MALAYSIAN STUDIES

ASSIGNMENT
Book Review

Thai South and Malay North: Ethnic

Interactions on a Plural Peninsula

Name

: Muhammad Adib bin Aminurrahman

Id

: 18535

Course : Petroleum Engineering

Chapter 1
If the peninsular can be regarded as ethnically plural, then it must also be seen as plural in
historiographical terms. Different historiographical traditions that exist do not nearly correspond
to the ethnic groups that we perceive today as constituting the population of the peninsula. In
fact, ethnically appears only relatively recently as the subject of historical narratives. And even if
we look at the histories of the Thai or the Malay, the picture we get is not homogenous,
unified, ethnic groups. If we are come to ta fuller understanding of the regions history, therefore,
we need to address the deeper problem of how to deal with the multiple vantage points and
competing political interests in the representation of the regions history.

The historical record comes down to us through diverse range of sources; those left by
external powers with interests in the peninsula, especially Chinese for the early period and for
the later period the Europeans; competing historiographical traditions centered either on the Thai
state of Ayuthaya, and later its successor Bangkok, or that of the Malay state of Malacca; and the
histories of local polities. Contemporary historiography, as Reid points out his essay, relects the
recent division of the Peninsula into two nation-states. Indeed, the point of division, the territory
of the former sultanate of Patani, has also been the site of the most intense cotemporary
historiographical contestation; history has been mobilized by all parties to recurrent conflict in
order to give their political agendas the stamp of legitimacy

Reid notes that the creation of sharp borders between colonies that would become nationstates and the rise of modern nationalism proved central episodes in the transformation of the
Peninsula into a zone of contestation. Borders created minorities and turned crossroads into
backwaters. If the era of Field Marshall Plaek Phibunsongkram (Premier, 1938-1944, 19481957) shaped modern Thailand as much as did that of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (r. 18681910), its effects were strongest in the far of the kingdom. The Phibunist state sought nothing
more than to make Thailands peripheries less peripheral. Its linguistics, cultural, and educational
policies; the garrison mentality of its army and police; and the ascendancy of its bureaucracy in
all realms of Thai life could prove particularly disorienting and even threatening for people
outside the Central Thai heartland.

Chapter 2
In the eyes of centralizing states, of course, seeming backwater regions populated by
minority groups were all too easily perceived as zones of lawlessness. Recent efforts to put these
developments into perspective have often come up short. They slight the sentiments or interest of
one or more of the contending parties, whether those who hew to the Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur
line or those who decry the consequences or marginalization and alleged misrule. Deconstructing
nationalist discourses about Peninsula, in particular those produced by the Thai state by historian
Chuleeporn Virunha. Her method is to analyze the chronicles of four local political centers in the
middle part of Peninsuka Patani, Kedah, Nakhon Si Thammarat, and Phattalung. Chuleeporn
shoes that in the same way that these centers were politically absorbed within the modern nationstates of Thailand and Malaysia, their histories were swallowed by the nationalist Thai or Malay
narratives, with the result that now view these chronicles as local histories. Using a novel
reading of these sources Chuleeporn attempts to discover how local people perceived
themselves, rather than to take for granted their assumption of an ethnic identity.
For all their locality, Chuleeporn shows that from the sixteenth century onwards these
mid-Peninsular political centers were in fact subject to two larger contending orders of power.
These she refers to as the Thai and Malay mandalas, the former centered upon Ayuthaya and the
latter on Malacca and later Johor. The struggle for political hegemony in the region is reflected
by two competing historiographical traditions. Despite the local concerns of the narratives, one
tradition is clearly framed by the role of Islam, while the other takes place within Buddhist
milieu. In neither tradition, however, is there any concern to affirm the exclusive ethnic unity of
the inhabitants.
It seems, then, that ethnic identity formerly played a relatively minor role in
distinguishing people in the middle part of Peninsula. Yet this situation clearly changed with the
definitive political division of the Peninsula between the kingdom of Siam and British Malaya on
the basis of the Anglo-Siamese Agreement in 1909, the final abolition of the Patani sultanate in
1902 and fall of the Thai absolute monarchy in 1932, and the hardening of Thai and Malay
nationalisms in the middle of the twentieth century.

Chapter 3

The fault line of the Peninsulas political division, in what is today Thailands lower
south, became the subject of a protracted and on-going historiographical struggle between Thai
and Patani Malay historians, which is the subject of Davisakds Puakoms essay. The goal of
each side has been to establish historical legitimacy for the claims of the sovereignty of its
nation over Patani. For the Thai state, patani was always part of Siam. This claim rests upon
a number of texts edited and published by Prince Damrong Rachanuphap-Chulalongkorns
brother, founder of the Interior Ministry which implemented the thetsaphiban model of
centralized provincial administration, and the officially recognized father of Thai history. Its
Opponents, the Patani Malay nationalists struggling for national independence, refure these
claims by showing that theirs was once an independent and ethnically distinct kingdom, at least
up until Siams occupation in 1785 or even until its total subjugation in 1902
Davisakd argues that Patani certainly enjoyed periods of independence- contrary to the
official Thai claim that Patani was a vassal state of Siam since time immemorial. But the
nature of interstate relations in the premodern era was fluid. The historical evidence suggests that
Patani was, as often as not, held within Ayuthayas political orbit, even if at times only weakly.
Developing a metaphor derived from the Thai historian Nidhi Eeosiwong, Davisakd views the
relationship as akin to the competing radiance of the two premodern states: when Ayuthaya
(or, later, the reconstituted Thai state based on Bangkok) was strong, Patanis brilliance was
outshone by the more powerful state to the north.
Davisakds essay also makes clear the minor role that Islam formerly played in the
historical debate over the status of Patani. It brings a perspective absent from the recent
understandings of conflict on the Peninsula that place such overwhelming stress on religious
difference.

Chapter 4

Nothing has marked politics on the Peninsula in recent times so much as the drawing of
national boundaries and the consolidation of nation-states within those boundaries. Only with
those boundaries, and with the determination to effect or resist that consolidation, did the nation
of separatism become possible. In historical perspective, then, the notion is fraught with
difficulty. To level the charge of separatism means to stress the inviolability of national borders
as currently drawn. Likewise, however, to seek autonomy or special treatment on the basis of
ethnic or religious identity means to reify what in fact dynamic and ambiguous categories. For all
their tendentiousness, allegations of separatism and assertions of identify nevertheless merit
study. For those allegations and assertions bring into the open many of the normally unspoken
concerns that accompany everyday interactions in a pluralist environment like that of the
Peninsula.
The author agreed that the policies of administrative and political centralization that have
occasion led to conflict in Thailands southernmost province must be understood as part of a
broader, national process. That process ultimately brought about the political neutralization of
such previously important centers as Nakhon Si Thammarat and Chiang Mai. It led also to the
integration into the Bangkok-centered Thai policy of such culturally, linguistically, and ethnically
distinct areas as what is todays contemporary Northeast. It did so without the long term tensions
and recurrent hostilities that have attended Bangkoks efforts to integrate Patani. It is in part the
perception of overwhelming success in national integration that leads any suggestion of
separatism to provoke an extreme, hostile reaction from many in Thailand.
The centrality of Islam to that identity reflects in part the role of revivalist Islam in
Malaysia since 1970s, itself in turn part the role of a broader, global phenomenon. The identity of
patani Malays cousins across the border in Kelantan and, if in different ways, throughout
Malaysia has been Islamized to a much greater extent than ever before. In contrast to earlier
uprisings against Bangkok rule, Islam has today become virtually the sole discourse in which the
discontent and political ambitions of Patani militants are expressed. Ironically, this shift
resonates with the long term policies of a Thai state unwilling for many decades to accept the
Malay ethnicity of its southernmost citizens, but comfortable ascribing a Thai Islamic identify
to them. And the current convergence of nomenclature employed by Bangkok chauvinists and
Patani insurrectionists represents far less the emergence of common ground than a troubling
hardening of each sides position.

Chapter 5

A recent ambitious post-colonist revision of the history of Bangkok-Patani relations

emphasizes Siams split identity in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even as the
kingdom faced European imperialist pressure, that study argues, it developed and
imperialistically imposed its own variant of colonial modernity in Muslim Patani. In their
efforts to account for the particular difficulties that Thai national integration has faced in the
lower South. Minister of the Interior Damrong, to confirm Thai sovereignty within clearly
demarcated borders. These scholar emphasize, rather , the later assertive hyper-nationalist
policies of that era Field Marshall Phibun. His governments, especially his first administration
between 1938 and 1944, mounted intensive efforts to force the peoples of the lower South to
conform to a narrow, centralist concept of a culturally Thai nation. These three essays
narrations of events thus privilege the resistance of southern Thai Malay Muslim commoners
during the mid-twentieth century rather than that of the aristocratic Malay elites at the turn the
same century.
This privileging has four significant implications. First, invocations of Patanis history as
an independent Malay sultanate on Malacca model must be understood from the start as an
artifice of historical memory-making. They raise the questions of how and by whom that
memory has been made and transmitted. Second, good governance pragmatism according to
Kobkua, electoral democracy according to Ockey on the part of Bangkok could go a long way
toward bringing peace to the lower South. Third, the roots of the conflict must lie in the clash not
of primordial loyalties but rather of alternate modernities: the Islamic modernism of the
prominent religious teacher Hai Sulong Abdul Kadir and the too often underestimated and too
simplistically discredited civic nationalism of Field Marshall Phibun. Finally, the privileging of
mid-twentieth-century resistance directs attention. As do so many of the essay, to issues of
leadership in the interactions among ethnic groups on the Peninsula.
In an era that promised decolonization across the Malay world, Hai Sulong won a
following in the Patani heartland as Muslim rather than as heir to the vanquished sultanate.
Thanet argues that Islam is allowed him to build a truly mass political movement. The
aspirations of Pridi Phanomyong and his fellow Promoters of the 1932 coup-revolution
nowithstanding, Bangkok lacked any familiarity with such a movement. It was utterly
unprepared to cope with one, above all in so distant and different a lace as the southern border
provinces. In this perspective, Haji Sulongs alleged or actual separation is a matter of only
superficial importance today. Far more significant, for at least two reasons, is the way that his
career focuses attention on the question of leaders and followers among Patani Malays.

First, it is hard not to conclude that issues of local Malay leadership lie at the center of
the crisis of Thailands lower south. The political figures that have represented the lower South
in recent decades have often appeared impotent before the on-going strife. It must be asked
whether a new, yet unrecognized group of leader has supplanted them, and if so, what the nature
of those leaders appeal to their followers. It may lie in the prestige of experience of the wider
Muslim world. It may reflect a perception that other, older leaders, Malay Muslim, Chinese, and
Thai Buddhist. Certainly, multiple leaderships now co-exist in the lower south. As the historical
case of Haji Sulong suggests, failure to identify them, to understand their interactions with one
another, to appreciate the bases of their appeal, to see how they relate to national elites and to
listen to them is a mistake.
If state violence has marked the politics of the Peninsula, so have state perceptions of the
zones lawlessness. For Kuala Lumpur and Kelantan is perhaps no less different and
challenging to central authority than are Patani, Yala, and Narathiwat for Bangkok. There is no
question that Kelantanese Malaysians and Patani Thais have an awareness of these perceptions or
that this awareness affects their relationship with government.

Chapter 6

A remarkable acceptance of any number of hyphenated-Thai identities, though not with

Malay-Thai identity, marks the renewed Thai cosmopolitanism that Kobkua stresses. The era
in which the nation-state made an easy target may be passing. Again, its negative traits may
prove more contingent or temporarily specific than many of us have realized. National
integration may in this context play a different, more benign role than even in the very recent
past. At the same time, however, international linkages-cultural, commercial, political, and
religious, may in this new era promote not the pluralism of the past but rather new divisions.
The origins of renewed cosmopolitanism in Thailands rapid economic growth during the
era of globalization raise several troubling questions. Does this cosmopolitanism, for example,
have room for those who do not or cannot take part in that growth? In the context of resurgent
contacts between the southern Muslim-majority provinces and the wider Muslim world, does it
run the risk of provoking a second clash of modernities such as that which brought Hai Sulong
and Phibunist state to grief?
Undoubtedly both Thai capitalism and Patani Islam have changed. Each allows both more
and also less space for the patterns of pluralism that previously obtained in the lower South.
Whether either can abide the restoration of what was long the defining character of the Peninsula
remains to be seen.

Chapter 7

Chinese have for several centuries appeared as significant, omnipresent minority

segments across the Peninsula. Yet always central to their circumstances has been the need to
navigate plural contexts. Without privileging Chinese actors on the Peninsula, these essay thus
address some aspects of their history as sources of insight into the history of wider processes of
interaction. Fundamental to these processes, as they involved all populations on the Peninsula,
have been the influence of outside centers, the role of capital and commerce, relationships with
the state, and the dynamics of intra-ethnic leadership and organization

Previous scholarship on the Peninsula has privileged certain Chinese roles and
experiences. Emphasis has fallen on two overlapping phenomena. One is leading role taken by
Chinese revenue farmers serving the Thai state in the political integration of the South with
Bangkok during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese commercial, social, and
educational center of Penang in the same period.

Curiously, that two-dimensional understanding of modern Chinese role and experiences

on the Peninsula prevails despite much scholarship on the Chinese populations in the zone that is
focus in this book. First, the Wong and Montenasso essays explicitly revisit the centrality of
Penang and ties to its Thai hinterland. Wong Yee Tuans essay on the Big Five Chinese
families of Penang and their contacts with southern Thailand begins to fill the gaps. In pointing
out that those families joined Khaw family undertakings as an umbrella for activities of their
own. By the end of late nineteenth century, Penangs economic importance reflected the
sweeping capitalist transformation of the west coast of Malaya. As Penangs hinterland, the west
coast of peninsular Siam diverged considerably from its east coast. Wongs essay nevertheless
makes clear that Penang Chinese connections extended across the Peninsula to the east coast of
Siam.

Chapter 8

The contrast between rural Peranakan Chinese of Kelantan and town Chinese of the same
state drawn in Teos paper suggest the unevenness, even among Chinese, of market penetration
on the Peninsula. At the same time, Montesano argues explicitly that far greater exposure to
market forces and outside capital has distinguished the history of both upper and lower South of
Thailand from that of other regions of the country. Trangs position in the world economy both
shaped the thinking and delimited the options of its twentieth-century Chinese civic leaders. The
same conditions applied across the Thai South.
Wongs essay revelas the distinctiveness of the Thai South not so much from the rest of
Thailand as from the rest of Penangs commercial hinterland. Penang Chinese created the
linkages that spanned the capitalist economy centered on the island. In their dealings with
Malaya and Sumatra, the Big Five families developed relationships with such other, nonChinese, immigrant minorities as Hdrami traders and Jawi Peranakans, but, it would seem rarely
or only insignificantly with indigenous associates. In contrasts, their important associations in
Siam tied these families not to other minorities but rather to other Chinese, albeit Chinese whom
the Thai state had granted titles in recognition of previous service.

Chapter 9

The Peranakan Chinese of Kelantan demonstrate the remarkable persistence, even up to

the present, of a stable, culturally intermediate creole population. The big Five Chinese families
of Penang and the association for the Promotion of Education in Trang also occupied
intermediate positions, alternately as mediators and as agents. While they mediated between
world markets and the Peninsula, the Penang Chinese also served as agents of international
market forces. Likewise, the promoters of Chinese-sponsored education in Trang negotiated their
communitys relationship with the Thai state even as they furthered that states local interests.
Wongs and Montesanos essays thus revisit a theme that like the issue of market forces and
capitalism recurs: the need to scrutinize intra-ethnic leadership and organization.

As John Furnivall argued many decades ago in Colonial Policies and Practice, relations
within ethnically defined segments of the plural society merit no less scrutiny than do relations
among segments. On the Peninsula, leaders, associations, and societies, ranging from those like
Trang Association for the Promotion of Education, to Penangs Kian Teik Tong and Red Flag
Society, and to the recently formed Kelantan Chinese Peranakan Association, have served to
mediate members and followers relationship to local, ethnically and politically complex,
contexts. They have also swung those members and followers behind their leaderships goals.
The authors highlight the unmistakable connection between the bases of influence within
Peninsular Chinese, Malay and Thai societies on the one hand and interactions among those
societies on the other.

Chapter 10

One of tragedies born of the violence that re-erupted in the lower part of southern
Thailand in early 2004 was its immediate and consistent misrepresentation, particularly in the
media, as a religious conflict. They demonstrate the plural, complex, and above all rapidly
changing religious scene in the border zone of southern Thailand and northern Malaysia.
Buddhist, Islamic, and Chinese religious traditions have historically rubbed shoulders with one
another and with Thai, Malay, and Chinese ethnic identities in that zone. In some regards, those
ethnic identities have emerged or at the very last been reconceived, reinforced, and formalized
only in relatively recent times. The result is a setting in which the political boundaries of
contemporary nation-states conform to neither ethnic nor religious frontiers. It is also setting in
which episodic religious intolerance contrast with enduring habits of accommodation and with
the similar cultural roots of peoples on the Peninsula.

Alexander Horstmanns essay compares the concepts and practices of pilgrimage among
Buddhists, Muslims, and devotees of Chinese religion in southern Thailand. The increasing case,
comfort, and affordability of international travel have transformed the logistics of pilgrimage in
Islam, above all Haj. Muslim pilgrimage is internationalized as it occur in Middle East. In
contrast, Buddhist society on pilgrimage is nationalized. Thai Buddhist tend to see Thailand as
the center of their religious world. Local Buddhist revere such Muslim ancestral figures in the
south as Thuat Klai and Sultan Sulaiman. Malay Muslim hold certain Buddhist monks is great,
open respect. And both Buddhists and Muslims participate actively in Chinese vegetarian
festivals. Significant religious interaction is thus a defining element of the socio-cultural
landscape of the middle part of Peninsula.

Chapter 11

One rather strange anomaly amidst this interaction concerns the popular Thai cult
surrounding the figure of Luang Pho Thuat. The cult derives from the legend of charismatic
monk with supernatural powers who is supposed to have propagated Buddhism in the South in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It has devotees from Malaysia, Thailand and
also Singapore. Yet, this cult is in the centered of Malay Muslim province, Patani. Jorys study of
the history of Luang Pho Thuat cult argues that the monks national and international popularity
is, however, relatively recent. A phenomenon of the post 1945 era, its origin can be dated to the
outbreak of an ethnic-Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist insurgency and to rise of Malay
nationalism and Patani Malay separatism. The popularity of the cult is thus intertwined with the
Thai states fears over its control of the southern Malay-majority provinces.

Chapter 12

Irving Johnsons essay discuss the significantly different religious scene in Kelantan,
Malaysia. It addresses the stories of Buddhist supernaturalism popular among Thais and Chinese
in Malay Muslim Kelantan. Harmony traditionally characterized relations between Malay
Muslims and the ethnic-Thai Buddhists who comprised but one percent of states population. The
two communities, Johnson has it, inhabited a shared ritual universe held in place by the
[Malays] belief in the magical efficacy of Thai monks and their amulets and in the Thais feeling
of beneficial clientelism under sultans rule. At the same time, a far tighter connection binds
religion and ethnic identity in Malaysia than in Thailand, a point all too often lost on casual
obeservers of violence in Patani. That connection meant that ethnic Thais in the state have drawn
on Buddhism as a force for solidarity in a way that has been largely inconceivable north of the
Thai-Malaysian border. They maintained successful and deliberate relations both with the Malay
sultan of Kelantan and with the Bangkok-centered Thai Buddhist Sangha.

Like much else in the religious life of the Peninsula, the foundations of Kelantanese
Buddhism are now very much in flux. The authors identify a hardening of the ethnic divide in
Kelantan as a result not least of the neo-modernist turn that Islam there has taken. But other
factors account for this hardening. In particular, the increasingly prominent role of Chinese
temple patrons and its effect on Kelantanese Buddhism have roved significant. The support of
Chinese from as far away as Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore has become essential to the
financial health of many of the states Thai Buddhist temles. Only hastening the sinification of
temples, larger and larger numbers of tourist-pilgrims from China itself have also joined these
Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese visiting them. With the very survival of Kelantanese Thai
Buddhist temples now dependent on such Chinese patronage from outside the state, alternatives
to this development are hardly viable.