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HONOLULU (Aug. 29) – Muslim minorities in both the Philippines and Thailand have been engaged in persistent, and at times violent, conflict for decades with the central governments of the two nations. But, according to Joseph Chinyong Liow, a 2005 East-West Center Washington Southeast Asia Fellow, the long-running conflicts “appear to be taking on a more explicit religious dimension.”
Liow, now an assistant professor at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, says, “What was not previously seen to be conflicts with decidedly religious contents are today being increasingly portrayed and understood” by outside observers and the media “as a phenomenon driven and defined by Muslim radicalism, militancy, and international jihadi terrorism.” He adds this is the result of numerous factors, including “the failure of secular nationalism in achieving the ends of the respective rebellions, the resultant search of alternative (and presumably more effective) ideological impetus, the radicalization of local mujahideen volunteers involved in the international jihad waged in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation (in the 1980s), and the impact of post-9/11 events on Muslim worldviews.”
But, in his recently released monograph titled “Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines: Religion, Ideology, and Politics” (East-West Center Washington Policy Studies 24 ), Liow claims attributing this change in “expression and trajectory of the conflicts … to the seductive appeal of radical Islam is a gross simplification of profoundly complex and convoluted problems that involve not only religion but also, politics, nationalism, history, and identity.”
He points out that while the Muslim militants in Thailand and the Philippines have cloaked themselves in the trappings “of Islamic symbolism and employed Islamic dialectics, idioms, and metaphors to articulate their struggle,” the mainstream resistance “does not cohere with the objectives of global jihadi ideology.” Liow says the “reference points remain primarily local and political.”
And, this, according to Liow, is because the fight in the Philippines and Thailand has for years been about “territorial and ideational boundaries.” He notes “fashioned in the crucible of resistance to domination from the centers of national political power, the narratives of separatism, liberation, and nationalism, even as they employ religious referents, have been embedded in the local fight against the ‘near enemy’ as opposed to the global jihad against the ‘far enemy.’
He says Islam has “gained greater currency” recently in the two ongoing conflicts, especially to outside observers, due to the perceived religious nature of the movements and their foes … Thailand is seen as a Buddhist state, the Philippines as a Catholic nation. But Liow notes “nationalism remains anchored primarily on ethnic reference points, and has been trending towards a civic dimension.”
The Islamization of the conflicts, Liow says, “is directed not at the purification of Islam by ridding the faith of ‘deviants’ such as is taking place in Pakistan and Iraq between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, the ideological emasculation of the liberal-democratic way of life as Syed Qutb (the doyen of Ikhwan al-Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood) preached, nor to the anti-West, anti-Zionist global jihadi ends of the neo-Salafi (or Wahhabi) movement.” Rather, he says, “it is directed to context-specific political objectives of self-determination, regaining lost national identities, setting right historical wrongs, and creating a sovereign nation-state.”
Liow says understanding the religious contents of the ongoing Muslim conflicts in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand cannot be viewed merely as an extension of the global jihadi movement, it “cannot be divorced from the specific historical, political and ethic contexts to which they remain anchored, or the local identities and politics that frame them.”
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The East-West Center Washington Policy Studies 24 “Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines: Religion, Ideology, and Politics” is available in PDF and print editions. The PDF copies can be accessed through the East-West Center Washington at www.eastwestcenterwashington.org/publications. Hardcopies are available through Amazon.com. In Asia, hardcopies are available through the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore at 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Pasir Panjang, Singapore 119614 (website: http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg).
Joseph Chinyong Liow is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Techological University, Singapore. In 2005, he was a Southeast Asia Fellow at the East-West Center Washington, where he wrote the above study. He can be contacted at iscyliow@ntu.edu.sg.
For daily news on the Pacific Islands, see www.pireport.org. For links to all East-West Center media programs, fellowships and services, see www.eastwestcenter.org/journalists