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Thailand Religious Minorities
Defining Thai minority religions was as complex as defining
Thai ethnic minorities. This problem was further compounded by
the number of Thai whose Buddhism was a combination of differing
beliefs. In the 1980s, the religious affiliation of the Chinese
minority was particularly difficult to identify. Some adopted the
Theravada beliefs of the Thai, and many participated in the
activities of the local wat. Most Chinese, however,
consciously retained the mixture of Confucian social ethics,
formal veneration of ancestors, Mahayana Buddhist doctrine, and
Taoist supernaturalism that was characteristic of the popular
religious tradition in China. To the Chinese community as a
whole, neither organized religion nor theological speculation had
strong appeal. There were some Chinese members of the
sangha, and most large Chinese temples had active lay
associations attached to them. It was estimated in the 1980s that
there were about twenty-one Chinese monasteries and thirteen
major Vietnamese monasteries in Thailand.
The practice of Islam in the 1980s was concentrated in
Thailand's southernmost provinces, where the vast majority of the
country's Muslims, predominantly Malay in origin, were found. The
remaining Muslims were Pakistani immigrants in the urban centers,
ethnic Thai in the rural areas of the Center, and a few Chinese
Muslims in the far north. Education and maintenance of their own
cultural traditions were vital interests of these groups.
Except in the small circle of theologically trained
believers, the Islamic faith in Thailand, like Buddhism, had
become integrated with many beliefs and practices not integral to
Islam. It would be difficult to draw a line between animistic
practices indigenous to Malay culture that were used to drive off
evil spirits and local Islamic ceremonies because each contained
aspects of the other. In the mid-1980s, the country had more than
2,000 mosques in 38 Thai provinces, with the largest number (434)
in Narathiwat Province. All but a very small number of the
mosques were associated with the Sunni branch of Islam; the
remainder were of the Shia branch. Each mosque had an imam
(prayer leader), a muezzin (who issued the call to prayer), and
perhaps other functionaries. Although the majority of the
country's Muslims were ethnically Malay, the Muslim community
also included the Thai Muslims, who were either hereditary
Muslims, Muslims by intermarriage, or recent converts; Cham
Muslims originally from Cambodia; West Asians, including both
Sunni and Shias; South Asians, including Tamils, Punjabis and
Bengalis; Indonesians, especially Javanese and Minangkabau;
Thai-Malay or people of Malay ethnicity who have accepted many
aspects of Thai language and culture, except Buddhism, and have
intermarried with Thai; and Chinese Muslims, who were mostly Haw
living in the North.
The National Council for Muslims, consisting of at least five
persons (all Muslims) and appointed by royal proclamation,
advised the ministries of education and interior on Islamic
matters. Its presiding officer, the state counselor for Muslim
affairs, was appointed by the king and held the office of
division chief in the Department of Religious Affairs in the
Ministry of Education. Provincial councils for Muslim affairs
existed in the provinces that had substantial Muslim minorities,
and there were other links between the government and the Muslim
community, including government financial assistance to Islamic
education institutions, assistance with construction of some of
the larger mosques, and the funding of pilgrimages by Thai
Muslims to Mecca. Thailand also maintained several hundred
Islamic schools at the primary and secondary levels.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese
and Spanish Dominicans and other missionaries introduced
Christianity to Siam. Christian missions have had only modest
success in winning converts among the Thai, and the Christian
community, estimated at 260,000 in the 1980s, was proportionately
the smallest in any Asian country. The missions played an
important role, however, as agents for the transmission of
Western ideas to the Thai. Missionaries opened hospitals,
introduced Western medical knowledge, and sponsored some
excellent private elementary and secondary schools. Many of the
Thai urban elite who planned to have their children complete
their studies in European or North American universities sent
them first to the mission-sponsored schools.
A high percentage of the Christian community was Chinese,
although there were several Lao and Vietnamese Roman Catholic
communities, the latter in southeastern Thailand. About half the
total Christian population lived in the Center. The remainder
were located in almost equal numbers in the North and Northeast.
More than half the total Christian community in Thailand was
Roman Catholic. Some of the Protestant groups had banded together
in the mid-1930s to form the Church of Christ in Thailand, and
nearly half of the more than 300 Protestant congregations in the
country were part of that association.
Other religions represented in Thailand included Hinduism and
Sikhism, both associated with small ethnic groups of Indian
origin. Most of the Hindus and Sikhs lived in Bangkok.
Data as of September 1987
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