Thailand - Islam
The practice of Islam is concentrated in Thailand's the comparatively poor, underserved southernmost provinces, known as Greater Pattani. Here the vast majority of the country's Muslims, predominantly Malay in origin, are found. Islam is the dominant religion in four of the five southernmost provinces. The remaining Muslims were Pakistani immigrants in the urban centers, ethnic Thai in the rural areas of the Center, and a few Chinese Muslims in the far north. The majority of Muslims are ethnic Malay, but the Muslim population also includes descendants of immigrants from South Asia, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, and those who consider themselves ethnic Thai. Education and maintenance of their own cultural traditions were vital interests of these groups.
Except in the small circle of theologically trained believers, the Islamic faith in Thailand, like Buddhism, had become integrated with many beliefs and practices not integral to Islam. It would be difficult to draw a line between animistic practices indigenous to Malay culture that were used to drive off evil spirits and local Islamic ceremonies because each contained aspects of the other.
In the mid-1980s, the country had more than 2,000 mosques in 38 Thai provinces, with the largest number (434) in Narathiwat Province. All but a very small number of the mosques were associated with the Sunni branch of Islam; the remainder were of the Shia branch. Each mosque had an imam (prayer leader), a muezzin (who issued the call to prayer), and perhaps other functionaries.
The Ministry of Interior’s Islamic Affairs Section reported as of 2010 that there were 3,679 registered mosques in 67 of the country's 76 provinces, of which 3,121 were located in the 14 southern provinces. According to the Religious Affairs Department (RAD) of the Ministry of Culture, 99 percent of these mosques were associated with the Sunni branch of Islam. Shi'a mosques made up the remaining 1 percent and were not located in the south but are in Bangkok and the provinces of Nakhon Sithammarat and Krabi. There were 39 Provincial Islamic Committees nationwide.
Although the majority of the country's Muslims were ethnically Malay, the Muslim community also included the Thai Muslims, who were either hereditary Muslims, Muslims by intermarriage, or recent converts; Cham Muslims originally from Cambodia; West Asians, including both Sunni and Shias; South Asians, including Tamils, Punjabis and Bengalis; Indonesians, especially Javanese and Minangkabau; Thai-Malay or people of Malay ethnicity who have accepted many aspects of Thai language and culture, except Buddhism, and have intermarried with Thai; and Chinese Muslims, who were mostly Haw living in the North.
The National Council for Muslims, consisting of at least five persons (all Muslims) and appointed by royal proclamation, advised the ministries of education and interior on Islamic matters. Its presiding officer, the state counselor for Muslim affairs, was appointed by the king and held the office of division chief in the Department of Religious Affairs in the Ministry of Education. Provincial councils for Muslim affairs existed in the provinces that had substantial Muslim minorities, and there were other links between the government and the Muslim community, including government financial assistance to Islamic education institutions, assistance with construction of some of the larger mosques, and the funding of pilgrimages by Thai Muslims to Mecca. Thailand also maintained several hundred Islamic schools at the primary and secondary levels.
Previously, government regulations prohibited female civil servants from wearing headscarves while dressed in civil servant uniforms. This policy changed with the implementation of the Prime Minister Office’s Regulation No. 94, dated April 12, 2010. The new regulation authorized Islamic headscarves as part of a civil service uniform for female Muslims nationwide.
The roots of separatist identity in Southern Thailand, Mindanao, and Aceh derive from the same basic factors: insensitivity to local concerns, regional neglect, military repression, and the force of Islam. The federal government's policies of forced integration or neglect of the south, plus Thai prejudice against Malay-Muslims, has helped to sustain a long-standing insurgency.
The state, in turn, combined religious and economic concessions to attempt to reorient irredentist Malay-Muslims toward Thai culture and identity. Particularly under democratic rule (given that Muslims constitute the majority in many constituencies, especially in the south), cultural pluralism seemed to be taking root and Muslim unrest was waning by the 1980s. Notably, in 1986, southern Muslim parliamentarians established an interparty Al-Wahdah faction to promote and safeguard Muslims' collective interests and political awareness. Consolidation of this faction gave Muslim MPs bargaining power, which helped them to increase their representation. By the late 1990s, Muslims were playing a greater role than ever before in national politics, serving in parliament and the cabinet, and Muslims had been granted unprecedented freedom of religious observance.
In Southern Thailand, the threat emanating from Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO). and New PULO was reduced thanks to regional economic and administrative development and enhanced cross-border cooperation with Malaysia -- which has deprived both groups of external safe-haven. Jemaah Islamiya (JI) is an Indonesia-based clandestine terrorist network formed in the early 1990s to establish an Islamic state encompassing southern Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the southern Philippines. Its operatives, who trained in camps in Afghanistan and the southern Philippines, began conducting attacks in 1999.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra launched a series of "wars" on drugs and "dark influences" in 2003. These efforts seemed to signal a harder line, less democratic approach from the regime: the "war on drugs," for instance, resulted in over 50,000 arrests and 2,000 deaths in a three month period. The use of purportedly excessive force by the military, including against "criminal gangs" (some of them Muslim separatists) in the south, may have heightened resentment against the state.
Muslim unrest has increased since the late 1990s, and especially since January 2004, in the southern provinces, possibly coordinated by armed separatist group, Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO). The majority of the deaths in the far south since the escalation of the conflict have been the result of Muslim on Muslim violence. However, violence perpetrated by ethnic Malay Muslim Thais against ethnic Thai Buddhists in the southernmost provinces perpetuated increased tensions between religious groups and invited retaliatory killings and human rights abuses by both groups. While the conflict in the south was primarily about ethnicity and nationalism, the close affiliation between ethnic and religious identity has caused it to take on religious overtones. As a result there were a number of cases in which the violence in the region undermined the ability of citizens to practice the full range of their religious activities.
By 2004 at least a half-dozen different groups of varying degrees of radicalism were active, some of them reputedly linked with JI or al-Qaeda. Extremists continue to target Islamic mosques and Buddhist temples. On June 20, 2010, two men riding on a motorcycle threw a grenade into a mosque in the Sai Buri District of Pattani, injuring a woman and two boys. On April 15, 2010, unknown assailants fired two M-79 grenades into the Choeng Khao Buddhist Temple in Narathiwat; no injuries were reported.
Buddhist monks continued to report that they were fearful and thus no longer able to travel freely through southern communities to receive alms or perform rites. As a safety precaution, they often conducted religious rites that were customarily conducted in the evening in the afternoon instead.
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