A Bit More Detail

The Irish Times has an article examining the history and current position of the Cham people, a Muslim Austronesian-speaking people living in diaspora in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The nondescript river town of Chau Doc is home to one of Vietnam’s less likely attractions, Islam. It’s an easy sell for tourists who are surprised to find a Muslim village on the Hau river, a wide brown-watered branch of the Mekong often depicted in Vietnam war film scenes of patrol boats fading into a jungle sunset. This is also home to the Cham, one of oldest, most idiosyncratic Muslim communities in Asia.

Colourful apparitions amid the banana and coconut trees of this tropical town, the Cham women’s long, flowing dresses and veils set them apart in socialist Vietnam, where working women wear a simple blouse over three-quarter length trousers. Leant over motorbikes, their men set themselves apart with white skull caps and the sarong-style wraps more common to south Asia.

This settlement of 10,000 Muslims traces its roots to the early Arab caliphs, leaders of Islam and free traders who encouraged Arab sailors to spread the faith across the Asian seas. They found willing converts in Chinese south coast cities.

Converts were plenty in today’s Malaysia and in the seaports of Cambodia and Burma. Similarly among the Cham, an Indic people with a kingdom sprawling across southern Vietnam and eastern Cambodia. The fall of the Cham kingdom in 1471 to Vietnamese forces triggered an exodus into Cambodia and southward across the strait to Malaysia. Those who remained retained their religion, although in an increasingly syncretic form that meshed local Buddhist and animist beliefs.

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While they’ve been able to practise their faith, the Cham have been sidelined economically compared to the country’s Kinh ethnic majority. “They lack education, connections and access to state power,” according to Philip Taylor, a Vietnam expert at the National University of Australia, who has published a book on the Cham. He points to the Cham’s inability to cash in on a boom in aquaculture on Mekong tributaries like the Hau. The Cham lack the know-how and access to credit enjoyed by the Kinh, who dominate business and officialdom. Though there’s money coming in from tourism, local Muslim communities have come to rely on overseas aid to build mosques and madrassahs.