Cham Muslims of the Mekong delta

PHILIP TAYLOR

Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta: place and mobility in the cosmopolitan periphery

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007. xvi & 313 pp. ISBN 978-87-7694-009-6, pb £16.99

Reviewed by William G. Clarence-Smith, School of Oriental and African Studies

Given the paucity of materials in English on the Cham people of mainland Southeast Asia, any new publication would be welcome. As this is an excellent book, it is doubly welcome. The topic is limited to the Cham of Vietnam’s Mekong delta, who live along the Cambodian frontier, but there are some interesting asides on the Cham of Cambodia itself, and on those in central Vietnam. The Mekong delta community is entirely Islamic by faith, and many of its members live in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), whether temporarily or permanently. Taylor made eight field trips over the period 1999-2005, and collected a wealth of ethnographic data in ‘open-ended’ conversations, mainly conducted in Vietnamese rather than in Cham or Khmer. While not specifically historical in his focus, the author says quite a bit about the origins and evolution of this dynamic community. The book is generally well-written and illustrated, with telling anecdotes, useful maps, and revealing photographs. However, the theoretical emphasis on hybridity and multiple identities becomes a little laboured and oppressive at times.

At the heart of the book, there lies a fine dissection of the tension between intense localism and remarkable globalism. This leads these ‘rural cosmopolitans’ to make highly universal claims in a very localised idiom. They are emotionally rooted in their home area, and resistant to a long tradition of Vietnamese efforts at assimilation. Cham villages in the delta are instantly recognisable, due to mosques, houses, and sarongs. Also striking is the minor importance of rice agriculture, as compared to trade, river transport, fishing, boat-building, and artisanal industry. However, the Cham are simultaneously a cosmopolitan people. They are aware of their relatively recent origins in the south-central highlands of Vietnam, although they rarely feel strong bonds of affinity with their ‘Hindu’ or ‘mixed Islam’ kin. As pious Muslims, they are part of the global umma, and they realise that they have long mingled their genes with those of Muslim immigrants from all over Southeast Asia and beyond. Malay loan words are common in their Austronesian language, and Arabic is fairly widely studied. As keen traders, they travel widely, and, partly due to centuries of persecution, resident communities have formed in many parts of the world. Some of the gains of trade and diasporic living have been ploughed back into home villages, in a pattern familiar from many other mobile peoples.

Much of the book, notably in chapters 4 to 6, is devoted to the impact of the Communist take-over in 1975, followed by economic liberalisation. Some Cham did rather well in exploiting the failures of top-down economic management after 1975, but others were sent to New Economic Zones and lost their lands to Vietnamese settlers, being perceived as having favoured French colonialism and ‘puppet regimes’ supported by the Americans. In the 1990s, political pressures eased, but the Cham often found it hard to survive in the free-for-all capitalism of the reform period. Weaving suffered badly from the liberalisation of textile imports, although ‘ethnic tourism’ offset some of these losses. Saigon has become increasingly important to the Mekong delta Cham, with the traditional seven Cham mosques expanding in number to around a dozen.

Another important section of the book, mainly in chapters 2 and 3, investigates the progress of Islamic reform, as the group’s identity gradually comes to be expressed more in religious than in ethnic terms. For Kinh (ethnic Vietnamese) women marrying into the community, conversion to Islam is a symbolic moment. Support, both financial and moral, comes from the wider Islamic world, and returning pilgrims are significant sources of outside influence. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, ‘Wahhabi’ reform tends to be expressed by building separate mosques, rejecting the veneration of ‘saints’ and ancestors, frowning on celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday, hostility to Sufi mysticism, and a strict dress code for women.

Taylor’s intellectual background lies in studies of the extraordinary religious and ethnic diversity of the Mekong delta, and he is occasionally a little wobbly on matters relating to Islam and maritime Southeast Asia. He seems unaware of the role played by Muslim Tamils, arriving under the umbrella of French colonialism, even though he mentions, in passing, that ‘Indians’ built the Trà Vinh mosque in 1921 (p. 118). He is almost as hazy about Arab influence, with no grasp of the workings of the Hadhrami Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia, despite mentioning an Arab ‘saint’ of the lineage of ‘Ali (p. 77), almost certainly a Hadhrami sayyid. There is much on the importance of the coffee shop as a place for socialising, and on coffee drinking more generally, but no glossing of the possible association of coffee with the Islamic world, and conversely of tea with the Sinic world.

The real strengths of this book lie in a deep and complex understanding of the fragmented societies of Vietnam’s far south. As Taylor puts it in his conclusion, ‘the Mekong delta remains divided, ironically, by competing visions of human unity, not one of which compels universal authority over the entire region’. The Cham version of this localised universality is an Islamic one, and increasingly so, and it remains unclear whether the tensions building up around ‘Wahhabi’ reform may lead to violence over time. In any event, it is much to be hoped that this fine book will stimulate more studies of the Cham, including those of the south-central highlands of Vietnam, who have retained much of the Hinduism that characterised them when they were one of the most powerful peoples of Southeast Asia.