...peninsular Malaysia are known as bastions of Islamic civilization. Less known is the reciprocal hybridization and inter-penetration of Buddhist and Islamic cosmologies in the cultural landscape of northern peninsular Malaysia and southern Thailand. The tradition of pre-Islamic Hinduism is also shared in the ritual life of Thai and Malay groups. Wayang kulit in Kelantan, and manora and hang talung in Nakhon Si Thammarat are examples of the common Indian tradition in performing arts on both sides of the Thai-Malaysian border.

In academic representation of southern Thailand, few scholars were interested in inter-religious coexistence. Chaiwat argues in his "Patani in the 1980s" that much of the literature on Patani was carved as political stories rather than objective research (Chaiwat 1994). Much of the literature on southern Thailand (and state discourse at various levels) presented Muslims in South Thailand as a homogenous group. The main question was the various degrees to which Muslims as a minority community were integrating successfully into the Thai-Buddhist-dominant "host" society.

The years from 1969 to 2002 are chosen for this review because that was the period during which Buddhist-Muslim relations became fundamentally transformed as southern Thailand develops into modernity. The year 1969 was also the watershed in ethnographic studies on southern Thailand. Southern Thai ethnography in this period witnessed larger transformations in anthropological research in general: the shift away from structuralism towards a more interpretative approach of culture with its concerns for voice, transformative complexities, and subjectivity. Local scholarship by and large seems to take ethnic identities and religious beliefs for granted, overlooking the history of inter-ethnic marriage and conversion in both directions, from Buddhism to Islam and from Islam to Buddhism. The unique mechanisms of ritual and language that emerged in southern Thailand indicate that common beliefs in spirits and ancestors have been more important than canonical rules. The dissolution of many mixed rituals and the fundamentalisms in both Buddhism and Islam seem to overshadow unique cultural practices that gradually disappear. The mechanisms of coexistence should be noted and written down before they disappear. They will be needed to reconstruct peaceful relations in times of conflict.

Local scholarship seems to be emotionally involved and trapped in the identity politics of southern Thailand, in which nationalist positions dominated Thai-Buddhist as well as Malay-Muslim discourse, thereby marginalizing local positions of exchange, solidarity, and compromise. Buddhist-Muslim relations in South Thailand should not be romanticized. The historical perspective shows how the breaking up of the shared cosmos caused by the intervention of the state and the depletion of natural resources create opportunities for violent confrontations in which Buddhists dashed with Muslims. The dominant paradigm of inter-religious hostility needs to be informed by narratives from the grassroots.

This paper is a response to a dominant representation of the cultural landscape of southern Thailand caught in a static dichotomization of Thai-Buddhist and Malay-Muslim ethnicities that overlooks the crucial diversity in which Buddhist-Muslim relations are manifested differently depending on entirely different historical trajectories recorded in the memory of the people.

While Malay-cultured Patani, Yala, and Narathiwat have been incorporated by military conquest, the landscapes of Thai-speaking Nakhon Si Thammarat, Songkla, Trang, Patthalung, and Satun have been under Thai-Buddhist influence and were characterized by overlapping religious cosmologies (Kobkua 1988; Che Man 1990; Cheah Boon Kheng 1988). Satun, which used to be part of the Malaysian state of Kedah across the border, was sparsely populated and peripheral to the Muslim sultanate of Patani. In addition, the mountainous landscape of Satun, Trang, and Patthalung hindered the expansion of the Patani sultanate on the east coast. On the other hand, the Thai-speaking Muslims from Satun, Trang, and Patthalung suffered less from the military punitive expeditions of the Siamese, in which numerous captives were abducted to Bangkok. These historical developments underlie a situation today in which Thai-Muslims in the South who identify with being Malay resent Thai Muslims who do not, for not supporting their separatist struggle for a Malay state independent of Thailand. In sum, the Thai-speaking Muslims in Satun, Songkla, Trang, and Patthalung are estranged from the Malay-speaking Muslims in Patani, Yala, and Narathiwat. Theravada Buddhism was always perceived as a stranger in the Malay villages of Patani, Yala, and Narathiwat, while for Muslim communities in Satun, Trang, Songkla, and Patthalung, the local Buddhist monkhood is a familiar neighbour. Thai-speaking Muslims are said to be not able to read the holy Qur'an in Jawi nor Arabic although the dakwah movement is spreading to Muslim villages of Satun and Songkla through pilgrimage, Islamic education, and the Internet.

Among the literature I surveyed were works that not only misrepresented local Islam and ignored its cultural complexity but also contributed substantially to the "dehumanizing" of Muslims. They also ignored subaltern voices and cultural plurality within the Muslim cultural space, especially in negotiations of gender relations, negotiation, and tensions between sufistic and orthodox approaches and the coexistence and differentiation of local representation and world religion (Omar Farouk 1980, 1994; Scupin 1980, 1988, 1998). Second, this static view misses huge differences of cultural location that have only been recently discussed (see Bonura 2002). This discourse also underestimated the ambiguous cultural position of Muslims in Thailand and their relationship to kin in Malaysia that has been produced by the border and the increasing gap between impoverished Muslims in southern Thailand and well-to-do Malays in Malaysia. As Gesick (1995) indicates, social scientists have been preoccupied with the struggles between centre and periphery, either reproducing national historiography or resisting it. Fraser's study (1960) of Rusamilae reflects this bias, as he looks at the Malays in the framework of the Thai nation, but gives little space to inter-ethnic interaction at the grassroots level.

While much has been written on conflict, little has been written on the relationship between Thai-speaking Muslims and Buddhists at the local level. Southern Thailand can be said to be a unique region in which world religions have been accommodated and integrated into the social order and local cosmology. The ritual aspects of the manora dance drama can illustrate this accommodation. There are three kinds of manora. There are ngan war(temple festival), manora ta yai yan, and manora long khru (manora when the teachers descend). As Gesick explains:

Manora long khru is a ceremony in which the Manora ancestors, plus all other ambient spirits or deities capable of bringing good fortune or who might cause trouble if left out, are invited to a feast, and an exhibition of Manora dancing. Unlike entertainment Manora, there is no plot danced in manora long khru, rather, the dancers show their skill in the twelve attitudes (sip song tha), the dance modes prescribed by the "first teachers", that is, the ancestors. After three days, the ancestors and spirits depart, satisfied and benevolent ... (1995, p. 66)

Manora dancing knowledge is passed down by bilateral lineage in the same way as for taa yai (great ancestors). As Nishii explains:

descendants of taa yai Manora conduct rituals periodically during the sixth lunar month as for ordinary taa yai. In the case of taa yai manora, they not only offer food but also dance Manora for three days and three nights. Taa yai Monara may...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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