Tablighi Jamaat and COVID-19: Nations Face Delicate Balancing Act

Commentary by Don Pathan
BenarNews

Yala, Thailand

Returnees, mostly migrant workers, are being processed by Thai Immigration
officials  crossing the border from Malaysia into Thailand on April 19, 2020, at
the Sungai Kolok checkpoint. (Photo by: The Patani)

Countries in South and Southeast Asia find themselves in a dilemma as they respond to the threat from COVID-19, as bad as things already are.

They have to walk a fine line between enforcing public health measures to curb the pandemic while not offending religious sensibilities, such as in the case of a conservative Muslim network whose name has made headlines across the region in recent weeks.

Getting Islamic religious authorities to go along with a government’s public health initiative generally wasn’t a problem. But a misjudgment by Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic reformist movement, has proven to be detrimental.

Many followers of the India-based missionary group tested positive for the coronavirus disease after attending massive religious revivalist gatherings in Malaysia, India, and Pakistan, despite warnings from medical personnel and fellow Muslims to observe social distancing as a way to protect people from the coronavirus. Other followers who traveled to Sulawesi Island in Indonesia to attend another gathering, which eventually was canceled, also caught the virus.

Tablighi members have said their fate lies in God’s hands. Meanwhile, authorities in his home country suspect the group’s Indian emir, Maulana Muhammad Saad Kandhlawi, of not doing enough to curb the recent mass gathering at his mosque in New Delhi.

Nearly a third of the 4,400 confirmed cases of the virus in India, as of April 6, was linked to the gathering at the movement’s headquarters in the Nizamuddin section of the Indian capital, officials said.

The Delhi Police Crime Branch is probing Maulana Saad and others for violating government orders on gathering restrictions, India Today reported on April 15.

In Malaysia in late February and early March, about 16,000 people from across South and Southeast Asia converged in Kuala Lumpur to attend another Tablighi gathering.

Within weeks of the Malaysian event, it became obvious that the gathering was a breeding ground for COVID-19. As of the end of last week, Malaysian authorities had linked more than 1,946 cases to that event.

This cluster has expanded to five generations of cases from which 26,021 samples were taken. From Brunei alone, out of the 50 Tablighi Jamaat members who attended the event in Kuala Lumpur, 45 tested positive for the virus, according to one report.

Thai followers of Tablighi

In Thailand, about 340 Thai Tablighi Jamaat followers who had attended the Malaysian event or had traveled to Indonesia for the gathering that was canceled tested positive for COVID-19 after returning home.

This cluster included 170 residents of the Thai Deep South. Most of the infected ones did not display any symptoms upon their return. But one by one, they showed up in hospitals during the weeks that followed.

On March 17, only four cases had been detected in Thailand’s southern border region, but that number jumped to more than 280 by mid-April.

Thai officials operating in the Muslim-majority and Malay-speaking far South face a bigger challenge in containing the virus because the border region is home to a separatist insurgency that has claimed more than 7,000 during the past 16 years.

But Barisan Revolusi Nasional (the National Revolutionary Front or BRN), the rebel group that controls virtually all of the combatants on the insurgent side, has cooperated and heeded the advice of local youth activists, like The Patani and PerMAS, as well as other local civil society organizations, by declaring a cessation to hostilities until the pandemic is brought under control.

The Patani's Artef Sohko talks to Thai Army officer at the Sungai Kolok border
crossing as they wait for  the returnees, mostly migrant workers, from Malaysia,
on April 19, 2020. (Credite: The Patani Photo)

The first wave of armed insurgency in this Malay-speaking region erupted in the early 1960s – 50 years after Thailand – then Siam – drew the border with British Malaya. Violence from the insurgency arose in response to Thailand’s policy of assimilation, which the Malays of Patani feel comes at the expense of their ethno-religious identity.

The vast majority of the more than 2 million residents of this historically contested region identify themselves as Malay – as opposed to Thai – and share the same mistrust of state agencies as the BRN separatists.

Tablighi Jamaat members in the Deep South constitute a small fraction, numbering in the tens of thousands. While they see themselves as Malays, they do not embrace the cultural and historical narrative of the Malays of Patani, at least not to the point of taking up arms against the state.

Thai Tablighis Don’t Back Insurgency

Tablighi Jamaat is a movement that prides itself on being apolitical.

Its work mainly consists of reviving the faith of “weaker” Muslims to ensure their passage to paradise. Until then, Muslims should practice their religion as it was practiced during the life of Prophet Muhammad. This means sleeping on a straw mat rather than a soft bed and brushing one’s teeth with a twig rather than a toothbrush.

However, certain aspects of the interpretation of Islam embraced by Tablighi Jamaat continue to pose problems for Muslims who otherwise might want to join the movement. These include the veneration for the movement’s founder and his family, the ritualization of certain select scriptures, and the 40-day preaching tour that all members are obliged to undertake annually regardless of the depth of one’s religious intellect.

In his book “Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways,” Olivier Roy, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris, placed Tablighi Jamaat in the reformist camp, or “born again” believers who rebuild their identities through their rediscovery of religion. Along the way, these reformists, like the Wahabi and Salafi, break away from their cultural roots.

Roy pointed out that this shift did not exclusively apply to Muslims. In Christianity, such a shift is also taking place – from Catholicism and classic Protestant denominations, such as Methodism and Anglicanism, towards a more fundamentalist and charismatic form of religiosities, such as evangelicalism and Pentecostalism.

Reformists tend to reject culture, philosophy, and even theology to favor a literal reading of sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith. And as these reformists strive for “religious purity” along the way, space in-between of accommodation disappears, Roy said.

The Thai state may have a good working relationship with Tablighi Jamaat, especially in the conflict-affected far South where the group’s members don’t support the separatist insurgency.

But translating public health messages to people at the grassroots level, on the other hand, is still a challenge. As a Buddhist state, Thailand tries to be extra careful in issuing public directives that pertain exclusively to Muslims, such as cleansing rituals for loved ones who have died, as well as refraining from mass prayer at community mosques.

A perceived interference could very well push the Tablighi Jamaat members in Thailand toward the Emir in India whose stance is nothing less than a challenge to the governments around the region that are desperately trying to fight this pandemic and keep their societies and nations intact.

Don Pathan is a senior program officer at The Asia Foundation – Thailand. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not of BenarNews.

https://www.benarnews.org/english/commentaries/far-south-view/balancing-act-04202020160832.html

Southern Thai Rebels Score Points with COVID-19 Ceasefire

Commentary by Don Pathan
BenarNews

Yala, Thailand

BRN rebels in Thailand’s Deep South are known for being a shadowy bunch, but lately, the insurgents have emerged from the darkness and are trying hard to show the world that they can be responsible non-state actors.

The April 3 declaration by Barisan Revolusi Nasional (the National Revolutionary Front or BRN) that for now, it was ceasing all hostilities against the Thai military on humanitarian grounds because of the coronavirus pandemic was unprecedented in the history of the separatist insurgency, and the latest example of such an effort.

Left to Right: HRW's Sunai Phasuk, Gen. Wanlop Rugsanaoh,
Gen. Chinawat Mandate, and Don Pathan at the FCCT in Nov. 2019.

In January, BRN, the longstanding separatist movement that controls virtually all of the insurgents in the Deep South, signed the Deed of Commitment with Geneva Call, an international NGO based in Switzerland. It works with armed groups worldwide to encourage them to abide by the Geneva Convention, which regulates the conduct of armed conflict.

A month later, BRN issued a statement via YouTube, in which it urged residents of this historically contested region to heed the advice of medical personnel working to contain the spread of COVID-19.

The group’s new call for a ceasefire was in line with an appeal made by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for warring parties in conflicts around the globe to observe ceasefires in order to help contain the deadly virus.

Military offensive

Meanwhile, until just days ago, Thai security forces were carrying out search-and-destroy operations in Ta Se, a sub-district of Yala province, to flush out militant cells in this vast wetland the Muslim-majority far south. Thai troops wrongly thought the operation would be easy.

A game-changer came when photographs of one of the militants killed in a gunfight, and who was severely mutilated, surfaced; the same day also saw a powerful twin bombing outside the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC) in Yala – a stern warning by the insurgents to the Thai side to back down.

Sources within the BRN movement claimed they had not been aggressive. Ever since the coronavirus penetrated this border region, BRN operatives said they were on the receiving end, starting with the killing of five insurgents in a gunfight at their makeshift camp on the foothills of a mountain in Narathiwat province on Feb. 23. The fight then shifted to the wetlands of Ta Se in the weeks that followed.

There were concerns that the army’s offensive would jeopardize a peace process launched on Jan. 20 in Malaysia between the BRN and Thai negotiators. But even without the fighting in the field, the talks were already on shaky ground.

Before the formal announcement in Kuala Lumpur in January that the talks were starting, BRN’s political wing had met separately with Thai government negotiators in Indonesia and Germany, with the help of another foreign NGO.

BRN’s blunder

BRN’s negotiators went to the table without inputs from the militants in the field, thinking that the terms of reference (TOR) were the only thing on their plate. But Bangkok has never agreed to such terms with any of the Patani Malay groups because Thailand always has been non-committal.

The Thai negotiators and the BRN’s political wing were supposed to dwell on the seven-page draft TOR for some time. But it didn’t take long for their secret meetings in Indonesia and Germany to be exposed.

As expected, the designated facilitator of peace talks, Malaysia, was furious for being left in the dark. As a gesture of reconciliation, Bangkok decided to credit Kuala Lumpur and praise Malaysian officials for all the wonderful work that made the Jan. 20 event between the Thai government and BRN negotiators possible. So far, Kuala Lumpur has hosted two meetings between the Thai negotiators and the BRN’s political wing.

For the BRN militants, the problem wasn’t the talks or keeping the Malaysian officials out of the loop; the problem was that the political-wing people had started the talks without addressing key questions within the movement. To correct the sloppy mistake of coming to the negotiating table prematurely, BRN’s secretariat told its members to mend fences with the militants fighting in the field.

Even with that, BRN people still can’t get the new narrative right. Is the BRN willing to settle for something less than the right to self-determination, or are the talks a stepping stone toward some sort of autonomy to be followed by independence? These are some of the unanswered questions from the combatants.

And as the political and military wings of the BRN tried to patch things up, the coronavirus struck the Deep South. The number of infections went up considerably after hundreds of Tablighi Jamaat members returned from Malaysia and Indonesia, where they had traveled for religious revivals in early and mid-March, respectively.

Silence on the Thai side

Now, the Thai government has not yet said anything publicly about the BRN’s ceasefire declaration.

Perhaps this is out of fear that any positive statement, like welcoming the insurgent group’s humanitarian gesture, would upset the top leaders in the government and in the armed forces, especially Gen. Apirat Kongsompong, the powerful army chief. Many have said that he opposes the current southern peace initiative because he believes the country has made too many concessions.

Meanwhile, in the Deep South, Lt. Gen. Pornsak Poolsawat, the region’s top army commander, refuses to see the violence through political lenses. As far as he’s concerned, he is upholding the law of the land.

Three months ago, Apirat led a delegation to Indonesia, where he succeeded in persuading his counterpart to agree to curb any of BRN’s activities in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

He also got the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a separatist movement that secured a peace agreement with Jakarta in 2005, to agree to act as a monitor of the Thai-BRN talks. Thai negotiators and the designated facilitator in Kuala Lumpur were left in the dark and wondering what was Apirat’s real intention.

For many of the generals among Thailand’s top military brass, treating the Patani Malay separatist movements as their equals is a bitter pill, which they refuse to swallow.

For the time being, the army has retreated from the wetlands of Ta Se, but unannounced visits and searches of residents’ homes in the name of national security continue unabated.

BRN may have won some points by heeding the U.N. secretary-general’s call to silence their guns during a global pandemic, but the rebels are still up against a mighty army, whose anger only deepens every time its enemies become that much more legitimate in the eyes of the world.

Don Pathan is a Thailand-based security analyst. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not of BenarNews.

https://www.benarnews.org/english/commentaries/far-south-view/brownie-points-04072020145240.html