Cham people

Muslim people of Cambodia descended from the people of Champa

Four Cham men from Cambodia, photographed by Émile Gsell about 1877.

Community details
Khmer name	ចាម
Community type	Ethnic community
Country	Cambodia
Subjects	Community & Civic Life; Religion & Spiritual Life; History & Remembrance; Crafts & Material Culture

The Cham people (ចាម) of Cambodia are a Muslim people who descend from the people of Champa, a former kingdom on the coast of central Vietnam. Their language, Cham, belongs to the Austronesian family and is close to Malay and Acehnese. Cham communities have long lived beside Cambodia's rivers and lakes, among them Trea village in Kroch Chhmar district and Chroy Changvar near Phnom Penh.

History

Champa and the move to Cambodia

Michael Vickery wrote that Austronesian-speaking seafarers founded Champa, settling around river ports on the coast of present-day Vietnam. For centuries Champa and the Khmer kingdom fought each other. In 1177 a Cham army attacked Angkor, and in 1193 King Jayavarman VII sent an army into Champa, which then stayed under Khmer control for about 20 years.

Vietnam took Vijaya, the Cham center at present-day Quy Nhon, in 1471. Only the southern regions remained as Champa after that. Vickery dates the end of Panduranga's independence, the last of them, to 1692, and the division of its land into Vietnamese districts to 1832. Ben Kiernan wrote that Vietnam overran and broke up Champa in 1471, and that from 1693 the Vietnamese ruler treated Cham kings as local officials. Cham people began moving to Cambodia after the fall of 1471. Kiernan cites two 11th-century Arabic inscriptions that show a community of foreign Muslim traders in Champa, but he judged that few Cham had become Muslims before 1471. In the centuries that followed many Cham took up Islam. Islam is the faith of all but a few small Cham communities in Cambodia. Vickery wrote in 2005 that the largest Cham community in Vietnam, around Phan Rang, was not Muslim.

Kingdom of Longvek and Oudong

In the 16th and 17th centuries the Khmer court sat at Longvek and then at Oudong. Cham traders were among the many foreign merchants in Cambodia, and the Cham and Malays were among the groups that competed for trade and influence. The Khmer royal chronicles tell of a king who became a Muslim and ordered his ministers to dress in the Islamic way, against the Buddhist custom of the court. Magali An Berthon names him as Ramadhipati I (reigned 1642 to 1649), who married a Malay princess and converted to Islam. She writes that he brought Cham weavers to the royal court to make hol, a silk whose weft threads are tied and dyed in patterns before weaving. Kiernan wrote that a young prince, Ponhea Chan, took the throne in 1642 with Malay help, and that when the king accepted the religion of the Cham and Malays he took the name Ibrahim. In Kiernan's account this marked the high point of Muslim influence in the kingdom. On the smaller of Oudong's two hills stand the remains of the Ta San mosque. A Cham Muslim built it on land that one of the kings gave him for the purpose.

19th century

In the 19th century the Cham and the Malays, all of them Muslims, were classed together as one group, the Cham-Malays. The court named eight officials (ocnha) from among them. The Cham-Malays farmed, fished and traded, and settled in groups beside the lakes and rivers. One of their officials, Tuan Pha, served King Chan in the 1810s and rose to the rank of chauvea, or prime minister.

In 1858 the Cham and Malays on the east bank of the Mekong, in Thbaung Khmum province, rose against the provincial governor under three brothers, sons of Tuan Pha. King Ang Duong led an army against them by boat, and the rebels withdrew to Chau Doc. On the king's orders, the Cham-Malays of the province who stayed behind were moved to Pursat, Lovek, Kampong Tralach, Kampong Luong and Phnom Penh.

After independence

After independence in 1954, the Sihanouk government officially called the Cham "Islamic Khmers", a label Kiernan described as inaccurate because it denied their ethnic origin.

Khmer Rouge period

Under the Khmer Rouge, in Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979), the Communist Party of Kampuchea persecuted ethnic minorities, in particular the Cham and the Vietnamese. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia found that uprisings broke out at Koh Phal in September 1975 and at Svay Khleang in October 1975, in reaction to earlier limits on Cham religion and customs. After them, the party's armed forces moved the Cham of the East Zone, most of whom lived along the Mekong, into the Central (old North) Zone. There they were scattered among Khmer villages, so that their communities would break up and be absorbed.

The court found that in many places the regime banned daily prayer and forced Cham people to eat pork. It made them dress, cut their hair and speak like the Khmer, burned copies of the Quran and tore down mosques or put them to other uses. People who resisted were arrested or killed. In 1977 many people, among them most of the Cham of Kang Meas district (in present-day Kampong Cham province), were arrested and executed at Wat Au Trakuon. In 1978 many Cham people of Kroch Chhmar district (in present-day Tbong Khmum province) were arrested and taken to the Trea Village security center. There the Cham among them were executed and the others spared. The court found that the orders against the Cham in Sector 41 of the Central Zone and in Kroch Chhmar district of the East Zone came from the regime's upper ranks.

No single death toll is agreed. The court did not establish a definite number of victims, though it found that very many Cham civilians were killed at the Wat Au Trakuon and Trea security centers. Kiernan estimated in 1988 that the Cham population, about 250,000 and perhaps more before the regime, fell to about 173,000 over its four years, and that about 90,000 Cham, more than a third, died under it. In a table drawn from interviews, he counted 20 survivors among 113 hakkem (community leaders) and 38 among about 300 teachers at Quranic schools. UN News gave an estimate of 100,000 to 500,000 Cham Muslims among those killed under the regime.

On November 16, 2018, the court's Trial Chamber found that genocide had been committed against the Cham. It convicted Nuon Chea, the party's Deputy Secretary, of genocide of the Vietnamese and, as a superior, of genocide of the Cham. It convicted Khieu Samphan, the President of the State Presidium, of genocide of the Vietnamese only. Both were sentenced to life in prison. On September 22, 2022, the Supreme Court Chamber upheld Khieu Samphan's convictions, including the crime against humanity of persecution of the Cham. Among the reparations the Trial Chamber endorsed were projects that record the experience of civil parties harmed by the regime's treatment of the Cham.

Community

Kiernan wrote that the Cham of Cambodia had always lived mainly in some seventy villages on or close to the Mekong and Sap rivers. These lay in Kompong Cham (Kampong Cham) province in the east and in Kampong Chhnang and Pursat in the west, and most of the villagers fished the rivers on a small scale. The first French census of the protectorate, in 1874, counted 25,599 Cham, 3 percent of the population. Kiernan cites estimates of 88,000 Cham in 1936 and 250,000 in 1975.

The census tables report religion and mother tongue, not ethnic group. Muslims made up 1.9 percent of the population in the 2008 census, 1.1 percent in the 2013 inter-censal survey and 2.0 percent in the 2019 census. In 2019 the share was highest in Tbong Khmum (11.8 percent), followed by Kratie (6.6 percent) and Kampong Chhnang (5.8 percent). The 2013 survey found that speakers of minority languages lived mostly in forest and hill areas, with the Cham as the exception.

IntoCambodia.org, drawing on a map by Marsel Ner, names Trea village in Kroch Chhmar district and the Chroy Changvar area as two places with many Cham and many Muslim religious centers. It cites a 1968 Khmer geography by Doek Keam that reads the name of Kampong Cham as "Cham port", and other accounts that read it as "waiting port".

Islam

Philipp Bruckmayr's 2019 book Cambodia's Muslims and the Malay World traces religious and cultural change among Cham and Malay communities in Cambodia since the 19th century. In a review, Michael Feener summarized its account. Islam in Cambodia grew through ties with centers of learning in Pattani, Kelantan and Mecca. Cambodia's Muslims came to study texts in the traditions of Sufism and the Shafi'i school of law. Bruckmayr also describes a turn toward Jawi, the Arabic-based script used for Malay, for writing Cham.

Imam San and Chvea

Yekti Maunati and Betti Rosita Sari wrote in 2014 that the Cham of Cambodia do not form a single group. They note that many scholars count three groups: the Cham, the Cham Chvea and a group the authors call Cham Bani or Cham Jahed. Their own division is into at least two, by prayer: those who keep the five daily prayers and the Cham Jahed, whose prayers are on Fridays alone. Michael Feener wrote that Bruckmayr's 2019 book questions how such overdetermined categories as Cam Bani migrants and Chvea communities came to be drawn.

The Imam San community is one of several Islamic groups in Cambodia that Maunati and Sari name, drawing on a missionary web page, beside Chang Veng, Da'wa and Wahhabiyya. They wrote that the Imam San villages keep animist traditions that stricter Muslims reject, and so have fewer ties with Muslims abroad than the Chang Veng villages, whose speech takes in more Malay words through links with Malaysia. Citing Hean Sokhom's 2009 book Ethnic Groups in Cambodia, the authors describe the Jahed-Imam San group, known as Kom Jumat, from the Malay for "Friday group". Its members pray once a week, on Fridays, rather than five times a day. In Hean Sokhom's account its members live in places such as Oudong, Pursat and Battambang, and use the Cham language for their religious texts.

Maunati and Sari watched a Friday prayer in Kampong Tralach and a wedding of the Friday-praying Cham in Kampong Chhnang province during fieldwork in 2010 and 2011. The group's leader told them that Friday prayer was its most important practice. The authors wrote that its members see their ways as the authentic tradition of their ancestors from Vietnam, keep close ties with the Cham of central Vietnam and use the written Cham script more than other Cham do. A restaurant owner who prays five times a day told them that many younger members had begun to do the same.

In Hean Sokhom's account, as Maunati and Sari report it, the group called Chvea-Khmer Islam are Muslims who speak Khmer and Malay rather than Cham. They follow Sunni teaching and pray five times a day. Many of them are ashamed to be called Chvea, a name that points to Malay and Javanese origins. Maunati and Sari place Cham-Chvea communities along National Route 5, north of Phnom Penh, where a women's center received sewing machines and looms from the Malaysian government.

Weaving

Kikuo Morimoto surveyed silk weaving in Cambodia in 1995 for a project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and his report was published in 2019. He recorded a sarong worn by Muslims and woven mostly in Cham villages of Kampong Cham province. It often had a silk warp and a cotton weft. He compared it to the mashru cloth of India, made where religious law kept devout Muslim men from wearing garments of pure silk. In Kompong Krobai, a Cham village in Kampong Siem district, half of the 92 households had looms in 1995, and 20 of them wove silk; the villagers knew more than twenty sampot hol patterns. A weaver there showed him the kontoi kronggao, or peacock tail, a pattern he described as popular among Muslims. At Trea village, on the Mekong, he counted about 1,000 Cham households, seven in ten of them weaving, mainly sarongs and krama in Muslim styles. He noted that Malaysia, where the villagers were in frequent contact with fellow Muslims, was also a market for their sarongs.

Kikuo Morimoto wrote in 2002 that Muslim Cham villages in Kampong Cham province were well known for making sampot hol. Berthon wrote that most weaving by the Cham of Kampong Cham is of cotton krama, Cambodia's checked scarf. She also wrote that Cham-Malay communities made kiet, tie-dyed silk head scarves, and that multicolored kiet scarves are among the few textiles left from the National Museum of Cambodia's collection from before the Khmer Rouge years.

At the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles, Morimoto brought Cham and Khmer weavers into one workshop. The Kyoto Journal wrote in 2011 that he found the Khmer weavers favored small motifs and the Cham large patterns, and that at least 20 Cham women were training there.

References