ABSTRACT
The historiography of Thai Islam, particularly in the south, has overtly and tacitly authorized the understanding of Thai Islam as bound within the ideological and political hegemony of resistance; there is almost an obsessive compulsion to paint Thai Islam as a “Resistance Society”. McCargo, Liow and Madmarn, all political scientists, have concentrated on citizenship, political rights, the unjust state and a threatened minority seeking redress through violence.1 This book constructs, through the waqf, a different narrative of Thai Islam, a social-economic history which sees resistance as episodic and casting a shadow of sectarianism only under the stress of poverty and rising youth unemployment. The Thai state was shackled by perceived threats to its independent existence from British and German colonial ambitions from the reign of King Chulalongkorn, who conceived blood ties and marital relationships as central to strengthening the state through clientelist networks and bureaucracy along the Thai borders. These perceptions of the state are clear in its dealings with the Muslims, a community straddling the Siamese borders in the north and the south, for it was provided with a measure of autonomy. Even the juridical and institutional reforms introduced by Phibun in the 1940s, by Sarit in the subsequent two decades and by Thaksin as recently as the first decade of the twenty-first century failed to disturb this autonomy. This led the Muslims to control public spaces of religious patrimony – cemeteries, mosques, madrasahs, waqf lands and Muslim cooperatives – through a cash waqf model. Within this “constellation of holy histories”,2 genealogies of elite Muslim families thrived in the south, in Chiangmai and in parts of Bangkok.3 The imam in local communities founded mosques and madrasahs, and combined religious, educational and judicial functions. Usman Miyashi (whose family has been prominent in Chiangmai since 1878) and Haji Sulong (whose family has been prominent since 1830) perpetuated their positions as a hereditary religious aristocracy. The role of Patani and its rich history as an important centre of Muslim learning and in Malay translations of the canons as well as juristic treatises of the Shafii School has produced a putative sense of Malay identity within Islam, with scholars from Sumatra, Cambodia and Burma flocking there since the seventeenth century. This declined only in the twentieth century. However, this strong
Malay identity has survived through the localism of the ulama. The ulama played a powerful role in local Islam, in new forms of Islamic debates along with modernizing visions of Islam gaining ground in the south through returning intellectuals from Mecca, Medina, Cairo and India. This localism withstood two attempts at centralization by the state. First, through the Patronage of Islam Act of 1945 and the second overture through the education reforms in 1961. The latter sought, through state subsidies, to introduce a national curriculum for madrasahs. Thai state involvement remained limited because of the diverse Islamic intellectual traditions and hence the continuation of multiple types of madrasahs, some fully funded by the state, while others were wholly private. The dissemination of reformist Islam in Thailand from the interwar decades did create a more nationalist identity within the madrasahs, similar to that captured by Anthony Reid in West Sumatra with the dissemination of Muhammadiyah movement.4 In the central and northern areas of Thailand, Indian philosophical traditions, including those influenced by Mawdudi I (1903-79) and Sayyid Ahmad Khan of Aligarh (1817-98), enabled ulama to portray themselves as local guardians of a global ethical Islam, even portraying jihad as an ethical ideal, not one of perpetual warfare against infidels. This infiltration of Indian thinkers into the South Asian communities in Chiangmai and Bangkok and some Malay reformists in Pattani influenced them into adopting liberal ideals as well as loyalty to localism. Similar to Jamaluddin al-Afghani, “they shifted intellectual gears quite as often as he did habitations”.5 Such eclecticism evaded the strict Salafists belonging to the Kaum Muda, who perceived science, reason and mixed curriculums as central to an Islamic renaissance after the crushing defeat of the Patani Empire in 1909. However, this momentum to radical reform from the Middle East and South Asia led to the ulama being divided between Kaum Muda and Kaum Tua (conservative), with much of their wisdom received through direct translations into Jawi of Arabic texts. The rise of the new curriculum after 1961 produced more public discourse on shari’a emanating principally from the ulama. Particularly vociferous were those tok khruus facing unemployment as a result of state reform of Islamic education. Broadening the curriculum in order to secure state funding from 1961 inevitably fuelled friction with teachers and frustration and discontent among the unemployed youth. But this narrow appeal of violence, as seen in the two madrasahs involved in the 2004 outrage at Kru Ze Mosque, had only tenuous connections to radical Islam. It was a model more of Malay nationalism and ethnic identity. This violence did not halt the processes of modernity pursued by Kaum Muda. What is striking is not the rise of resistance groups to this modernization but that the modernizing reformist movements remain localized in the south. This localism was reproduced in the Indonesian case where reformist movements like Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912, were not successful in Aceh in west Sumatra. This relativity of knowledge to place and time is conceded by Hallaq, when he argues, in the Egyptian context in the nineteenth century, that religious liberalism is relative to the needs of place and time.6 Thus, PUSA (Persatuan Ulama Seluruh Aceh, All Aceh Ulama Union, founded in 1939) held sway throughout
west Sumatra as a localized reform movement.7 Reform is not a permissive charter that can be transferred. It possesses a local pedigree and is difficult to transplant to other regions without the support of local networks. In the case of Thailand and Indonesia, ethnic differences of the Muslims may add to the difficulty. This produces a pluralism, tolerance and cosmopolitanism which have been traced throughout this volume, principally through a detailed analysis of endowments, the land waqf, the cash waqf, the madrasah, the Hajj and other institutions of the waqf. Even shari’a has shaped the personal status of all Thai Muslims but has minimum sectarian impact on Muslim politics or attitudes to the Buddhist state. The absence of a direct role for the Thai state in Islam, and in particular on the waqf, has introduced ambiguities in ownership of waqf assets and responsibility and occasionally conflict within the Muslim community and the state. The waqf in Thailand lacks a formal legal framework and also does not possess a centralized Bayt-al-mal (Islamic Treasury). This leads to zakat (Islamic tax), its collection and the responsibility for disbursement, being placed in the hands of local mosques. This lack of control is also visible in the failure of bureaucracies to control or oversee its activities. Such decentralization of organization and practices, however, produces diversity. While zakat committees do exist within some Mosque Committees, Islamic charities are part of wider associations and reform movements. The Thai waqf is thus a looser form of connection to the local area, a mutual solidarity, close to Weber’s idea of brotherhood, Verbrudderung.8 This loose institutionalization enables it to be free of politicization. Such neutrality is lost in Malaysia, where charitable associations are closely linked to politicians.9 It is useful to compare this laissez-faire approach with Malaysia, where all waqf properties are under the individual State Islamic Religious Councils (SIRC), first instituted in Selangor in 1952 and followed by all other states by 1974. These councils are responsible to state and federal authorities.10 In addition, various committees exist to manage the waqf. Moreover, in Malaysia, there is a Department of Awqaf, Zakah and Hajj to coordinate all Islamic activities, not just philanthropy.11 Hence multiple agencies emerged, including the Bayt-al-mal (Islamic Treasury) responsible for the collection of zakat. The rise of corporate organizations and holding companies attached to state Islamic organizations were balanced by government-linked companies to manage and develop waqf assets. These religious institutions and personnel are firmly subordinated to state policy. Even the opposition, Parti Islam Malaysia, and its offshoots were weak Islamic advocates from the 1970s, despite accruing political influence in the east coast states. There are occasional challenges to central power but the waqf institutions remain under state supervision and legitimacy. In line with this bureaucratization of Islamic institutions and in particular the awqaf, the role of the mufti and ulama appear as in the hierarchy of state public servants. Even the exposure of legal fatwas classified and coded on social and political concerns for public dissemination are dominated by the state institutions of SIRC, JAWHAR (Jabatan Wakaf, Zakat dan Haji [Department of Charities, Zakat and Hajj]) and Tabung Haji. The main argument for this is accountability both to donor and to
beneficiaries. Even at state level, the waqf management is coordinated through parliament and through the ministers to trustees, then to a government department, then to management of the waqf committee, and if necessary to a private corporation established by the trustees of the waqf. This hierarchy is linked horizontally to both the donors and the beneficiaries.12 The institutions involved in the management and development of waqf assets thus include companies, both state-owned and private corporations, operating in domestic and international markets.13 Islamic banks in Malaysia accrue religious funds, including funds from abroad, and yet charged an interest rate 2 per cent higher than conventional banks in 2011, and even in 2012, when world interest rates had dramatically fallen in the wake of the 2008 international banking crisis This close involvement by the state and the detailed structure of supervision of awqaf in Malaysia has not averted corrupt profiteering by some endowments, both state-owned and private institutions. The considerable lands owned, the businesses managed and the revenues accumulated are not reproduced to this extent in Thailand. The Islamic bureaucracies that have existed in Thailand since 1945, creating hierarchies of Islamic Committees radiating from Bangkok to the provinces, had representatives who commanded little support from the local community. The office of the Chula Rachamontri remained largely ceremonial. This has been changing in the last few years with the appointment of accredited Muslim intellectuals, such as Lutfi Japakiya, nominated to head the Hajj committee, and Wisoot Binlateh to the Department of the Chula Rachamontri, an important advisory post on Islamic matters. This extension of intellectual Islamic authority and orthodoxy to Bangkok extended Islam’s public sphere within an institutional autonomy. The peculiarity or distinctiveness of Thai Islam is that it was never subordinated to government control. Religion is bureaucratized but the secularism of the Thai state severed the connection of state and religion. The traditional connection of Islam to shari’a is missing too at a national level. The elections between 1933 and 1938 to official religious establishments and democratic elections between 1986 and 2007 reveal serious factionalism within the Thai Muslims. These elections introduced crony networks, money politics and a culture of vote buying. These elected personnel and Muslim ministers appointed to cabinet positions are not strictly religious representatives. Many, like Wan Muhammad Nor Matha, have lost the support of their communities. The last category of Islamic leaders, a tiny and changing group attached to violence, is not distinguished by theological erudition or by enduring local support. Their protests register more an anxiety over employment and fears stirred by the state and its agencies of control and repression. Their protests during important phases of Thai history, particularly in the south, reveal fears of loss of a Malay Muslim identity and cultural authenticity, particularly through the era of centralization under Phibun in the 1940s, the educational reforms of the madrasahs in 1961 and the undermining of religious institutions by the economic expansion of the state and its foreign multinational partners under Thaksin in the closing decade of the twentieth century.
