The Sultanate of Patani

Down from Mahligai

Drafted from Wyatt, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1970)formation

Patani began inland and moved to the sea.

The founder was born Phaya Tu Antara, son of Phaya Tu Kerub Mahajana of Kota Mahligai — an interior seat, some way from the coast — and what he did was relocate. He took the court down to a landing place on the Gulf shore of the peninsula, and the settlement that grew there became Patani. He is remembered afterwards as Sultan Isma'il Syah, which is the other half of the story.

Two things happened at once

The move and the conversion are not separable, and both are about the sea.

An inland ruler lives on what the country round him produces and on whoever he can compel. A ruler at a landing place lives on what passes. Going down to the coast meant entering a world of Muslim shipping — Gujarati, Arab, Malay — in which being Muslim was not incidental to doing business but close to a condition of it.

Patani's own tradition attributes the ruler's conversion to people from Pasai, who were present in the town as a trading community. That is a specific and plausible route: Pasai was the oldest Muslim court in the region, four hundred miles west across the peninsula and the strait, and its merchants were exactly the people a new port on the Gulf would be dealing with.

Patani has long been held to be one of the cradles of Islam in Southeast Asia, and the claim is older than Melaka's. D'Eredia, writing in 1613, says Islam was adopted at Patani and Pahang before it reached Melaka; Islam was certainly established at Trengganu, close by, no later than 1386. When exactly it arrived here nobody has established.

A disputed pedigree

The origins are confused in the tradition, and the confusion is itself informative.

The oral and written accounts disagree about the immediate origins of the ruling house and about whether its connections on the peninsula were Thai or Malay. That looks like the residue of a period in which Patani's predecessors had been eclipsed by their neighbours — and when a new Patani rose to prominence in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, its pedigree became something worth arguing about. Factions inside the state identified their own fortunes with competing cultural traditions and political connections, and each had a version of where the dynasty had come from.

Only two rulers are named before a datable event: Isma'il Syah and Mudhaffar Syah, and then a rebellion against the Thai monarchy of Ayutthaya in 1564. Before that the record is a set of claims about ancestry made by people with reasons.

What a chronicle argues

Drafted from Wyatt, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1970)aside?What aside means

Almost everything known about Patani from the inside comes from one text, the Hikayat Patani, and it was written by people with a position in an argument that was still open.

It is worth knowing what kind of book that makes it. It is not a chronicle in the sense of a year-by-year register. It is a sequence of episodes with a moral shape — the same form as the Sejarah Melayu, the Melaka court's chronicle written in exile at Johor, and like that text it is simultaneously the only view from within and a document with something to prove.

What this one is arguing about

Succession, and specifically the legitimacy of a line that ran through women for a century.

The text spends a great deal of its length on the four queens and on the events around each accession, and it is at pains to establish that each was the right person. That is not how a chronicle behaves about an uncontroversial rule. It is how a chronicle behaves when the arrangement it is describing needs defending — and the Hikayat was compiled, in the form we have, after the queens were over and a different dynasty from Kelantan held the throne.

So the most detailed evidence for Patani's most distinctive feature comes from people who had an interest in how that feature was remembered.

The Sejarah Melayu is elegy — survivors writing about a lost city. The Hikayat Patani is closer to a brief.

What follows from that

Nobody can say whether Patani had a rule of succession.

Women succeeded women for a hundred and four years, which looks like a rule and was not one: descent ran through the founding dynasty, and the dynasty had run out of men. Whether anything more principled than that was ever agreed is a question only the Hikayat could answer — and the Hikayat is the witness with the strongest motive to say yes.

That is a harder kind of ignorance than a missing document. The document exists, it is detailed, and it is arguing.

The cannon

Drafted from Wyatt, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1970)expansion

Patani cast its own artillery, and the pieces were famous enough that the Hikayat Patani names them: Seri Negara, Seri Patani, Nang Liu-liu. They were large bronze guns, made in the town by a founder the chronicle identifies, and they were what made a Siamese siege an expensive proposition rather than a formality.

When Siam finally took the town in 1786 it carried them off. Seri Patani is in Bangkok, outside the Ministry of Defence, under a Thai name.

Why a port had guns

Patani was on the Gulf side of the peninsula, which put it on the route between the China trade and the Siamese and Malay ports, and it did well out of the period when Portuguese Melaka was driving Muslim shipping elsewhere. Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and English trading posts were established there in the first decades of the seventeenth century; the Dutch and English factories at Patani predate their factories almost anywhere else in the archipelago.

Patani lived on tolls, like every other port on this strait, and it had a hinterland but not a productive one. What is unusual is what the money bought.

The others on this water bought protection from somebody. Melaka bought a Ming guarantee. Srivijaya and Johor bought the orang laut, which is to say they paid the people who would otherwise have robbed them. Pasai bought nothing much and was taken twice in three years.

Patani bought guns and a wall, and used them.

1634

Raja Ungu, the third of the four queens, refused the Siamese overlordship her predecessors had accepted. A large Siamese army and fleet came south and were beaten off.

That was the ordinary condition of the peninsula rather than a contradiction: tribute bought the appearance of submission, and the substance stayed negotiable until somebody tested it. What made Patani able to test it, in a way that Kedah and Kelantan and Terengganu could not, was a foundry.

Four queens

Drafted from Wyatt, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1970)peak

In 1584 the male line of Patani failed and the dead sultan's sister took the throne.

Raja Hijau reigned thirty-two years. Her sister Raja Biru followed, then a second sister, Raja Ungu, then Raja Ungu's daughter Raja Kuning. Four queens in succession, from 1584 to 1688: a hundred and four years.

Not a rule about women

Four queens in a line invites a conclusion it will not support, and Patani is the sharpest case of it anywhere in these waters.

Descent at Patani ran through the founding dynasty, not through its women. What happened in 1584 is that the dynasty had no men left, and then kept not having them: a sister, a second sister, a third, and then a daughter. Nothing was inherited through the female line and nothing in Patani's law made women eligible as women.

Aceh, four hundred miles across the water, did the same thing for fifty-eight years from 1641 and did it for a different reason again — there the merchant aristocracy installed queens deliberately, four times running, precisely because a queen could not lead an army or build a following among the war captains. A mechanism for keeping the throne weak.

Two of the longest runs of reigning women anywhere in the Malay world, on two sultanates in the same century, and neither of them a rule about women. Genuine matrilineal succession exists — in Ghana, where al-Bakri states it outright, in Makuria, in Asante, where the matriclan decided who could rule at all — and it looks nothing like either of these.

1786

Drafted from Wyatt, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1970)end

Patani spent two hundred and eighty years as a nominal tributary of Ayutthaya that behaved, in practice, as an independent state.

In 1634 Raja Ungu refused the overlordship her predecessors had accepted, put that independence to an actual test, and a large Siamese army and fleet were beaten off.

In 1786, nineteen years after Ayutthaya itself was destroyed by a Burmese army, the dynasty that had replaced it at Bangkok took Patani, deported a large part of the population north, and carried off the town's great cannon.

Who did it

The polity that took Patani was not quite the one it had spent two centuries managing.

Ayutthaya had been destroyed by a Burmese army in 1767, nineteen years earlier. The Siamese state that reassembled itself afterwards under a new dynasty at Bangkok was a different and more centralising thing than the one that fell: it had lost its capital, its archive and much of its literature, and what it built back was tighter.

Patani's two hundred and eighty years of negotiable tribute ended because the party on the other side of the negotiation had been replaced by one that did not negotiate. The new dynasty rebuilt Ayutthaya's city plan on a fresh bend of the river and re-promulgated its law code, and then went south and collected what the old arrangement had only ever pretended to owe.

A border through it

Drafted from Wyatt, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1970)afterlife

Siam took Patani in 1786, deported part of the population north, and carried off the guns. That is the conquest, and it is not really when the sultanate ended.

In 1808 the territory was broken into seven small provinces under separate rulers, which is a standard device for making a place ungovernable as a unit. In 1902 the last of the ruling line was removed and the area was absorbed into the Siamese administrative system.

And in 1909, under an Anglo-Siamese treaty, Britain and Siam drew a line. Kedah, Kelantan, Terengganu and Perlis went to the British side and are now in Malaysia. Patani stayed on the Siamese side and is now the southern provinces of Thailand.

The line runs through what had been one Malay-speaking, Muslim, Jawi-writing world, and it was drawn by two states neither of which was in it.

Endings that are documents

Patani is not the only one. Brunei ended in 1888, having been given away in pieces to two chartered companies and a private individual, and the pieces are now in three countries. Sulu's own ending turns on a single word in an 1878 contract, whose translation determined which state a coastline belongs to today.

None of those is a conquest, whatever else it is. Nobody stormed anything. The instrument in each case is a signature, generally applied a long way away, and often by parties who had never seen the place.

That is the harder thing to convey about how these sultanates ended, because a conquest has a date and a battle and somebody to blame. Patani's ending took a hundred and twenty-three years and three separate instruments — a deportation, a partition, and a treaty between two empires — and the last of them is the one still being argued about.

What 1909 did not settle

Drafted from Group, Southern Thailand: Insurgency, Not Jihad (2005)afterlife

The 1909 treaty fixed a border. It did not settle the question of who the people on the Siamese side of it were governed by, or why - and the argument it left open has outlived every government that has tried to close it.

An imam's petition, and its answer

Haji Sulong, an Islamic scholar who had returned to Patani after decades studying in Mecca, spent the 1940s pressing Bangkok for exactly what the 1909 treaty had refused: religious courts under Islamic law, Malay taught in schools, and local officials answerable to the region rather than imposed from the capital. He was arrested in 1948 and disappeared in Thai police custody in 1954, presumed murdered - and his petition, rather than being forgotten, became the founding grievance of every movement that followed him.

From petitions to guerrillas

The Barisan Revolusi Nasional, formed in the 1960s, and the Patani United Liberation Organisation, founded in 1968, replaced Haji Sulong's appeals to Bangkok with armed insurgency aimed at outright independence. Decades of intermittent guerrilla activity in the southern border provinces followed, ebbing and flaring without ever fully resolving into either victory or peace, alongside a smaller rival faction, the Gerakan Mujahidin Islam Patani.

The violence that returned

On 4 January 2004 raiders stormed an army depot in Narathiwat, killed four soldiers and made off with hundreds of weapons - the opening act of a resurgence far more sustained than anything in the previous two decades. The government declared martial law within a day. On 28 April that year, security forces stormed militants who had barricaded themselves inside the historic Kru Se Mosque in Pattani, killing all inside; and on 25 October, at Tak Bai, seven protesters were shot dead and at least seventy-eight more died of suffocation or crushing while being transported, bound, in army trucks after a demonstration outside a police station.

Those three events did for the twenty-first-century insurgency what Haji Sulong's disappearance had done for the twentieth: they turned a political grievance into a body count with names attached, recruiting for the movements that used them far more effectively than any ideology on its own could have.

An argument still running

The line drawn in 1909 divided one Malay-speaking, Muslim world into a Malaysian side and a Thai one, and everything since - Haji Sulong's petition, the guerrilla decades, the mosque and the checkpoint - has been an argument about what obligation the state on the Thai side of that line owes to the people it drew inside it. Unlike Patani's own conquest, its partition, or the removal of its ruling line, this last chapter has no date it can be filed under. It is still being fought over the way the earlier ones were fought over before they had endings.