Wan Muhamad Noor Matha

Wan Muhamad Noor Matha (born 1944), also called Wan Noor, is a Thai politician who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2023 to 2025 — the first Thai Muslim, ethnic Malay and member of an ethnic minority to hold the speakership. He also served as deputy prime minister and as minister of the interior, transport, and agriculture and cooperatives. ^{1 2}

Wan Muhamad Noor Matha was born on 11 May 1944 at Mueang Yala, Yala. He was schooled at Ban Sateng School and Kanaratbamrung School in Yala and at the Islamic College of Thailand in Bangkok, then took a bachelor's and a master's degree in education at Chulalongkorn University. He became a teacher, was head teacher at Attarkiah Academy in Narathiwat at twenty, and taught at Songkhla Teachers College and Srinakharinwirot University, Songkhla, becoming vice president of Songkhla Teacher College in 1978. ^{1 3}

Elected to the House of Representatives for Yala in 1979, Wan Noor led the Wahdah group of Malay-Muslim MPs from the southern provinces through a succession of parties — Social Action, Democrat, Solidarity, New Aspiration, Thai Rak Thai and its successors, Pheu Thai — and later founded the Prachachat Party, which he led from 2018 to 2023. He was deputy minister of the interior (1994–1995), Speaker (1996–2000), minister of transport (2001–2002), minister of the interior (2002–2004), deputy prime minister (2004), and minister of agriculture (2004–2005). Barred from politics for five years after the 2006 coup as one of the 111 Thai Rak Thai executives, he returned to win the speakership a second time in July 2023. No source read for this record names a religious school for Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, and this record records none. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.