foreign capital. The south, with its rich resources, was open to outside exploitation, a practice that had existed since the nineteenth century when Chinese from Penang tapped these rich resources and acted as revenue farmers for the indigenous and colonial states. The difference now was that violence was legitimized in the pursuit of this wealth creation. The nascent tourist industry in the south then took off under private entrepreneurship from Bangkok, stimulated by American demand, in particular for soldiers recovering from their engagement in the Vietnam War. The Muslim marginalization of economic and cultural space occurred with ferocity. Opening up the south, with no safeguards for the local population, was manifested in the 1962 Industrial Investment Promotion Act, which introduced joint ventures with foreign capital. This led to a flow of capital from the USA as well as from Japan and Britain. This, in addition to American military aid, posed serious problems for the vulnerable south. The theory of export-led economic growth with internal and external actors, including Western multinationals and
the Thai state and its crony capitalists, explains the binary divide between the Muslims and the Thai economic growth focused primarily on Bangkok but utilizing all the resources of the rest of Thailand. Muslims were barricaded in their villages while their lands and resources were tapped by aggrandizing foreigners, the state and Sino-Thai merchants.3 A further important trend was overt political factionalism among Muslims, exposing schisms which Chavalit, Chatchai and Thaksin exploited. This factionalism persisted and survived the democratic elections between 1986 and 2007. The Wadah faction, created in 1986 by Den Tohmeena, son of Haji Sulong, soon divided into two factions: one loyal to Tohmeena; the other to the charismatic Wan Muhammad Nor Matha, the grandson of a famous Islamic jurist (Dato Yutitham – shari’a judge) in Yala. Wan Muhammad Nor Matha took over the chairmanship of Wadah in 1995.4
Elections among these Muslim constituencies introduced crony networks, money politics and a culture of vote buying. The power of imams, which persisted until the turbulent 1970s, was a decentralized, almost autonomous, centre of power and social organization, with the clerics closely administering their local communities and jealously safeguarding their interests. Elections now introduced integration and disintegration of the Muslim-dominated south. The Thai state, unclear of the constraints and necessities of religion, was increasingly secularizing politics, though religious institutions continued to thrive. Elected personnel and Muslim ministers appointed to cabinet positions were not performing religious functions. Increasingly, they were an entrenched interest group clinging to power accorded at the whim of the state, legitimizing their control but increasingly being alienated from their religious constituencies. The following section underlines the historical context and influences in the evolution and mutation of formal leadership and power within Muslim society in Thailand. It analyses the significant formative episodes which illustrate the genesis and development of the three contrasting forms of leadership: first, the religious authority retained by the local imam, the tok khruu and the qadi; second, the religious office of the Chula Rachamontri, which, as noted above, though the highest religious rank, was largely ceremonial and was naturally conciliatory and accommodating of the Thai state5 (this was true also of the Central Islamic Committee in Bangkok and the separate Provincial Islamic Committees); and third, the primarily urban Islamic ideologues who played a central role in the insurrections in the south with an emphasis on the liberation struggle for a Malay identity and through incitement of dispossessed urban youth. This last leadership was constantly changing, depending on the nature and power of the Thai state and its police and army harassment of dispossessed young male Malay Muslims. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the most significant religious teachers, muftis or judges were the ulama. Entry to these learned professions were governed by education abroad in the Middle East and by descent from intellectual families. The intellectual lineages included Shaykh Daud bin Abdullah Idris al-Fatani (early nineteenth century), Haji Sulong (1927-54) and
Lutfi Japakiya (since 1983). Contrary to the current notion that Thai Islam is fundamentalist, and inflexible, what the leadership structures reveal is flexibility in accommodating to the prescriptions of the Thai Buddhist monarchical state and the needs and contingencies of power within Muslim society. Islamic leadership has displayed considerable variation, the long processes of political and spiritual struggle and quests for legitimacy, articulating the intellectual, ideological strands of Islam that are perhaps remarkable for a state of only five million Muslims out of a total population of sixty million. In politics and political mobilization, Islamic parties contended for influence, but this chapter shows that it was the Muslim masses, not their self-appointed political leaders, who shaped the democratization and integration of the “violent” south into the unified Thai state by 2007. This is clearly demonstrated in the section on electoral politics in 1948-2004. This again exemplifies the Thai case as unique, a legacy partly of the traditional Patani Empire, as a hotbed of intellectual and economic power in the extended Southeast Asian theatre, and partly the intellectual base for the migration and settlement of diverse ethnic Muslim groups in old Siam. There were Arabs and Persians from the Middle East, South Asians from within the diaspora in Asia, Chams from Khmer and Indonesians largely from Java and Mindanao, with an educated religious elite from Sumatra. The Sam Sam from the northern Malay states live in Songkhla and Satun, while the Thai Malays came from Kelantan and Keda-6
The ulama/imamate: religious lineage, ideology and leadership Family domination of the waqf in Thailand, particularly in the north and the south, led to the rise of a hereditary dynasty of scholars, the ulama, who combined their functions with that of acting as the tok khruu, the teacher in the pondok.7 This was further accentuated by their role in the dissemination of formative Islamic ideologies from the Middle East and Indonesia. Family members also held senior positions in shari’a as qadis in mosques and shari’a courts, which were only present in the south. These two processes of dissemination of Islamic ideologies and the validation of shari’a practices constituted pressures for both consistency and systemization within a strong oral tradition. Many of the ulama had been educated in Mecca and Cairo before returning home via Indonesia and Cambodia. The Thai waqf, unlike those in Singapore and Penang, possessed reduced assets of land, property, and business interests and entrepreneurship. Social prestige and influence were paramount. The mutawalli of the waqf was often an appointee chosen by the community and possessed a hereditary past. These administrative, intellectual positions of leadership and power, the ulama/imam, tok khruu and mutawalli, created an elite dictated not by wealth but by education and intellectual impregnability. Patani also offered refuge to foreign intellectuals fleeing from repressive colonial regimes, such as in the Netherlands East Indies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
