Staging history for Thailand's far south: fantasy for a supposedly pliant Muslim community

If the current conflict in Thailand's far south could be interpreted as a revival and full retelling of the 1940s modernist Islamic awakening, why have local Muslim elites and various state agents in the historical present circumvented such a reawakening? Instead, what was broadcast was another history, namely a certain glorious Patani past that supposedly featured a harmonious relationship with Siam. My stipulation of the 1940s Islamic reawakening refers not only to what followed the awakening in Thailand's far south in the long twentieth century but, more broadly, to the meaning of that past in the politics of the twenty-first. This essay argues that the absence of any serious attempt to interpret the resurgence of violence and to account for incidents of unnecessary deaths remains an important barrier to an understanding between the government and ordinary Muslims in the far south.