By Vaudine England -- Published: SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2005

CHIANG MAI, Thailand: Verasak Leartpoonvilaikul looks like any other cheerful, well-fed resident of this northern Thai city, which is dense with Buddhist temples and market stalls for tourists.

Unlike most of his neighbors, however, he prays five times a day toward Mecca. Verasak is a leading figure at the Ban Ho mosque in Chiang Mai.

This spacious compound, including a boarding school and kindergarten, dates to 1915 and is still the center for a community of Muslims from the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. A dedicated pocket of Islam, the compound is found on a lane snaking off from the Night Bazaar, where scantily clad tourists seek bargains on fake soccer shirts and opium pipes.

Verasak's world is just as eclectic. His first love was jazz, and he met his initially non-Muslim wife in Lopburi, in central Thailand, while playing saxophone in a touring band. The vagaries of a musician's lifestyle persuaded him to come home to Chiang Mai when his father was dying to take up business as an engineer.

Verasak's life and attitudes are typical of many Muslims in northern Thailand. They have successfully integrated into Thai society, in contrast to the more marginalized Muslim populations in Thailand's troubled southern provinces.

"I'm a Thai man, 100 percent," Verasak said, beaming as he sat in his sister's restaurant near the mosque.

The flexibility, education and professional skills of Chiang Mai's ethnic Chinese Muslims is cited by them as one reason this community has had little problem integrating with a Thai Buddhist city and its people over several generations. The other reason for their success, said men at the mosque, is that there was never any doubt that this area was part of Thailand and that to survive it was important to adapt.

Muslims in northern Thailand have long married non-Muslim Thais, and those from China have adopted Thai names, as ethnic Chinese have long done, and they have attended Thai-language schools and entered a range of middle-class and professional jobs.

The contrast between this and the travails of Muslims in Thailand's four southern provinces is stark, as every conversation with members of the mosque in Chiang Mai suggests.

In the south, Muslims are in the majority and trace their roots back to independent sultanates with ethnic and linguistic ties to Malaysia. Their relationship with the state of Thailand has long been marked by conflict and repression, separatist violence, and competition among Thai security forces for power and influence.

More than 800 people have been killed in attacks since January 2004, and the government's respect for human rights and for its Muslim citizens in the region has been called into question.

Not so in the north. Youthful employees at the Active Sports store on the corner of the mosque street laughed off any hint of trouble with their Muslim neighbors. Proprietors of several stores nearby said the Muslims were good landlords.

Chiang Mai's community of about 6,500 Muslims - among an overall population of 180,000 - includes families from Bangladesh, Pakistan and beyond, but the majority arrived from southern China. The first trading caravans from Yunnan arrived in the 1400s.

"Now we represent all different kinds of work," said Winai Jarin, a gem trader and an ethnic Chinese Muslim living next to the mosque. "Our people include government servants, doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and others."

This level of education and independent wealth has spared the Muslims of the north from any feeling of discrimination, Winai said.

"You can see, there's a wall behind our mosque and over that wall is a Buddhist temple - no problem!" he said.

Winai, who is in his 60s, added that he visited China when he was 2 but had no plans to go again.

Verasak, the jazz enthusiast, said he might make a first trip to Yunnan next year but had no doubts about where he belongs.

He recounted how he was educated at a local Christian school - Chiang Mai has long been a focus for Christian missionaries - and went to the mosque every night to learn Arabic for his prayers.

"I could choose for myself because I've learned about Christianity and about Buddhism," Verasak said, "but I think Islam is best."

Verasak's father left China in the 1920s, leaving a first wife and children. After following the ancient routes of Yunnanese trading caravans south, he married again in Thailand, where Verasak was born.

The imam at Ban Ho mosque, Ma Chin Jaen, came from Yunnan 25 years ago, but his brother had been here for two decades before him. He leads prayers for up to 400 people on Fridays, and estimates that 70 percent of them are ethnic Chinese.

Although Ban Ho is not the only mosque in Chiang Mai, it is the biggest among 12. Its liveliness was evident on a recent rainy weekday when afternoon prayers were attended by young and old men, visiting from their offices or shops in the Night Market and beyond, washing feet and face before entering.

There is no strident call to prayer from loudspeakers but rather a discreet chant over a small microphone at the mosque doors.

None of these men wanted to be quoted for their views of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose harsh methods in the south have attracted the criticism of international rights bodies, even though some of them went to school with Thaksin, who was born in Chiang Mai.

Some, however, have joined demonstrations in front of the U.S. Consulate here to protest the invasion of Iraq and sent a delegation to the U.S. and British consulates to request an end to the war. This appears to be about as political as Chiang Mai's Muslims want to get.

Verasak said his wife wears a head scarf "only sometimes," contrasting the north's low-key industriousness with what he described as the southern Muslim's wish only to "pray, pray, pray."

"We are very polite, very smooth and quiet," Verasak added. "We are very comfortable here."

The ethnic Chinese Muslims are so well integrated into Thai life that they are not even part of overseas Chinese business networks, said Jean Berlie, an anthropologist who contributed to the book "Where China Meets Southeast Asia," published in 2000 by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Berlie said the closed border between China and its southern neighbors from 1950 to 1980 reinforced the sense of separation.

"Consequently, new Chinese trade networks between Yunnan and Thailand have replaced the ancient, traditional Muslim ones," Berlie wrote. "The numerous Thai delegations which have been coming since the 1980s are not Muslim: The first foreign bank to open a branch in Kunming is Thai."

But the men of Ban Ho do not seem concerned about such cultural changes in northern Thailand.

"Here in Chiang Mai is a good example of how many different people can live together at peace," Verasak said.

His sister was closing up the restaurant for the night, his wife was selling satay at her street stall and his cousin was leaving, bareheaded, on a motorbike, as he paused to emphasize his next point.

"I think Christians and Muslims are the same," he said. "We are all from the same root."

He added with a laugh, "The only difference is that Muslims don't eat pork."

A stark contrastto south's conflict  -- http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/12/news/thai.php?page=2