Muslim activists, who tend to be identified as Islamists or Islamicists to denote their extremism and penchant for violence, have rallied around interpretations of Islam that tend to be described as inappropriate by those who see Islam as a world religion of integrity in its mainstream doctrine and practice. One scholar of the Islamicist phenomenon, for example, cites the "vitriolic and literal interpretation of Islam . . . that present[s] Muslims as being under attack" (Abuza, Crucible 127), especially from the West but also from (presumably) nonvitriolic and nonliteral versions of the faith. It is not uncommon to see similar characterizations throughout the discourse of global jihad.
The activities of such Islamicist groups as al-Qaeda, author of 9/11, which emerged out of Arab culture, and Jemaah Islamiya, a creature of Malaysian Islam, serve a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural goals, some of which are articulated and some of which appear to lie latent in the agenda of their leadership. What has become increasingly clear to established governments and peoples is that such movements are transnational and transcultural. Accordingly, their motives, methods, and goals are important to identify, not only from a global standpoint but also from the standpoint of individual nation-states, which have had different experiences of jihad enactments, which have mounted a variety of responses to jihad behavior, and which, owing to the idiosyncrasies of local culture, have different response capacities and tendencies.
This research focuses on the encounter between nation-state apparatus and Muslim activism in Thailand. In that country's southernmost provinces, a Muslim separatist insurgency has ebbed and flowed for decades, but the character of conflict between Thailand's government and the separatists has shifted in the post-9/11 world. This research explores the shape that the conflict has assumed as well as its content a...