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Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta Place and Mobility in the Cosmopolitan Periphery Philip Taylor, Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies at the Australian National University

• The first book about Vietnam’s little-known Muslim minority.

• The first ethnography in the post-war era to examine Vietnam’s ethnically and religiously diverse borderlands.

• Traces the settlement history and origin narratives of the Cham Muslims of the Mekong delta, describing their religious practices, material life and relationship with the state.

This fascinating account of the vigorous survival of an Islamic community in the strife-torn borderlands of the lower Mekong delta, and of its creative accommodation to the modernising reforms of the Vietnamese government, shows how Islam provides a unifying focus for Cham Muslims in their diversely constituted rural settlements. 

Full of Cham Muslim people’s stories and voices, this highly readable ethnographic study reverberates with the texture of everyday life in rural Southeast Asia. Its original insights into the sources of religious and ethnic differentiation in the Mekong delta will enrich the comparative study of culturally pluralist societies, while its contributions to the study of Islam, cosmopolitanism, trade, rural development and resistance, as well as to our understanding of Vietnam, Cambodia and the Malay diaspora, are equally new and important.

Published by NIAS Press, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series
Published 2007, 313 pp., illustrated
ISBN 978 87 7694 009 6, paperback, £14.99