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173 Conclusion 173 173 CONCLUSION Islamic Education in Southern Thailand: At a Crossroads The quest for knowledge has always been viewed as an important responsibility and obligation for Muslims. This follows from injunctions in the Qur’an and hadith that among other things impress upon Muslims the need to “seek knowledge even as far as China” and “to seek knowledge from cradle to grave”, and which further instruct that “the first thing created by God was the intellect” and “one learned man is harder on the devil than a thousand ignorant worshippers”.1 The pursuit of knowledge in Islam is understood by Muslims above all to be an expression of faith. Therein lies a fundamental difference between Islamic perspectives on education and modern, secular understandings of the function of knowledge, which tend to ascribe to knowledge an instrumentalist value towards the advancement of material interests. Islamic schools do not have as their primary task the supply of labour to the state or equipping citizens for the modern economy, particularly when such aims may entail compromises of faith and creed. This is not to say, however, that the considerations of physical welfare and the fulfilment of basic material needs are not a matter of concern for Muslim parents, teachers, and students alike. Indeed they are. The point to stress is that these concerns are seldom articulated as the foremost priority. Islamic schools are seen to provide Muslim students with specifically religious education and their concern is, above all, the matter of spiritual well-being. It is to this end that they follow distinct and long-cherished traditions of knowledge accumulation and dissemination. Any assessment of the Islamic education system, whether for the purpose of policy formulation or the study of a time-honoured tradition and institution, must necessarily bear this in mind. Because of the place of knowledge in Islam, the Islamic school has through the centuries been considered a major social and religious institution 06 IslamEdu&Reform Conclusion 4/23/09, 2:34 PM 173 174 174 Islam, Education and Reform of the Muslim world. This should not detract from the fact that Islamic education is in and of itself hardly a monolithic entity devoid of its own dichotomies and dissonances. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, what “knowledge” entails, who enjoys the authority to define it, and what the appropriate forms and structures are of the institutions and pedagogies through which it is transmitted — these questions are subjected to intense debate and contestation, not least from within Muslim communities themselves. Needless to say, such tensions are further amplified by the specific social and cultural conditions within which the quest for knowledge is pursued in any particular Muslim community. This book has attempted to plot out the struggles of Thailand’s Malay-Muslim population in achieving and sustaining an education system that is infused with Islamic values and principles but which remains relevant for the community in the face of contemporary challenges, against its own peculiar social, political, cultural, and historical context. To this end, the book has focused on both the continuities and discontinuities in Islamic education primarily (though not exclusively) in the three Muslim-majority provinces of southern Thailand. The reform of the traditional pondok, and more broadly of the Islamic education system in southern Thailand, has been a subject of considerable debate in both scholarly and policy realms. Much of this debate, however, has been informed by the imperatives of “counter-terrorism” and “counterinsurgency ” and correspondingly stem from suspicions and allegations that Islamic schools are churning out militants. The prevalence of this mindset is unfortunate, for it not only obfuscates some very significant challenges confronting Islamic education that have little or nothing to do with terrorism or insurgency, but also limits and distorts analysis while marginalizing the very voices from within the Malay-Muslim communities and religious leadership that are in fact catalysts engaged in promoting reform. The fact that schools have historically been involved in the intermittent separatist movement is something that has been stressed on many occasions, not least in the literature on terrorism and insurgency. While such tracts are not entirely bereft of truth, their narrowness is unhelpful, particularly when they cause schools to become the focal point of counter-insurgency efforts in the minds of pundits and policy-makers without providing any nuanced understanding of Islamic education in southern Thailand. While we need to consider where to locate Islamic schools in the ongoing violence and to appreciate the role of...

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