The impetus to preserve and sustain religious and communal identities against the backdrop of a wider Buddhist culture has traditionally led Muslims in southern Thailand to look to independent religious education as an alternative to Buddhist and secular national education. Consequently, much of the extant literature portrays such separate forms of education as a symbolic struggle to gain recognition for Muslims. This tendency has been most evident in the case of the Malay-Muslims concentrated in the three southern border provinces. Less visibly, however, Islamic education has recently emerged as an arena where tension and contestations within the Muslim community itself have come to be captured and expressed. This trend now operates parallel to, and to a great extent independently of, structural pressures posed by state education policies which had previously defined the parameters of the politics of Islamic education. At the heart of these contestations is the advent of the Islamic reformist movement in Thailand, with its implications for Islamic thought and praxis in a hitherto traditionalist environment.

As was the case throughout Muslim Southeast Asia, Islam in Thailand has enjoyed a long tradition of syncretism, coexisting with earlier Hinduistic and Malay religio-spiritual and supernatural beliefs and practices. In this way, both the transcendental and mundane concerns of rural communities were addressed. Particularly pronounced was the imprint of Sufism, which sought to harmonize mysticism with orthodoxy and which rejected rigid, ritualistic adherence to the shari'a. The resulting brand of Islam was pliable enough to reconcile all manner of local beliefs and customs with the monotheistic faith at its base. This syncretic nature of so-called folk Islam in Southeast Asia, though, would soon come under pressure from Islamic reform movements to abandon this characteristic elasticity for a more pristine, fundamentalist creed.

In thinking about the emergence of the Islamic reform movement in Thailand, two of its conceptual pillars – Salafism and Wahhabism — should be examined, for two main purposes. First, as the following chapters will show, Salafism and Wahhabism are seen as the intellectual and ideological foundations of reform, by virtue of the fact that they oppose traditional Islamic orthodoxy. Indeed, local scholars and educators tend to apply these terms interchangeably when describing reformist patterns in the configuration of Islamic knowledge and education in southern Thailand.