Jeerawat Na Thalang
The Nation
February 10, 2007
Too often photos and news reports don’t give you the whole story.
It’s never like being there yourself and seeing it up close and in person. This is the case when it comes to visiting the historic region of Patani, the heart of the Islamic South and once the cradle of Islamic civilisation in Southeast Asia, which has been making headlines over the past three years because of the ongoing violence there. (’Patani’ encompasses the three Thai provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.) A new generation of militants has emerged and they launch these attacks on a daily basis according to officials and news reports.
But neither the violence nor the level of brutality says anything about Islam or the local community in ethical terms. We in Bangkok tend to forget that the violence there has a history of its own, and that it is an offshoot of the historical mistrust between ethnic Malays and the Thai state over the country’s policy of assimilation, which could mean the end of the Malays’ way of life and cultural identity.
One can’t help but feel a deep sense of loss after visiting the Muslim-majority region. It has apparently been left in oblivion since its seven “hua muang”, or feudal states, were formally annexed by Siam just over 100 years ago.
The level of poverty in the region strongly suggests that the state has failed the locals in many respects. There is a lack of social mobility, not to mention cultural and political space for the local Muslim people, whose history has been largely ignored by the central government.
Today, ships from Europe no longer dock in Pattani. The region is now dotted with military bunkers, checkpoints and barbed wire at various corners and intersections.
While Bangkok’s perceptions of the region - as seen through brief television footage and sound bites, not to mention news reports that don’t tell the whole truth - is negative, a glimpse of life on the ground tells a different story. Life goes on. Chinese-Thais and Malay-Thais sip tea in front of shop houses. Young men and women stroll up and down the main drag leading to Prince of Songkhla University’s (PSU) Pattani campus. But the passing Humvee with a 50-calibre mounted machine-gun is a sad reminder that this great city is being held back by the violence.
Patani has every element necessary to be considered a great region. Besides having established itself as the centre of Islamic learning for Southeast Asia, it is also the home of the historic Krue Se Mosque, which has served as the heartbeat for Muslims not just from southern Thailand but Malaysia as well.
The renowned Chang Hai Buddhist temple is not far from the capital seat, and neither is Yarang palace, an historical site. Unfortunately, few of us know or have heard about these places or care enough to drop by and chat with the headmasters (tok kuru) of local pondoks, the Muslim boarding schools. It’s amazing to witness how one man can command so much respect and obedience from more than 100 students.
But if you go just a little deeper into these remote villages, you can see that there are great similarities between Islam, at least the local folk version, and the popular beliefs of Buddhism.
One 35-year-old tok kuru humbly informed me that his specialities were performing exorcisms and providing holy water. “Even Buddhists come to me for holy water,” he whispered. (I wanted to ask him to make me some but wasn’t sure if that was appropriate. Definitely next time.) The city, however, reflects another side of Islam, which is less superstitious and more tuned in to modernity. Yala Islamic College, for example, is not just a theological seminary but quickly moving towards becoming a full-fledged university, offering courses in various fields and languages, including Chinese.
But no matter how many of the region’s positive aspects charm me, Bang Ta, my trusted driver, along with Dia, his sidekick and a PSU senior, constantly remind me of the grim reality facing the community. As we drove through the region, he would point to the traces of violence here and there. Abruptly pulling over at a small electricity station on the way to Yarang, the driver says, “See, that place was burned down by Naew Ruam [’the movement’ - the term the locals use to refer to insurgents]”.
A breath of fresh air comes along the road from Hat Yai to Pattani. It’s an area where Buddhists and Muslims coexist peacefully. There is no explanation as to why that is possible in this community but not in the rest of the 22,000-square kilometre Malay-speaking region. “Perhaps it’s because the Buddhists can speak Malay,” he said.
Nervousness kicks in, however, whenever we get too close to Thai security officials. A plan to lunch in a seaside restaurant has to be dropped because of the presence of a group of uniformed and plainclothes policemen at the restaurant connected to ours.
We decided instead on a riverside restaurant in the next town over. It was here that Dia experienced what some anthropologists might call “cultural discontinuity”. A third-generation Chinese-Muslim Thai who wasn’t quiet fluent in the local Malay dialect, she was asked by the restaurant owner why she was ordering her food in Thai, and not her “mother tongue”. She just smiled and went on with her business.
The Muslim people I talked to say they are Thai even though they might not speak perfect Thai with a Bangkok accent. Bang Ta told me that one of his wives plans to join the border patrol soldiers to protect the community from the insurgency.
One night when I was having dinner at a rice-chicken restaurant in Pattani province, Muslim locals shouted and rooted for the Thai team when the match between Thailand and Malaysia was broadcast live on a hanging TV set.
They are Thai. Yet they prefer to keep a different lifestyle from people in Bangkok due to religious, cultural and linguistic differences. They prefer to be Thai on their own terms.
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