On Tuesday for my Thai Studies class we had a guest speaker come in to talk about Islam in Thailand. For those of you not in the know, Muslims are the biggest religious minority in Thailand. The south of Thailand has more Muslims than Buddhists, and the region is having boiling tensions that are often portrayed in the media as being old ethnic tensions but in fact are more about differences in economic opportunity that happen to manifest along the lines of ethnic groups. When there are explosions going off in the south, all kinds of people get hurt. Almost always it is not known what the motives are behind the violence.
I was late to class because I needed coffee or I would have drifted off, but at the beginning of class our speaker, Kannaporn Amoraseth Akarapisan, gave us three articles. One of the articles is this one: Personal faith in Islam more powerful than global borders. Maybe I can find the other two later. She also brought a Qur’an with her, which has the original Arabic along side an English translation. And then she sat in front of the classroom after a short bio on herself and basically said ‘ask away!’
The most important things she told us about her culture and religion is that the ‘hijab’ is not, in most ways a form of oppression. It is a way to be rid of our own human distractions with physicality . For example, when one talks to other people, we are identified by our ideas rather than physical aspects. She of course does not meant to dismiss that the hijab is sometimes used as a form of oppression, because it can be. “Islam” means peace, and imbedded in the greetings of Muslim culture are well-wishing to one another. Jews, Christians and Muslims all really do belive in the same thing, they just get off at different bus-stops; Jews at Moses, Christians at Jesus, and Muslims at Muhammad. It made me giggle. Non-Muslims can go into mosques, which makes me happy and I hope to visit a mosque while I’m here in Chiang Mai with her sometime.
Duuuuuudes, afterward I really felt that I should research more about our big, old religions. They’ve been around for a long time.
