 Advances in Anthropology 2012. Vol.2, No.3, 161-168 Published Online August 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/aa) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/aa.2012.23019 Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 161 There Are ponoks, and There Are ponoks: Traditional Religious Boarding Schools in Thailand’s Far-South* Kee Howe Yong Department of Anthropology, McMaster U ni v e rsity, Hamilton, Canada Email: yongk@m cmaster.ca Received May 23rd, 2012; revised June 26th, 2012; accepted July 10th, 2012 There has been a vast corpus of literature on Islam and Muslims since 9/11 that sought to locate the basis of Muslimness in some primordial essentialist cultural value. Since then, many Muslim religious boarding schools in predominantly Muslim countries in South and Southeast Asia have been policed and raided. This essay, based on fieldwork conducted in Thailand’s far-south, hope to provide a different picture from what has commonly been portrayed about the ponok (traditional Muslim schools), as rigidly strict and pi- ous or as the playground for radical Islam. What concern me are the lives and livelihoods of the ponok students should the fear about Islam continues unabated, or when these children have no idea why they are being sought after or whose interests they are serving. Keywords: Thailand’s Far-South; ponok; War on Terror; Violence; Muslims Introduction The Bush administration unilateral declaration of a global war on terror comes with a clear binary choice: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”—shaping the discourse that is largely based on the threat of a political enemy, imagi- nary or exaggerated (Schmitt, 1996)1. The political enemy is also indeterminate in the sense that they are never given any formal or legal channel to surrender. Words like militant, ex- tremist, terrorist, Islamo-fascist, and so on have since become the lexicon for talking about the indeterminate enemy. In many ways, the discourse on the war on terror is predicated on a tru- ism of a certain cultural and political theory which goes some- thing like this: the more modern (Westernized) a society be- comes, the more its religious tradition decline or, at best, pri- vatized. In such a view of historical development, there is a “myth” in the sense described by Roland Barthes (1972), pre- cisely not in the received sense that it is false, but obscures are the well springs of religiosity running through all societies, including the West2. The goal of my essay is modest. I want to follow the position taken up by Mahmood Mamdani (2002) and others that such binary way of framing the issue has fueled “culture talk” that often ended up offering cultural explanations of political out- comes that tend to avoid certain history and issues. In the case of Thailand’s far south, I am referring the effects of the long- standing state assimilation policies and the current conflict on its diverse Muslim communities. Moreover, by equating politi- cal tendencies with entire communities defined in cultural terms it also encourages collective discipline and punishment (2002: p. 767). What is equally crucial, as Talal Asad (2003) points out, is not an analysis on the origin of binary representations of so-called secular and religious societies itself but “the forms of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable” in the concatenations of “the new concept of ‘religion’, ‘ethics’, and ‘politics’” (2003: pp. 2-7). Such culture talk could very well be called a “leveling crowds” discourse, to borrow the term coined by Tambiah (1996), targeting the diverse Muslim communities in Thailand’s far-south with antiterrorist rhetoric, in essence, treating Muslimness as an object of criminality. The focus of this essay is on the effects of the current war on terror on the ponok (traditional Islamic boarding schools) in the far- south3. Summarily labeled as the bastion of religious conservatism, most Muslim religious boarding schools—(madrasah, ponok (pondok) or pesantren)—from Kandahar to other designated Muslim sites have been accused as contemporary “dens of ter- ror” or potential “jihad factories”. They have become one of the metaphors for Islamic extremist religiosity the so-called West has to confront with, becoming singularly the most dominant metaphor for evil. In predominantly Muslim countries in South and Southeast Asia such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as at Thailand’s far-south, many Muslim religious schools were policed and raided. In many instances some were forced to close. Following the Bali bombing in 2002, Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin was one of the first leaders in Southeast Asia to jump onboard the global war on terror, unleashing its security forces on a hunt for alleged Islamic militants/terrorists in its far-south. Meanwhile, the rest of its *The research for this essay was supported by grants from McMaster Uni- versity Art Research Board and the Can adian Social Sciences and Humani- ties Research Council. 1Coming from Karl Schmitt (1996), the very concept of the politicalis redicated on the existence ( fabrication) of an enemy. One coul d argue that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 interventionist posture toward the Mid- dle East represents a longstanding United States bellicose foreign policy. Before there is Terrorism, there was Communism. And just as the threat o Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, the current war on terror is in practice an American war (including its allies) against a largely imagi- nary set of enemies. See, also Bradley (2008); Khalidi (2009). 2For a review of the unprecedented upsurge in popular and voluntary religious ritual, as sociati on, and o bservatio n in co ntemporar y Asia an d elsewher e, see Hefner (2010). For Africa, see Comaroff and Comaroff (2003). For the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States, see Crapanzano (2003). 3The local pronunciation for these traditional Islamic boarding schools in Thailand’s far-south is ponok (and not pondok as they are called in other arts of the Mala Archi ela o .  K. H. YONG ASEAN member countries were curiously silent about Thak- sin’s bloody campaign as they too were likewise engaged in their own anti-terror campaigns. At the same time we have witnessed the proliferation of a vast corpus of literature—many of them bestsellers—on Islam and Muslims that sought to locate the basis of Muslimness in some primordial essentialist value that is a menace to civilized life and humanity; an antithesis to the so-called modern neo- liberal ethics, serving Samuel Huntington and those that fol- lowed in his wake a way of essentializing the Muslim world of its diverse subjects, and thus legible4. To be sure, the hysterical global mainstream media is adding more fuel to the fire with their spurious claims about terrorists and terrorism5. Written in the context of rising fascism in Germany, Carl Schmitt’s phi- losophical reflections deserve our full attention: “When a state fights its political enemy in the name of hu- manity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. As the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy… The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humani- tarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism… It would be more exact to say that politics continues to remain the destiny, but what has occurred is that economics has become political and thereby the destiny” (1996 (1932): pp. 54-78). Even though Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1998) that demonized Islam in its entirety has been increasingly discre- dited, it had been replaced with a modified view that terrorists are predominantly link with Wahabi Islam—never mind its ludicrous interpretation of Wahabism. This view claims that Wahabism, predominantly from Saudi Arabia had been ex- ported to Afghanistan, the United States and elsewhere in re- cent decades (Mamdani 2002: p. 766). Since then Muslims all over the world have not only been increasingly essentialized but also “Arabicized” and radicalized. It is as if Allah is making a comeback, albeit in a very post-modern ecumenical way, so much so that our imagination and understanding of Islam have been increasingly restricted to a few religious lexicon, attire (as in the fullfaced niqãb by Muslim women), and gender segrega- tion. What is missing is the pluralism of Muslim politics, its diverse and competing visions of Islam and nation among the Muslim world (Hefner, 2002). In fact, many traditional ulamas in Southeast Asia have also, unhelpfully, if not incorrectly, accused the revival of modern Islam as a form of Wahabism and extremists6. Lost in the midst of all the paranoia about Islam and Muslims is the economy of the war on terror—the enormous profit for the producers of arms, private security industry, surveillance technologies, and kickbacks given to government and political elites. Let us not forget that the world was still reeling from the East Asian financial crisis of 1998 when the war on terror was declared—which demonstrated in no uncertain terms the vul- nerability of a global financial system that was operating with almost no legal and institutional checks and balances. In many ways, the war on terror can be seen as a godsend to many lib- eral-economic capitalists in both developed and developing world, manifesting, among many things, the development and expansion of an anti-terror industry. Thus enter another chapter for the “international community”, the crepuscular west to con- tinue to give lessons in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world. It is like the Cold War all over again, with Western military hardware and intelligence, economic aids and assistance (read gifts) to the rest of the world to curb the spread of terrorism7. It should also be clear that despite all the sound bites and talk of mutual partnership and assistance, the power differentials between donor and receiving countries of such gifts in the war on terror are painfully real. In some cases it is not entirely clear if the donors are working for or against the receivers’ intere sts . Internal Colonialism The most recent layer of aggression against the Muslims in Thailand’s far-south—whether social, economic, political or religious—had roots in the monarchical tradition of Thailand. Back In 1906, in an effort to avoid being colonized by Western imperialists, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) signed a treaty with both Britain and France and pursued a policy of moderni- zation (read “internal colonialism”) through which the entire kingdom, including the Malay far-south was consolidated under a policy of centralized bureaucratization and administration (Wan Kadir Che Man 1990)8. A series of stringent assimilation 6The term Wahabismhas often been misappropriated in Southeast Asia since the beginning of the twentieth century. During that time, a group of Kaum uda progressive ulamas gathered in the Straits Settlements (Penang, Ma- lacca, and Singapore) to set up their modern madrasah and to launch their ournals. They were deeply influenced by the writings of Egyptian reformist Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida that Islam is a religion of the intellect and reason; that the time has come to free themselves from the shackles o superstition, chauvinism, and outdated traditional practices that were neither Islamic nor rational. One of their modus operandi was to free themselves from the slave mentality of the colonial order. For all that, they were con- demned by many traditional ulamas as bei ng Wahabi. At the same time, the aum Mudamovement was also growing in Indonesia, being led by the uhamadiyah movement that pioneered modern Islamic education that included the hard and social sciences. Likewise, they were also accused o being Wahabi. In this respect, the modernists of are no different from the aum Mudageneration, who likewise condemned the belief in shamans and witches. See, Farish N oo r (2007). 7Thinking along with Nietzsche, the centrality of the gift, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1983), is not exchange and circulation but rather, inscription. The gift violently inscribes, it writes, and it records on bodies, and on debts. 8With the Anglo-Siamese treaty, Kelantan, Terengganu, Perlis and parts o Kedah was ceded to Britain. In return, the British recognized Siamese au- thority in regions situated north to the ceded territories that include Patani (“Patani” with one “t” is used here to denote the former Malay sultanate comprising the present-day Malay Muslim majority provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat), Satun and Trang (see Nik Anuar Nik Mahmud,1988; Suwannat hat -Pian , 19 88). 4In the famous “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, Samuel Huntington (1998) declared Islam as enemy number one of the West. See, also, Andrew McCarthy (2010) The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage merica, and Dinesh D’Souza (2007) The Enemy at Home: The Cultura eft and Its Responsibility fo 9/11. 5In the span of sixteen years that bracket September 11, one before and the other after the event (Oklahoma Bombing of 1995 and the Norway massacre of 2011), what you get is the instant, knee-jerk politically motivated racist suspicion by leading American and Europe an news organizations—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the BBC, The Financial Times, and a wide range of television and radio stations, website, blogs, etc.—that publicized derogatory allegations about Islam before any facts was officially announced. It was as if any heinous crimes have to be committed by a Muslim when in both cases the culprits—American Chris- tian fundamentalist Timothy James McVeigh and Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik—were white, blonde, and blue eye. Recently US congress- man Peter King—on the hearings of the “radicalization” of the American Muslim community—refused to widen the scope of the hearings to include other, non-Muslim terrorism threats. Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 162  K. H. YONG policies were to follow. In 1929 Bangkok insisted that Islamic family and inheritance laws be codified into Thai which, if successfully implemented, could be interpreted by its Muslim subjects as usurping the sacred ground of the shariah—the moral code and religious law of Islam—and establishing Thai as the language of Islam (Surin, 1985: p. 136). With the military takeover by General Phibul Songkram in 1938 and the desire to distinguish ethnic Thais from its ethnic minorities, the kingdom name was changed from Siam to Thai- land. With it, a series of ultra-nationalist initiatives were im- plemented that affected not only the Muslims but also other minorities. The notorious Thai Custom Decree (Rathaniyom) imposed Thai “modern” behavior and dress on the minorities, and an allegiance to the trinity of Thai’s nation, king, and Bud- dhism became the cornerstone to Thai patriotism. Following World War II, the King of Thailand was established as the pa- tron of Islam following the Patronage of Islam Act and the creation of the Chularajamontri (or Shaykh al-Islam), the Cen- tral Islamic Committee of Thailand under the Minister of Inte- rior. Since the 1960s ponoks were forced, through legislation, to register as “Private Schools Teaching Islam” and to teach, be- sides religious subjects, the Thai national curriculum (Madmarn, 1989). As if to add salt to the wound, the Thai government constructed several mosques in the far-south with their minarets resembling the Buddhist lotus flowers (Surin, 1988, cited by Joll, 2011: p. 41). All these efforts resulted not in the state hav- ing more but less control over its Muslim subjects as the num- ber of exodus who pursued Islamic education in the Middle East and South Asia increased dramatically. To be sure, the exodus coincided with a range of global developments that have often unhelpfully been bundled together as “Islamic re- surgence”—with its genealogy to the Iranian Islamic revolution and Shi’ism on the one hand, and the countering of it by the newly acquired economic power of Saudi Arabia in the form of Wahabism, on the other hand. The Muslims in the far-south, with its cultural and language dissimilarity with ethnic Thais have historically resisted the legitimacy of these legislations. However, in doing so, they provided plenty of pretexts for the state to accuse their resis- tance, especially since the late 1940s, with charges of separa- tism (baeng yaek dindaen) (Chaiwat, 2006). It is important to note, as Thai scholar Thanet Aphornsuvan points out, following Thongchai (1994), the idea of equating Malay Muslims in the southern frontier provinces with separatism is an invented “fact” of modern Thai political history that assumed “a prior existence of a territorially geo-body with its fixed borders and culturally unified Siamese nation-state borders” (2008: p. 91)9. Moreover, in becoming the discursive language in the manu- facturing of the proverbial others, charges of separatism vio- lently homogenizes and cuts, metaphorically speaking, the Ma- lay Muslims in the far-south of its diversity. For decades, Bang- kok has tried to set the terms and narratives for dealing with separatism in the southern frontier Muslim provinces. But it has since been taken over by events beyond its control. Since the 1940s, Thailand’s Muslim far-south have become a hotbed for separatist movements, added life to the specter of separatism that the state helped to create. Since then cases of Muslim se- paratism have erupted in the far south and continued throughout the 1960s to the 1980s as part of the region-wide phenomena that included the Moros in the Philippines, the Shans, Karens, and Rohingyas in Burma, and the Acehnese in Indonesia. Moreover, separatism might proved to be an inescapable fact in lieu that the far-south is one of the poorest and backwater re- gion in Thailand (Chaiwat, 2009). It was also at this period that armed separatism in Thailand’s far-south was at its height until the government ceased its as- similation policies when General Prem Tinsulanonda came into power (1980-1988). Various concessions were made to the Thai Muslims: permission to register their Muslim names, the wear- ing of niqãb in government institutions, Muslim prayer rooms at strategic public venues, including the parliament building, state sponsored Haj, and permission for the establishment of Islamic banking. The Prem administration also started negoti- ating amnesty deals with separatist organizations as well as with the Thai communist parties. Compared to what came be- fore the 1980s, the Prem period, though itself might sound cynical, was, relatively speaking, a semi-spring of freedom for the Muslims in Thailand. However, if indeed that was a period of relative peace in the far-south, the absence of any serious attempt to explain the revival of recent violence, together with some kind of explanation for incidents of unnecessary deaths and injustices remain an important barrier to an understanding between the government and the diverse people of the far-south (Chaiwat, 2008). Although Thailand’s far-south have been relatively quiet since the mid-1980s under an atmosphere of “corrupt peace”, to use the poignant phrase invoked by political scientist Kasian Tejapira (2006), renewed near-daily attacks began to emerge and became a major concern following clashes between militant Malay Muslims and government forces on April 28, 2004 at the historic Kru Se mosque. Since then, more than 5000 lives have been lost, close to 10,000 injured, and allegations of abuses tar all sides of the conflict10. So here we are at the year 2012, en- tering the eighth year of the conflict. Seven years of drawn out near-daily bombing and shooting in these Muslim provinces of Thailand far-south has seen the establishment and institution- alization of a “peace industry” so far-reaching that it stretch from Bangkok to Hatyai to Pattani to Yala and back to Bang- kok and beyond. We are now hampered by conferences and agreements, roadmaps and conditions that create a thicket of red tape. Layer upon layer of superficial “process” obscures the path forward, which is why we are standing quite still. Dek ponoks (ponok Boys and Girls) It is against such historical background and the current para- noia surrounding Islam that I met a fifteen years old Malay youth whom I shall called Nar (short for Nararuddin) at the border town of Sungai Golok in the province of Narathiwat. This is one of the most violent sites in the far-south. Like many 10Quantifying deaths has become as important as the quest to give meaning to the violent. Like other violent sites, such politics of conflating the number of deaths not only work to give an impression of surging violence but is also needed to classify the far-south as a site of mayhem, perhaps to satisfy the need of so-called experts on terrorism. Some counter-insurgency experts have even cl aimed it is th e most intense insu rgency after Iraq and Afghani- stan (see, for example, D. Kilcullen, 2009: p. 121). Ironically so, if the politics of number and its corresponding labeling of violent have arrived, the treatment has no t. 9Thanet goes on to argue that “… the cost of historical ignorance and amne- sia about the origins of separatism in the South is to prolong and tacitly approve of poor studies of modern Thai political history”, resulting in the often polarized conventions of criticizing the state of its handling of the Malay Muslim south and supporting the rights to self-determination on the one hand, and those conditioned by their loyalty to the state and Thai na- tionalism , on the other 2008: . 92 . Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 163  K. H. YONG other boys and girls in the far-south, Nar went through the tra- ditional Islamic boarding school. In fact, Nar is currently en- rolled in a prestigious madrasah across the river in Kota Bahru, the state capital of Kelantan, Malaysia. This is the religious seminary boarding school manage by the son of Niz Abdul Aziz bin Haji Nik Mat, better known as Nik Aziz, the spiritual adviser and leader (tok guru) of the Malaysian opposition party, Pan Malaysian Islamic Party. Nik Aziz is also the Chief Minis- ter of the state of Kelantan. I still remember the day I met Nar. Sporting a tight fitting dark jean and a black Metallica t-shirt, wearing sunglasses and smoking under the hot sun, it did not occur to me that Nar was a dek ponok. He was quick to point to me that he only smoked when he is back in Thailand and not at the prestigious madrasah where he is currently enrolled. In fact he learned to smoke dur- ing his ponok school days mostly because, like many dek po- noks, they were bored out of their minds. Nar tells me they would rather be playing soccer or the local favorite, sepak tak- raw11 rather than to be inside the classroom, much like any other schoolchildren at our so-called modern secular schools. According to Nar, the ulamas and ustazs at his ponok were fully aware of students smoking, with traces of daun ro’ko (leaves of rolling tobaccos) or cigarette butts everywhere. The only thing they cannot tolerate was for students to smoke in their presence. I would say the ponok is more “liberal” than the elementary and high schools I went through if the only restriction the dek po- noks have to observe is restrict themselves from smoking in front of their teachers. That was what I witnessed when Nar brought me to his po- nok located somewhere in Pattani where the standard fare of religious subjects ranging from the Qur’an and Hadith, reli- gious law (fiqh), exegesis, ethics and morality, as well as mathematics, geography, and history were taught. Not only were there traces of cigarette butts on the floor, I even saw some dek ponoks smoking in between classes. Eager to make contact with the stranger, they threw Nar a series of questions, “Bang dari mana? Apa nama? Buat apa di sini?” (Where is uncle from? What’s his name? What is he doing here?). As soon as I gave them the standard replies, I was bombarded with other queries. Calling me “Ajand” (Thai for professor or teacher) they asked what it is like living in North America, what is it like having snow, do we have tsunami, do we have ponoks, and so on. Muhammad 1 and 2 playfully asked if I am FBI. And like any boys, they would giggle or laugh loudly, and screamed almost hysterically when the subject of the opposite sex is brought up. Soon Ustaz Sulaiman came for me to give a tour of the girls’ section of the ponok, a gendered space totally cut off from the other half where the boys are. I noticed it was much cleaner but just as noisy. As we were heading back to the boy’s section, young Ibra- him 1 and 2 tagged along and joined the other dek ponoks who were sitting on a bench underneath a tree. They listened atten- tively as Ustaz Sulaiman and I were conversing in a clumsy creole (Pattani and standard Malay) or more accurately, as Ustaz Sulaiman waxed about the glory days of the Patani king- dom—and that was not the first time I have been introduced to their selective remembering of their history, their midwives of history—as if he seemed ever so inclined, like many others I have met, to return to a certain nostalgic past in order to escape, albeit momentarily, the squalid realities of the present. When it comes to the subject of history taught at ponoks, as my conver- sation with Ustaz Sulaiman have shown, the glorious history of “Patani” was the main emphasis as opposed to the Thai Bud- dhist-centric history. When asked, most of these dek ponoks would tell me they were at the ponok to get an education. Besides, their parents, brothers and sisters went through the same system, which pro- mpted Ustaz Sulaiman to declare: “This is tradition. The po- noks have coexisted harmoniously with the community for a very long time.” He paused for a few second before reemphasi- zing his point, “We never forget we are part of the community, partly because we are all equally poor”. It is true that being one of the poorest and backwater parts of Thailand, the ponoks is still the cheapest place for an education. There is a certain bond between the ponoks and its communities. This was a kinship built upon being poor, about pain, loss, love, humiliation, and sur- vival. I have often asked myself, why can’t the authority get it? When it comes to smoking, Ustaz Sulaiman brushed aside my question as there were bigger issues like joblessness, alco- holism, drug addictions, and the recent upsurge in violence and the militarization of their lives. And of course, there was the kratom phenomenon, the consumption of kratom leaf that has become a major concern not only in rural but also urban dis tricts in the far-south12. Many of the Muslims I worked with, including some ustazs and ulamas, were concerned that kratom consumption is getting worse with the absence of law enforce- ment officer in the region since the unrest, especially after sun- set, after the maghrid prayers. They call it the “hours of the guerrillas” (waktu geriya) when the other side takes over. Kra- tom has recently become a lucrative business, in part help by the unrest as soldiers stationed in the area have become not only regular customers but even as “protectors” of the illegal business (Anusorn, 2010). What I saw at this particular ponok is a rather different pic- ture from what has commonly been portrayed about ponoks, as rigidly strict and pious or as the playground for radical Islam. Similar to Farish Noor’s observation of the madrasahs he vis- ited in Afghanistan, Pakistan , Kashmir, Ja va, Bali, and southern Thailand (2009), while it is impossible to deny that militant groups might have infiltrated some of the ponoks in Thailand’s far-south to recruit young members, one should not generalize that making bombs and shooting guns is part of their standard curriculum. As the title of this essay alluded to, “there are po- noks, and there are ponoks”. The arrival of the current wave of horror, perhaps even to claim these playful children who are still oblivious to what has reemerged, reminds me of Shahla Talebi’s recollection about the terror during the Shah and later Islamic regime in Iran, “this contaminating power of violence and money, of the way they both often spoil whoever or what- ever comes their way” (2011: p. 11). This brings me to the story of another ponok. Ponok Islam Narathiwat Located somewhere in Narathiwat, Ponok Islam Narathiwat was one of the largest ponoks in the far-south—home to the headmaster, teachers, ulamas, ustazs and their respective fami- lies, and close to seven hundred dek ponoks. The government 12Kratom leaf (Mitragyna Speciosa) is classified in category 5 of the Nar- cotics Acts (1979), in the same category as cannabis and magic mushrooms (the least punitive category). As an addictive substance, it is illegal to pos- sess, distribute, sell, or consume kratom. But the law was not effectively enforced since the tree is indi enous to the countr . 11Sepak takr aw is a popular sport not only in Thailand but Southeast Asia. It uses a rattan ball but, unlike volleyball, players are only allowingtheir feet, knee, chest, and head to touch the ba ll . Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 164  K. H. YONG has since closed it down in July 200713. What initially gave the government to lay all sorts of trivial accusations or crimes on this particular ponok was that two of its ustazs and two of its male students participated in the infamous Tak Bai demonstra- tion. On Oct. 25 2004, a group of local Muslims that include women and children were protesting at the Tak Bai district po- lice station in the province of Narathiwat to demand the release of six youths arrested on the ground that they may have some links with some mysterious militants operating in the area. Witnesses and other reports diverged on what happened when the armies were called in to help control the crowd. Videotapes showing clashes between Muslim youths and the soldiers were banned. The confrontation quickly escalated into violence, re- sulting in several deaths among the demonstrators. When the soldiers were eventually in control of the crowd, hundreds of young male demonstrators were order to strip off their shirts, and with hands tied behind their backs, were forced to lie on the ground under a very hot day. And this was during the Ramadan. They were then made to crawl on their bellies to the waiting trucks. Piling on top of one another, packed like livestock, they were driven off to the main army detention facility in Camp Ingkayuthaborihaan in Pattani province, some five hours away. When the truc ks arrive d at th e camp, 78 more men were dead— apparently from suffocation or were crushed in the trucks. To this day, the army and the government have rejected all claims of malfeasance during the violence or even errors in transport- ing the demonstrators. To be sure, the frustrations of the majority of the Muslims towards the state was exasperated by the most recent coup in Thailand’s contemporary history14. In 2006, the military go- vernment that ousted Thaksin, then acting prime minister Sura- yud Chulanont traveled to Pattani town (and not to Tak Bai) to issue an apology and reparations to some families of the dead, and the (laughable) dropping of the charges of 92 demonstra- tors who survived the horrifying journey to the army camp. Initially, most Malay Muslims I spoke to conceded that it could bring some hope and thus, their moral imperative to forgive, albeit paradoxical, before justice arrives15. After all, the general who led the coup is a Muslim and the interim government did signal a willingness “to talk.” But such hope has si nce dissipated. As in the past, the interim government resorted to the establish- ment of loosely regulated armed proxy groups to work along- side paramilitaries to flush out so-called Muslim extremists. Invoking Hannah Arendt’s reflections that rage arises “when there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not”, did the latest coup created “an imaginary of hope” that quickly turned into rage? (1969: p. 63). If so, what kind of ex- planations could one offer for the surge in violence? Could rage be seen as potentially a productive analysis of identity, one that led to political awareness and activism? Could they be seen as spontaneous action to injustice, one that acts in order to trans- gress the “law”, the “law” that has become an empty signifier to the Malay Muslim communities at Thailand far-south? It may help to ask, along with Carolyn Nordstrom (2004) observation of violent sites in parts of Africa and Sri Langka, could one live on justice alone in any chaotic and violent atmosphere? Indeed, does the State or the “law” matters to the lives and livelihoods of its subjects in these dire situations. The answer was poign- antly reflected by the following respond from the owner of a street vendor. At his home located next to the old mosque in Pattani, he told me, in a tone more of cynicism than contempt, “Here nobody is afraid of the law. We are only afraid of the police”. He also commented on the drug situation and corrup- tion by quoting a common rephrase: “If you are caught with the possession of narcotic drugs, with money they will turn into flour”. Five years after the Tak Bai incident, under the pretext of a state of emergency, the judiciary handed out a “not guilty” verdict on the army personnel’s handlings of the protests and the transportation of the demonstrators. Obviously that did not sit well with many local Muslims. This phrase by Hanisah, one of the many mak pasar (open-air market food vendors) I worked with, pretty much sum up their feelings about the verdict, “Thailand has two states. One for Thais, one for Muslims”. To be sure, the Tak Bai incident has become a political imbroglio for the government and the insurgents are using it as a recruit- ing tool. Coming back to Ponok Islam Narathiwat, the headmaster, Puan (Missus) Shafikah and her ustazs and ulamas all strike me as welcoming, jovial, and hopeful when I first met them to talk about the fate of their ponok. But beneath the measure tone of our discussion lays a deep and sinister view about their ponok and what the future holds, if any, for their dek ponoks. Puan Shafikah tells me how frustrated she would get each time she ran into the parents of her dek ponoks as she could not offer any reassurance when their children could return to school. Puan Shafikah and her staff could still remember the sarcastic smiles of the police officers when they came to arrest two of her stu- dents and two ustazs for participating at the Tak Bai demon- stration. Shafikah reminded me that that was the time when not taking part in the protest was itself an anomaly. Immediately after the students and ustazs were taken away, the first question they asked as they begin their interrogation was the financial situation of the ponok. To be more specific, they wanted to know how did the ponok manage to operate when it was only charging a meager 150 bahts per student per term. Puan Shafi- kah tells me that the police officers were either playing dumb or they must have not done their homework. As she puts it across to me, “Everyone here knows that most, if not all ponoks re- ceived some form of financial assistance, whether they came from the Middle East or from local elites who prefer to remain anonymous16. 16Many ordinary Malays and Chinese I met confided to me that it is not uncommon for ponoks to receive contribution from local elites and busi- nessmen but these transactions cannot be “broadcasted” for fear of getting into trouble, especially under the prevailing paranoia in the far-south. In fact, I have come a cross several ponoksi n Pattani that d o n ot charge a n y t ui tion at all. All the parents need to do is to pay for the books and stationeries for their children. Besides, it is not even a public secret that ponoks and many local NGOs in the far-sou th are funded by sources from the Middle East. In fact, Thailand’s first Islamic University, the Yala Islamic University was sponsored by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, Saudi- ased Islamic Development Bank, the King of Qatar, the King of Kuwait, as well as pri- vate donors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. See, Joll (2011: p. 49). 13Despite my attempt of not revealing the real identity of this particula onok, it should be obvious to most Malay Muslims in the far-south which onok I am referring to. 14There have b een eighteen at t e mp t ed a nd successf ul coups in Th ai l and since it changed from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy in 1932. See, “Thailand: The Calm before Another Storm?” Crisis Group Asia Brief- ing, No. 121, 11 April 2011. 15According to Hannah Arendt (2005), there is always the paradoxical and ethical tension with forgiveness in that forgivers can be deservedly criticized for failing to remember the injustices they had endured—and remem rance im lies, if not vengeance, at least an unwillingness to let go of the desire fo vengeanc e. See, also, Giorgio Agamben (2005). Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 165  K. H. YONG After the headmaster’s refusal to divulge any financial infor- mation, more police officers arrived that day to search the po- nok. And the raid continued for months, usually unannounced. In less than a week after the first visit, the police made a hor- rendous accusation that the ponok was a bomb factory because of the presence of some gas tanks. With their hands up in the air to express their exasperation, Puan Shafikah, the ulamas and ustazs point out to me that it was a horrendous accusation. “How else are we going to cook our food?” the headmaster asked before continuing, “This is a ponok. We live here. Those children. They lived here, studied here, slept here, washed their own clothes, they cooked here”. One of her ustaz added, “They received their nasihat here”17. Later on, the police officers dropped their initial accusation but insisted that the gas tanks could potentially be used as bombs. Through a series of unend- ing accusations, the headmaster, ulamas, ustazs, and some stu- dents were interrogated and to this day the charges against them was still pending in case the government decided to enforce it. Besides these interrogations and charges by the police, the army was eventually called in. To make matter worse, on one occasion the army dug up some graves at the ponok’s cemetery in the belief that there were weapons stashed underneath them. This was not only a sign of disrespect but also a violation of Islam (for that matter, any religion), something that not only enraged the folks at the ponok but also the entire Muslim com- munities in the area. In fact, the news reverberated throughout the three Malay Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Nara- thiwat in the far-south. The army never found any weapons in the cemetery but that did not prevent them from staging further raids. It got worse. On one of those raids, they ordered every- one to evacuate the compound while they did their search. Sure enough, it was during this particular occasion that the army managed to come out with the recovery of illegal weapons. The locals were not amused by it at all. This is a common rephrase I often heard when they lament about their disposition: “kalau kerajaan tak adil, hidup tak senang” (if the government is not fair, life will be difficult). The last straw happened when the army arrested some stu- dents at an abandon tadika (kindergarten) and they also dug out several graves. After that, the ponok was closed and with its closing, not only have the state created a situation of jobless- ness for the headmaster, her ustazs and ulamas (and their re- spective families who lived with them) but also left all the dek ponoks without a school, a home and a community. Many folks at the surrounding area were worried that with the closing of the ponok their children would become mat lepak (young and idle), and indulge themselves in drugs, alcohol, gangsterism, and kratom. Not too far from the ponok, the owner of a teashop, Hamid, asked me why it is only now that the government believes the ponok is preaching hate. Why not in the past? Besides, as he puts it, “These mysterious militants, whatever you want to call them. They are the minority. And they are killing not only state agents but also ordinary Muslims. They don’t represent us but we are being blame for their violence”. Hamid’s lament re- minds me of Tambiah’s “leveling crowd” discourse I men- tioned earlier. In targeting the diverse Muslim communities in Thailand’s far-south with antiterrorist rhetoric, Muslimness has become an object of criminality. As we smoked and listened to his songbirds, a convoy of General Motor pick-ups and humvees raced past, bearing men in various uniforms: counter insurgency units, jungle police, paramilitary, paratroopers, and kratom military commandos/ users. I asked Hamid if some top brass is visiting the nearby camp, to which he responded, with sarcasm, “Yeah, it sure look like it. But this kind of display, this show of force is biasa (normal). We are used to it, checkpoints, army garrison, what have you. Biasa”. While he was feeding one of his songbirds with a special kind of banana, he gave me this half smile and said, “But such show of force is only for the daytime. Have you ever seen them after dark at the military checkpoints, unless they want to be lame ducks? Day and night is a different world around here. One is waktu askar (the hours of the army), the other is waktu geriya (the hours of the guerillas)”. Faosee, who has been very quiet the entire afternoon, interrupted Hamid and asked, “Are we kon Thai or not? Can we be kon Thai without being Buddhist?” I think he is saying why can’t Muslims be Thais without being culturally Thais. Faosee suggested we should get going. It was getting dark. By Way of Concluding As anthropologists we should be aware of some of the issues surrounding the usage of culture. Maurice Freedman (1975) once pointed out that culture, and here I may add religion, are not like homogeneous substance with the power to spread like butter, but that is how Muslimness and Islam in Thai’s far- south and elsewhere seems to be presented: as a pattern of seepage, of slow over-spill. Freedman points out that there is a tendency to look for order and concurrence once we use these words, blinding us to all its ambiguity, movement, and com- plexity; and, in the case of the war on terror, focusing on a col- lection of stereotypical values and behaviors that have been made into this fearful fantasy in the war on terror. Lately, all across the world, even among Muslim majority countries in Southeast Asia, the governments seem to be ob- sessed with the threat of Islamic terror. Lost in humanism at a time in history when we insist on the outer binary signs of in- ternational conflicts are the inner struggles and suffering of the people, each taken individually, who are the unbreakable core of what really matters. In the case of Thailand and elsewhere, the fact that ponok schools, like so many other religious board- ing schools, were more than conduits of religious education, that they also maintained a wide range of social and economic functions was never really appreciated nor understood by the authority, both historically and in the contemporaneity of the war on terror (Madmarn, 2003; Narongraksakhet, 2005; Liow, 2009). Since 9/11, “jihad factories” or “dens of terror” thus described the intended, the metaphoric, and the symbolic func- tion of the ponok, obscuring other possibilities these terms might entail. With the heightened surveillance and/or closing of several ponoks in the far-south, and thus depriving many of a source of affordable education, many of these dek ponoks were either forced to seek other alternatives in getting a decent edu- cation or dropped out of school altogether. Of those who dropped out, many became entangled with all sorts of delinquent activities, including the possibilities of being recruited by militants. And of course, much to the encourage- ment of their parents, many Muslim youth escaped from the violence by doing the thirty days visa-hop to Malaysia, only to 17In Arabic, nasiha is a central concept in Islamic moral theology. Among many things, nasiha is a morally corrective discourse, one that signifies giving advice for someone’s good, integrity, honesty, and doing justice to a situation (Asa d, 200 3). Copyright © 2012 SciRe s . 166  K. H. YONG end up being exploited at Tom Yum restaurants. But like the ponoks, these restaurants, perhaps because they were operated by Malaysian Malays, and thus Muslims, were accused by the Thai authority as being complicit with the current insurgency, of donating part of their revenues to the insurgency (see, Hel- bardt, 2011). It seem like the generalization did not stop with the ponoks. But perhaps the main reason why the far-south is now ripe for the recruitment of angry young Muslim men and boys is the underlying poverty and the neglect it has suffered for so long, whose scars run deeper than what is visible. Many Muslims are fed up with talks about development and all the benefits of mega projects that have not trickled down. They would often refer to these so-called development projects with the acronym NATO (No action, talk only). But more importantly, the peril of the longstanding assimila- tionist politics are laid bare, and the cost of the denial of coe- velness to the Malay Muslims as historical agents in Thailand’s far-south is high. And just to make their point, some govern- ment elementary schools were burned by those who have turned their back to dialogue because they were never listen to in the first place. These are a bunch of angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised youth who were being both held captive and absence in the narrative of the discourse on the war on terror. In my mind, to miss this is to misrecognize the puzzle to the whole equation as to what is happening to the far-south, that quaint little war that hardly, if ever, makes any headlines in international news coverage, let alone in their own country. It seems to me the answer is there, but the question has yet to be asked. 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