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xiii FOREWORD In the 1960s and 1970s, Islamic education in Southeast Asia was not a topic of great scholarly or policy urgency. Although a few anthropologists recognized that Islamic boarding schools in Java, Malaysia, and southern Thailand played an important role in religious learning and the sustenance of local religious identities, the general assumption was that Islamic schooling was so incapable of keeping up with the demands of the modern age that it was just a matter of time before it was pushed from the national scene. In an otherwise thoughtful essay, one of today’s most perceptive observers of Islamic affairs in Southeast Asia reached just such a pessimistic conclusion about the future of the Javanese variant of the Islamic boarding school known as the pesantren, writing, “The pesantren has enjoyed an unusually long life for a traditional school, but it may finally be threatened with disappearance.”1 As it turns out, like its southern Thai counterpart, the Javanese pesantren did not disappear. Rather, like Islamic education across most of Muslim Southeast Asia, it has flourished and diversified since the great resurgence in Islamic piety of the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, however, Muslim educational institutions are no longer seen as quaintly irrelevant institutions. Since the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the October 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia in particular, the sense of wistful obsolescence that used to characterize discussions of Southeast Asia’s Islamic schools has been replaced by an anxious and often unhelpful media frenzy. The reasons for the change of perception are understandable enough. The teachers of the young men responsible for the October 2002 attack in Bali had educational ties to the al-Mukmin boarding school in Central Java, an institution alleged to have links to the terrorist Jemaah Islamiyah. The link 00 IslamEdu&Reform Prelims 4/23/09, 2:30 PM 13 xiv Foreword led to widespread fears that some of Indonesia’s 47,000 Islamic schools were being used to open a “second front” in the al-Qàida conflict with the West. In the Philippines, the Intelligence Chief of the Philippine Armed Forces blamed an upsurge in terror bombings in that country in the early 2000s on the southern Philippines’ network of madrasas. “[T]hey are teaching the children, while still young, to wage a jihad. They will become the future suicide bombers.”2 In Cambodia, government officials discovered that between 2002 and 2004 the JI military chief, Riduan Isamuddin, alias Hambali, had visited several Islamic schools, allegedly attempting to recruit militants for armed attacks on Westerners. Nowhere have the allegations surrounding Islamic schooling been more heated, however, than with regard to the Malay-Muslim schools in southern Thailand. As Joseph Chinyong Liow shows in this timely and important study, since January 2004 Thailand has been rocked by a renewed cycle of violence between state authorities and the Malay-Muslim population concentrated in the country’s south. Government officials have accused particular Islamic schools of laying the groundwork for attacks on Thai government officials. Liow did not shy from the policy implications of these allegations in the course of his research on southern Thailand’s pondoks. He wisely reminds us, however, that Islamic education in this region can only be understood by situating it in relation to three broader facts. The first is that, contrary to many media commentaries, the pondoks are not at all backward-looking or unchanging “medieval” institutions. The question of reform now being debated with regard to the pondoks is not new either. Rather, the question of how to accommodate Islamic education to modern markets, polities, and forms of knowledge has raged for more than a century here in Thailand and for the better part of two centuries in some parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East to which Muslims in southern Thailand have long travelled. A second point among the many fine insights offered in this study is equally relevant for scholarship and policy discussion. It is that, rather than being uniform, Islamic schooling in southern Thailand shows a competitive diversity of institutions and cultures. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the classical Malay pondok was challenged by new Islamic institutions proposing to integrate some subjects of general (“secular”) learning into their curriculum. The challenges to the more or less classical pondok have continued to this day. Indeed, Liow shows, they have intensified in recent years, with the appearance of Saudi-funded Salafi schools that challenge not only the traditional...

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