"All the Malays Are Cham": How Multivalent Allegiances Reshaped Muslim Communities in French Colonial Cambodia

From the 1920s through the 1940s Muslim communities in French Indochina underwent critical changes spurred on by the vibrant discourse of modernism and reformism. Critical multivalent allegiances allowed clerics to shepherd their communities in times of tension, dissension, and contestation. While French authorities muddled through a patchwork pile of policies, unable to determine if they should administer ethnic minority Muslim Cham communities through direct negotiations or through the legal apparatus of Cambodian royal law, clerics capitalized on the confusion and positioned themselves strategically, including by bringing outlying communities – both geographically and praxeologically defined – into the fold. Significant disputes appeared, related to medical treatments of a corpse, the registration (or clandestine) nature of schools, and an almost decade long rift that would emerge in the then center of Islamic authority for all of Cambodia, Chroy Changvar. However, a close read of the main factions involved in the rift reveals that the dynamics of Muslim clerics were not so readily defined as typical portrayals would suggest. This is to say: they do not actually sort easily into two groups. Instead, overlapping relations and shifting power dynamics contributed to the rapid institutionalization of Muslim communities at a pace unparalleled by those of Animist or syncretic Hindu Cham communities elsewhere in French Indochina. In the end, I argue the dynamics of continuous creolization not only led to the transformation of Muslim communities in Cambodia, but also those in Cochinchina, leading to the long-term transformation of non-Muslim Cham communities as well.