Courting the Cham

New theatre of terror?

A cultural revival gathers pace. So do worries about fundamentalism

Sep 30th 2010
The Economist
PHNOM PENH

IN THE so-called war on terror, Cambodia is a sleepy outpost on a tense South-East Asian front that stretches from the Philippines to Thailand. Western governments are, however, worried that trouble may be brewing in this backwater.

Security experts fret about the possible perversion of a cultural revival by Cambodia’s Muslims, who mostly belong to the 400,000-strong Cham minority. In the genocidal 1970s the Khmer Rouge executed most leaders of the Cham and tried to exterminate both the tribe and Islam from the Maoist paradise they said they were building. Ben Kiernan of Yale University estimates that 90,000 out of a population of 250,000 died, a higher rate of loss than any other ethnic group. Only 21 imams survived out of 113, along with perhaps 15% of Cambodia’s mosques.

As they struggled from the wreckage, poor Muslim congregations came to depend on foreign charities for help rebuilding their mosques, whose numbers have risen tenfold to around 250 today, says Bjorn Blengsi, an anthropologist. They also became receptive to imported versions of Islam, which tend to be stricter than the traditionally relaxed local variety. Agnès de Féo, another anthropologist and author of “L’Islam au Cambodge et au Vietnam” says both Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia and Tablighi Jemaat from India are gaining adherents.