Good Muslim, Bad Malay: Interpreting the Current Violence in Southern Thailand
Saroja Dorairajoo, National University of Singapore
This paper examines the current violent situation in the Muslim south of Thailand by focusing on the Muslim perpetrators and abettors of the violence. While many works have focused on the external social and economic conditions that may have triggered the current three-year old violence in the Malay-Muslim dominated provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat as well as in parts of Songkhla, few works have interrogated the breakdown of socio-cultural identity among the Malay-speaking Muslims of Thailand as a possible cause of the violence. In this paper, I look at Australian historian Patrick Jory’s argument that deculturalization of Malay identity in southern Thailand is the reason for greater espousal of a more radical interpretation of Islam leading to the current violence. Using published sources, newspaper reports and personal fieldwork data, I show that there is a case for arguing that the loss of Malay identity among the youth of the three provinces, a result of improperly administered Thai government policies of assimilation, has led to a sense of disenfranchisement and made them easy targets for cooption by violence entrepreneurs.
