EDITORIAL: Put muzzle on TRT stooges

Cultural and religious insensitivity could escalate southern unrest

The Nation
Published on September 18, 2005

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra assigned 25 Thai Rak Thai MPs on a fact-finding mission to the
strife-torn Muslim-majority southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat to find out what is wrong and what needs to be done to restore peace in the region.

Six months and several study tours later, they came up with some innovative and
wonderfully callous ideas, including a recommendation for the government to close
down all Islamic boarding schools.

The findings made public on Wednesday were stupefying. Little wonder the Thai Rak Thai party failed miserably in the region in the latest general election. With this kind of shallow thinking, lack of intellectual capacity and callousness, the ruling party did not really need political opponents to lose in the poll.

Local religious leaders in the predominantly Muslim region cried foul after the group of MPs made blanket accusations against the religious schools, known locally as pondok. The charges were that they overemphasised Islamic studies at the expense of other useful worldly subjects, which they claimed makes it impossible for graduating students to further secular education at higher levels.

The MPs also said the schools also do not offer proper Thai language lessons and thus
prevent local children – who mostly are ethnically Malay – from assimilating into
mainstream Thai society. Or, in other words, the schools make them less Thai.

That’s why the MPs recommended turning all pondok into privately-run religious
schools which also emphasise secular curricula, to groom Malay Muslims in a way as
to make them get along better with mainstream society and compatible with the
modern economic and social development mindset. This high-handed approach
reflects Thai Rak Thai members’ ignorance and insensitivity to cultural differences
and traditional ways of life in the deep South, where the vast majority of Muslims
with Malay ethnic origins prefers to stick with their religion and distinct culture. Islam
and Malay culture combine to create a very different people with a different outlook
on life.

The pondok is not a normal school, as wrongly assumed by Thai Rak Thai lawmakers
and most government officials, but it is a place to train local residents to be “good and
upright” people in accordance with their brand of Islam. There are only some 300
officially registered pondok – which literally means dormitory – teaching young
people about the Islamic way of life. These are not schools designed to produce a
highly productive, competitive workforce for the economy as the Thai Rak Thai MPs
wanted to see. In reality, there are a number of private religious schools in the region
that provide lessons on both Islam and secular subjects. The schools subsidised by the
government exist as an option for local parents who want their children to have both
religious and secular training. The religious schools that offer secular curriculum have
done quite well as many of their students have successfully moved on to further their
education at university level.

Despite that, there is no reason to abolish the traditional pondok, as they are not competing with private schools that offer both religious studies and a secular curriculum, which are more popular among parents and students anyway. And then there are also children who, having finished primary and secondary education at secular schools, choose to further their study in Islam at a pondok as they want to deepen their understanding of their religion and culture.

They should be allowed to have the option to do so. Some ageing people attend pondok to learn the proper way to practise Islam before the end of their lives when they no longer have other worldly worries. For this reason, the pondok is a very important centre of learning and indispensable social institution of the local communities in the deep South – not dissimilar to the role played by the temple in a Buddhist community.

Except no one in his right mind is making outlandish suggestions to transform
Buddhist temples into anything else but what they have always been. The suggestion
to eliminate pondok is a divisive and very dangerous idea as it could be seen as a
move to destroy local social institutions which represent religion and cultural diversity
in the region. This unhelpful suggestion will not only fail to help reduce ongoing
violence, but will add fuel to the fire and cause further estrangement of the local
population from mainstream Thai society – and increased resistance to the central
government.