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3. The Challenge of Islamic Reformism
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
76 76 Islam, Education and Reform 3 THE CHALLENGE OF ISLAMIC REFORMISM The impetus to preserve and sustain religious and communal identities against the backdrop of a wider Buddhist culture has traditionally led Muslims in southern Thailand to look to independent religious education as an alternative to Buddhist and secular national education. Consequently, much of the extant literature portrays such separate forms of education as a symbolic struggle to gain recognition for Muslims. This tendency has been most evident in the case of the Malay-Muslims concentrated in the three southern border provinces. Less visibly, however, Islamic education has recently emerged as an arena where tension and contestations within the Muslim community itself have come to be captured and expressed. This trend now operates parallel to, and to a great extent independently of, structural pressures posed by state education policies which had previously defined the parameters of the politics of Islamic education. At the heart of these contestations is the advent of the Islamic reformist movement in Thailand, with its implications for Islamic thought and praxis in a hitherto traditionalist environment. As was the case throughout Muslim Southeast Asia, Islam in Thailand has enjoyed a long tradition of syncretism, coexisting with earlier Hinduistic and Malay religio-spiritual and supernatural beliefs and practices. In this way, both the transcendental and mundane concerns of rural communities were addressed.1 Particularly pronounced was the imprint of Sufism, which sought to harmonize mysticism with orthodoxy and which rejected rigid, ritualistic adherence to the shari’a. The resulting brand of Islam was pliable enough to reconcile all manner of local beliefs and customs with the 76 03 IslamEdu&Reform Ch 3 4/23/09, 2:33 PM 76 77 The Challenge of Islamic Reformism 77 monotheistic faith at its base. This syncretic nature of so-called folk Islam in Southeast Asia, though, would soon come under pressure from Islamic reform movements to abandon this characteristic elasticity for a more pristine, fundamentalist creed. In thinking about the emergence of the Islamic reform movement in Thailand, two of its conceptual pillars – Salafism and Wahhabism — should be examined, for two main purposes. First, as the following chapters will show, Salafism and Wahhabism are seen as the intellectual and ideological foundations of reform, by virtue of the fact that they oppose traditional Islamic orthodoxy. Indeed, local scholars and educators tend to apply these terms interchangeably when describing reformist patterns in the configuration of Islamic knowledge and education in southern Thailand. Second, these concepts are often treated in popular Western parlance in a pejorative fashion. Such treatments are for the most part impressionistic caricatures that show no proper appreciation of the complex meanings of these concepts. Indeed, when Salatism and Wahhabism are used as reductionist labels, significant differences among thinkers within these two traditions tend to be obscured. In more sophisticated and nuanced readings, it is often the case that continuities and discontinuities will emerge within these fundamentalist positions on different issues. Salafism should not be conflated with Wahhabism, for while they share some basic premises, there are also, as noted above, significant points of departure. And while in the minds of Western foreign-policy-makers these concepts form the ideological and intellectual basis of extremism, neither tradition is in and of itself a monolithic phenomenon. In the historiography of Islam, reformists such as Muhammad Abduh (1825–1905), a teacher at Al-Azhar and later Grand Mufti of Egypt, and his prodigy Rashid Rida believed that the “golden age” of Islam was the period that accorded with the activism of the early ummah and its Salaf, the three generations of the community of elders and companions of the Prophet. Indeed, there is a clear creedal injunction in which the Prophet himself pronounced the special status of the Salaf. In other words, Salaf includes the companions of the Prophet (the Sahabah), their students the “successors” (the Taabi’een), and their students (the Atbaa Taabi’een). Since the time of the illustrious companions, imam and scholars have been seen to be the righteous successors to this legacy of piety, and as such the term Salafus-Saaleh, the “Pious Predecessors”, has commonly been used to describe them. To the reformists, the Salaf represented the spiritual and epistemological core of Sunni Islam which was developed by the great theologians and thinkers of the third and fourth Islamic centuries. It is in this 03 IslamEdu&Reform Ch 3 4/23/09, 2:33 PM 77 [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:50 GMT...