Article

Patani

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Patani

Patani, historically known as Greater Patani, was a Malay sultanate located in the northern Malay Peninsula whose territory is now divided between the southern Thai provinces of Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, and Songkhla, and the Malaysian state of Kelantan. The kingdom, which endured from its mythical founding through the late seventeenth century and whose political legacy persisted into the twentieth, occupied a strategic position between the Thai basin to the north and the Malay archipelago to the south, serving as a node of trade, Islamic scholarship, and cultural production that shaped the political and intellectual life of the region [1, pp. 15–16], [2, pp. 69–70]. Its history is marked by a complex tributary relationship with Siam, repeated conflicts over sovereignty, and a distinctive literary and religious tradition that continues to define the identity of its Malay-Muslim population [2, pp. 69–72], [3, pp. 1–5].

Origins, Founding, and Early Political History

The earliest accounts of Patani’s origins are preserved in the Hikayat Patani, a six-book Malay manuscript composed between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, which served as a political charter for the sultanate [4, p. 47]. The founding legend, as transmitted in a Thai typescript dated 1928 and translated by David K. Wyatt, relates that an albino mouse-deer appeared at a beach and disappeared, prompting the arrival of Che’ Tani, who established the settlement at the spot where the animal vanished — a place thereafter called pata ni (“this beach”) [1, p. 19]. The ruler’s conversion to Islam is attributed to Sheikh Sa-i, who cured the sovereign of leprosy in exchange for an oath to embrace the faith, an episode that Nathan Porath reads as encoding the kingdom’s political and social contract with Islam, making the sultanate’s viability conditional on its Islamic character [1, pp. 21–22], [4, pp. 49–50].

The Hikayat Patani chronicles the succession of early sultans, including the casting of cannons and the execution of merchants for violating trade prohibitions [1, p. 23]. A particularly notable event records the execution of Sheikh Khamu and his apprentice Abdul Mumin for exporting brass, their bodies floating in the Pareh Canal [1, pp. 23–24]. The text also documents the rule of multiple female sovereigns, including Raja Ijau, Raja Biru, and Raja Kuning, who adopted the title phra-chao [1, pp. 29–31]. Porath’s analysis of the manuscript’s political narrative reveals that Patani’s relationship with its two great neighbours — Ayutthaya and Johor — was structured by a deliberate construction of mimetic identity: the text affirmatively recognizes similarity with Ayutthaya while fracturing every possible resemblance with Johor, positioning Patani as an elite Indic kingdom distinct from its Malay-speaking neighbours [4, pp. 45–48].

Sultan Mudhaffar Syah’s attack on the Ayutthaya palace, dated to approximately 1564, is confirmed by the Thai Luang Prasoert chronicle, which records the sultan riding one of King Cakkraphat’s white elephants in the palace plaza [4, pp. 56–57]. Porath argues that this was not a secessionist rebellion but a failed usurpation within the Indic frame of mimetic kingdom-hood, undertaken when the Ayutthaya king appeared weak under Burmese pressure [4, pp. 55–58]. A second rebellion under Queen Raja Ungu in the 1630s was triggered by the usurpation of King Prasat Thong; the queen rejected her Ayutthaya-conferred Thai title Phra Nang Chaou Ying and substituted the Islamic title Paduka Syah Alam, an unprecedented severing of Patani’s ties with Ayutthaya’s authority [4, pp. 59–61]. King Prasat Thong mobilized 60,000 men for the punitive expedition against Patani, headed by the Governor of Ligor, Okya Kalahom, the Pra Klang, and Rabisit, a Muslim official; he also requested Dutch armed ships from Batavia, which arrived too late [4, p. 61].

Following a series of rebellions near the turn of the nineteenth century, Patani was defeated by a resurgent Thai state and partitioned into seven smaller states [2, p. 68]. In 1842, a member of the Kelantan royal house came to fill the vacant throne of Patani, and though the descendants of the Kelantan dynasty exercised authority over only one of the seven states, the Raja of Patani was looked to as the heir of Greater Patani [2, p. 68].

Siamese Centralization and the Crisis of 1902

In the late nineteenth century, the rajas of Greater Patani exercised authority independently of Siam, chosen according to local custom by the headmen within the state before the interment of the predecessor’s body, after which a letter was sent to the king requesting recognition [2, p. 68]. The relationship with Siam was symbolized by a triennial tribute of the bunga mas — trees crafted of gold and silver — the strength of which tightened in periods of Thai ascendancy and loosened in periods of decline [2, p. 68]. The bunga mas tribute from Patani consisted of a gold tree and a silver tree, each at least six feet tall with stand, requiring two months to complete; the combined value was estimated at over $5,000, with the Jalor contribution alone at $1,500 [5, pp. 77–78].

British colonial demands for effective Siamese control over the northern Malay states — formalized in the Secret Convention of 1897, by which Siam agreed not to grant any concession in the Malay Peninsula to a foreign power without written British consent — compelled Siam to inaugurate an administrative reorganization designed to replace the loose unity around the sacred person of the king with effective bureaucratic control [2, pp. 67–68]. In 1895, commissioners responsible to a high commissioner at Songkhla were sent to five of the Patani states with letters from the king stating they were to advise on request [2, p. 69]. The first direct interference came when the high commissioner, Phya Sukhum, ordered the opium farms of all seven states integrated into a single farm, with revenues pooled and the rajas to receive their previous amounts plus half the additional balance [2, p. 69]. The initial contract rent was $30,200 per year; the rajas received their previous amounts in the first year but none of the promised additional balance in subsequent years [2, pp. 69–70].

The conflict over the poll tax designated to pay for the bunga mas epitomized the struggle between the rajas and the commissioners. In mid-1901, while the Raja of Patani was visiting Singapore, the commissioner began collecting the tax; over half the inhabitants had paid by the time the raja returned, who then issued a proclamation notifying those who had not yet paid to pay him in the usual manner [2, p. 69]. The high commissioner ordered over six hundred men from Nongchik to patrol Patani to enforce collection for the commissioner [2, p. 69]. The rajas’ petitions to Governor Swettenham between August and October 1901 enumerated grievances centred on revenue encroachment and interference with Islamic practice, explicitly threatening violence if no redress was obtained [2, pp. 72–73].

The abuses suffered by the Patani population were aggravated by the fact that the commissioners were Siamese-Buddhists governing Malay-Muslims. Inhabitants were forced to appear in court on Fridays during congregational prayers, to take oaths contrary to Islamic beliefs, and during the fasting month to work long hours in the sun; some Muslims were forced to carry pigs and others to carry Buddhist images in ceremonies [2, pp. 71–72]. The commissioner in Patani would not allow the raja to fine those who did not attend Friday prayers, and without this source of revenue the mosques were falling into disrepair [2, p. 72]. Leading Malay inhabitants were required to kneel before a picture of the King of Siam before which joss sticks were burning and around which stood certain idols, a ceremony that engendered “great offense among the Muslim populace” [2, p. 72].

On Friday, 21 February 1902, Phya Sri Sahadheb presented Raja Abdul Kadir with a document demanding compliance with administrative reforms and gave him five minutes to sign or be deposed; thirty Siamese soldiers surrounded the raja and carried him to a gunboat [2, pp. 86–87]. The raja was imprisoned at Pitsanuloke for “gross disobedience” [2, p. 87]. The British Colonial Office’s internal minute summarized its response as “This is outrageous!” and the first draft of a diplomatic note proposed to “insist upon the immediate release of the Raja of Patani as a signal of the Siamese government’s wish to remain on friendly terms with England” [2, p. 87]. However, British Minister Tower at Bangkok deliberately suppressed the protest, arguing it would “injure our cause” to take drastic measures over “a non-coterminous state” while negotiations concerning Kelantan and Trengganu were still pending [2, p. 87]. Siam’s strategy of establishing effective control in the Patani states kept this area out of the 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty negotiations, while its treatment of the raja brought a new British determination not to allow any kind of direct Siamese control in Kelantan and Trengganu [2, p. 88].

Economic Life and the Natural Environment

William Cameron’s 1883 account of his fourteen-month sojourn in the region provides one of the earliest detailed descriptions of Patani’s economic and physical landscape. The town of Patani was a trading centre of three to four thousand souls exporting tin, lead, gutta-percha, salt fish, and earthenware, governed by a Raja and overseen by a powerful Chinese official, the Dato of the mines, Chew Beng [6, pp. 123–126]. Cameron’s geological survey identified a distinct mineral belt approximately two miles wide, striking south by west, containing the productive galena veins; the largest lode ever discovered in Malaya (No. 1 Mine) lay within this belt [6, p. 131]. The galena lodes in the crystalline limestone contained silver in proportions ranging from 23 to 66 ounces per ton [6, p. 131]. Galena boulders found in surface “pockets” weighed up to six or seven pikul each, with single pockets yielding as much as seven or eight hundred pikul; Cameron demonstrated these were detached fragments from overhanging lodes broken by ancient marine action, not in-situ deposits [6, p. 132]. Elephants carried between three and a half and five pikul per load to the galena mines, making them the economically superior transport compared with buffaloes [6, p. 126].

Arthur T. Dew’s 1883 exploring expedition from Selama, Perak, to Pong in Patani documented the diminished state of Siamese settlements in the interior. Pong consisted of only six Siamese houses, reduced from twenty, the population having been conscripted by the Raja of Patani for forced labour [7, p. 112]. The nearby Klian Pong tin mine, once worked by five hundred Chinese, was abandoned, while Klian Intan still employed about a hundred Macao and Hylam miners [7, pp. 112–113]. Rice at Pong sold at twelve cents per gantang and fowls at three to nine cents each [7, p. 112]. The 1909 British Consular report recorded 4,209 boats, 155,629 cattle, and 35,714 buffaloes in the Monthon; three gold mines near Tomoh employed only about 35 men, and a British syndicate held a 12-square-mile lease at the Baja Gua Timbas tin mine [8, pp. 115–116].

Islamic Scholarship and the Jawi Literary Tradition

Virginia Matheson and M.B. Hooker’s survey of Kitab Jawi — Islamic literature written in Malay — documents a continuous tradition of scholarly production by Patani authors from the early nineteenth century to the late 1980s, which they argue constitutes a living intellectual silsilah linking Meccan scholarship to the Malay world and serving as the defining cultural marker of Malay-Muslim identity in southern Thailand [3, pp. 1–5]. Shaykh Daud bin Abdullah al-Fatani, the earliest known Islamic writer from the peninsular Malay world, produced dated works spanning 1809 to 1843; his Furūʿ al-Masā’il (659 pages) is the longest text in their sample, and twelve of his works were still being reprinted in 1987, typically through al-Maʿarif Press in Penang [3, pp. 19–25].

Of 42 texts surveyed in bookshops across Patani, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Kota Bharu, 12 treat fiqh and 20 treat sub-categories of kalam; only one work addresses tasawwuf and one tafsir, suggesting a shift away from mysticism [3, pp. 40–41]. The fatawa of Shaykh Ahmad bin Muhammad Zain (220 pages, published 1957) display a command of Arabic sources and sophistication of argument that the authors judge “technically superior” to recent Malaysian fatawa [3, p. 30]. Local Patani presses produce print runs of 2,000 to 4,000 copies per edition; one text, Al-Risālah al-Tawḥīdiyyah, reached a cumulative total of 23,000 copies over ten printings by 1984 [3, pp. 52–53]. The pondok system, which Matheson and Hooker argue originated in Patani, functions as both the primary consumer and the engine of production for Kitab Jawi [3, pp. 42–56]. However, the number of registered pondok in the four southern provinces fell from an estimated 400 in 1974 to 181 in 1986, and since 1985 no new pondok have been permitted to open [3, pp. 45–46].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on Patani spans more than a century and reflects shifting scholarly priorities. The earliest contributions are travel and geological accounts: Cameron’s 1883 survey of the Patani River system and its mineral deposits [6], and Dew’s 1883 journal of a mountain exploring expedition commissioned by Sir Hugh Low in the context of Anglo-Siamese boundary negotiations [7]. These works, published in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, provide first-hand descriptions of a region then under Siamese suzerainty and largely unexplored by Western science. The Cambridge University Expedition of 1899–1900, whose personal accounts were published by Gibson-Hill, Skeat, and Laidlaw in 1953, represents the most comprehensive multi-disciplinary field study of the Patani states, yielding over twenty published zoological papers and dense ethnographic observations of burial customs, wedding ceremonies, spirit-halls, and the manufacture of the bunga mas tribute [5].

The mid-twentieth century saw a turn toward textual and political history. Wyatt’s 1967 publication of a Thai typescript translation of the Hikayat Patani provided a critical bridge to the lost Malay manuscript referenced by T.J. Newbold over a century prior, offering an indigenous genealogical framework for the kingdom’s early history [1]. Margaret Koch’s 1977 article foregrounded the agency of the Malay rajas and the internal contradictions of British imperial policy, arguing that Siam’s success in establishing firm authority over Patani directly caused its loss of influence over Kelantan and Trengganu [2]. Khoo Kay Kim’s 1988 compilation of Malayan English press documents reconstructed the “Malayan perception” of Siamese rule at the turn of the twentieth century, demonstrating how Singapore-based European commercial interests shaped British public opinion ahead of the 1909 treaty [8].

More recent scholarship has expanded the scope to encompass cultural and intellectual history. Matheson and Hooker’s 1988 survey of the Jawi literary tradition documented the continuity of Islamic scholarship from the Meccan period to the late twentieth century and the political pressures threatening its survival [3]. Porath’s 2011 application of René Girard’s mimetic theory to the Hikayat Patani offered an alternative to both ethnicist and purely institutional readings of the text’s political narrative, reframing Patani’s relationships with Ayutthaya and Johor as deliberate constructions of mimetic identity [4]. Wyatt’s 1967 conclusion that the Thai typescript should be viewed as “an early pebble from an unexplored sea rather than the final stone for a wall of vernacular chronicles” [1, p. 18] remains apt: the records attest to a rich but fragmentary documentary heritage, with significant gaps in the middle Peninsula history before the sixteenth century and unsatisfactory coverage of seventeenth-century conflicts [1, p. 18].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. D.K. Wyatt (1967). A Thai version of Newbold’s “Hikayat Patani” JMBRAS 40(2): 15–37. Read on JSTOR
  2. M.L. Koch (1977). Patani and the development of a Thai state JMBRAS 50(2): 69–88. Read on JSTOR
  3. M.B. Hooker and V. Matheson (1988). Jawi literature in Patani: the maintenance of an Islamic tradition JMBRAS 61(1): 1–86.
  4. N. Porath (2011). The Hikayat Patani : the kingdom of Patani in the Malay and Thai political world JMBRAS 84(2): 45–65. Read on JSTOR
  5. C.A. Gibson-Hill et al. (1953). The Cambridge University Expedition to parts of the Malay Peninsula, 1899–1900: personal accounts. W.W. Skeat and F.F. Laidlaw. {Introd. C.A. Gibson-Hill JMBRAS 26(4): 1–174. Read on JSTOR
  6. W. Cameron (1883). On the Patani JSBRAS 11: 123–142. Read on JSTOR
  7. A.T. Dew (1887). Exploring expedition from Selama, Perak, over the mountains to Pong, Patani, in November JSBRAS 19: 105–120. Read on JSTOR
  8. Khoo Kay Kim (1988). Patani during the turn of the 20th century: a Malayan perception JMBRAS 61(1): 86–116.