5 - Contending Identities: Muslim Minorities

Summary

FROM KHAEK ISALAM …

In former centuries, Siam's Muslim inhabitants may have accounted for well over a tenth of the kingdom's total population, depending on how far down the Malay Peninsula the Siamese realm is calculated to have extended; one knowledgeable Western resident in the mid-nineteenth century reckoned Siam's “Malay” population at one million, about 17 per cent of the kingdom' total estimated population (Pallegoix 2000, p. 2). The kingdom's retracted southern border following the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 caused its Muslim population to shrink appreciably. As a result, their number is today believed to account for less than a tenth of the total citizenry. In the absence of official census data by religion, a 1988 estimate of the kingdom' Muslim population multiplied the country's total of 2,600 mosques by a rule-of-thumb figure of 2,000 people per mosque to arrive at a national Muslim population of 5.2 million, or around 9 per cent of the kingdom' total citizenry. For the Bangkok Metropolis, the equivalent figures were 155 mosques and 310,000 Muslims, accounting for 6 per cent of the capital' residents (Thailand, Ministry of Culture, Department of Religious Affairs, Muslim Affairs Bureau n.d. (1988?)). Two decades later, those figures had risen to 174 mosques and 348,000 Muslims, or an estimated 6.1 per cent of the capital's total population (Thailand, National Muslim Center, Office of the Islamic Committee of the Bangkok Municipality, n.d. (2011?)).

Among the Thai populace, the Muslim minority has traditionally been referred to collectively — sometimes pejoratively — as khaek isalam, literally “Muslim guests” or “strangers” (Scupin 1998, p. 148; Keyes 2008–09, pp. 21, 27; Winyu 2014, pp. 3, 16), a term that carries subtle exclusionary connotations implicit in a sense of Otherness (Thongchai 2000a). Perhaps that Otherness may arise from the fact that the great majority of the kingdom's Muslims have historically been domiciled in the South, with only a secondary presence concentrated in and around Bangkok. It has even been rather fancifully suggested that the name “Bangkok” (originally Ban Kok) may derive from a centuries-old designation, “Ban Khaek” (Bajunid 1992, p. 25), referring to an early intrusion of those Muslim “strangers” into the Thai heartland.