A week or two ago I wrote here that I thought that this insurgency had acquired some of its Jihadist ideology from abroad. I was aware when I wrote it that ‘Jihadist’ might not be a very good choice of words for what I was thinking about, but I didn’t have anything better at the time, and I did not want to start over again and try to find a better way to say it.
What I was talking about was the notion that it is OK to kill Muslims in pursuit of an insurgency, that soft targets like teachers and assistant village headmen and coffee shop vendors are legitimate targets, that Takbai villagers and Songkhla football players can be sacrificed as martyrs, things like that. There is a hard heartedness there that seems to me to be shared with the IED bombers in Iraq and Pakistan and an arrogance in judging others that is characteristic of the Taliban, as I know it, which is not that deeply or personally.
I wonder if there were a separate, independent, Ustadz led Pattani, what would it be like? What would reprisals look like on those who were insufficiently aligned with the insurgents? What would be the expectations of religious practice? What would be the place of women and girls? I see these insurgents as being capable of great harshness, and I doubt that the current standards of Islamic life in the South, even as the insurgency’s leaders manipulate them for recruitment and symbolic action, are what they intend for their future, should they achieve it.
Harshness is not exclusive to modern Islamic Jihadi ideology. The Thai army is no slouch at harshness. Thai and Malay cultures have deep reservoirs of harshness. However, legitimacy for this kind of hardness for Muslim insurgents in Thailand’s deep south, it seems to me, can only be explained as in import from the outside the world.
