Thailand’s Muslims have received increasing attention in recent decades. Much of this work has focused the Malayu-speaking
populations of Thailand’s so-called “Deep South” (Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, and southern Songkla provinces), with secondary
attention to Thai speaking Muslims of varied ethnicities in Bangkok and Chiangmai. Much less attention has been given to the
Thai-speaking Muslims of Thailand’s upper south, including the east-coast southern peninsular provinces ranging from
Chumpon province in the north to northern Songkla province in the south. In earlier presentations of this paper, the author has
discovered that some of that inattention is due to the assumption, especially among some Thai academics, that the Thai-speaking
Muslims of Thailand’s upper South are analytically less important than the Melayu-speaking Muslims of the Thailand’s Far
South. One of the purpose of the present article is to use the vitality, geographical mobility, and educational outcomes
observable in a particular cluster of Upper South Muslim communities to demonstrate their social and analytical significance. A
second informational gap addressed by the present article is that when scholars have studied education in Thailand’s Muslim
communities, they have focused mostly on explicitly “Islamic” parts of the curricula, and less on the “secular” subjects and
streams of study. Yet Muslim parents, community leaders, and former students often consider successful outcomes in these socalled
“worldly” streams to be just as important as explicitly “Islamic studies” in laying the groundwork for better individual
and community futures. Yet despite local ideological emphasis on the equal importance of the Islamic and secular “streams,” or
“languages,” of education, school enrollment statistics obtained from Thai educational administration offices suggest that
Muslim rates of participation in primary and secondary education—in both government and private Islamic schools—tends to
drop off much faster than is the case with Buddhist student enrollments. This drop-off is especially observable at the higher
grades of secondary education. The two topics are interrelated, because outcomes in the Islamic and secular educational
systems affect community social mobility. They also influence the community members’ relative economic and social well-being
compared to other Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Local Muslim educators and religious leaders suggest that the local
communities that are the focus of this article have been educational underachievers, and they have suggested that this
underachievement may be feeding into other local social problems such as drug abuse, access to land and capital, and access to
good jobs. The two topics are also interrelated in that education tends to be positively related to social mobility. Part of this
mobility occurs as people move to other provinces and countries to acquire more advanced education, part of it occurs as they
complete their educations and move in search of appropriate jobs, and parts of it occur as educated members of the community
return to develop local leadership positions. This latter point can be especially true of those who pursued advanced Islamic
education in the Middle East, though even these individuals find themselves drawing on both Islamic and secular bodies of
knowledge and experience as they develop their career paths