Vanished Polity of the Day: the Pattani kingdom

Under the rule of its now deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand crept closer to the brink of communal chaos. The restive Muslim Malay south had descended into such a state of unrest that some commentators saw the region as the another front in the eternal war-on-terror.

Yet the coup led by Gen. Sonthi (a Muslim from the south) has gone some way to ease those fears. One hopes that Thailand, with its bottomless reserve of eager-to-please touristic charm, will manage to bridge the difficult divide between the nation and its minority Muslims. Surely, massages were meant to be enjoyed (and conducted) by all citizens, regardless of race or creed.

Today's vanished polity of the day is Pattani, an ethnic Malay kingdom which converted in the 11th century to Islam. Its ongoing struggle with the Thai north ended with defeat at the hands of the kingdom of Ayodhya (named after, of course, the holy Hindu city in India) in the 13th century. Power and domination are in truth ephemeral beasts, and Pattani remained a functional beast under the loose reins of Thai suzerainty. It fought with smaller states to the south for control over the lucrative port of Malacca and its environs, even locking horns with the Portuguese. Yet by the 17th century, the Muslim Malays of those stretches of southeast Asia became vassals of the king of Siam. But the notion of an independent Muslim Malay state north of the isthmus was squelched not only by the Thais but by the British in the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909.

To this day, southern Thailand looks more to the islands and peninsulas of the spice-filled south and west, while the central heartlands gravitate north and west to its monumental cultural inheritance from India.