The Role of Relational Valence: How Overlapping Allegiances Reshaped Religion in Cambodian Muslim Communities, c. 1830–1975

This paper examines the case of ethnic minority Muslim communities in Cambodia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These communities simultaneously developed increasing ties to the Malay and Indian Ocean Worlds, as well as loyalties to the emergent Cambodian state. The ties that bound Muslim loyalties seem to paradoxically scale up in transnational and national dimensions between 1830 and 1975. For example, the arrival of Islamic modernism is often portrayed as an exogenous force in Cambodia, established via pilgrimages of study and journeys of transmission between Al-Azhar University (Egypt), the Uloom Deoband (India), the Hijez (Arabia), the Malay peninsula, and the Cambodian countryside. Yet, the spread of Islamic modernism and reformism was also facilitated by pre-existing dual allegiances between Cham clerics, the Cambodian royal apparatus, and the French colonial government. Furthermore, the peculiar role of French policy appeared to discourage the spread of Islamic modernism, since one might rightly presuppose external intellectual influence was a potential source of criticism of French authority. Even still, colonial policies themselves both encouraged and discouraged Muslims in Cambodia to have loyalties to intellectual lineages abroad. On the one hand, they actively encouraged local ethnic minority Cham Muslim populations to maintain a sense of identity that tied their loyalty to the Cham homeland in what was then southern Annam, now south-central Vietnam. On the other hand, through stances on language policy, masjid registration, and taxation, French policy encouraged Cham loyalties with the modernist and reformist minded Muslim intellectuals overseas. How, then, was the Cham community to establish roots in Cambodia, to center themselves? This paper examines one possible solution that maintained roots amongst a climate of shifting loyalties: the development of the “Cham Bani of Cambodia,” or the “Kaum Imam San” community.