Historical Imagination, Diasporic Identity And Islamicity Among The Cham Muslims of Cambodia by Alberto Pérez Pereiro A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Approved November 2012 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Hjorleifur Jonsson, Co-Chair James Eder, Co-Chair Mark Woodward ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY December 2012 ABSTRACT Since the departure of the UN Transitional Authority (UNTAC) in 1993, the Cambodian Muslim community has undergone a rapid transformation from being an Islamic minority on the periphery of the Muslim world to being the object of intense proselytization by foreign Islamic organizations, charities and development organizations. This has led to a period of religious as well as political ferment in which Cambodian Muslims are reassessing their relationships to other Muslim communities in the country, fellow Muslims outside of the country, and an officially Buddhist state. This dissertation explores the ways in which the Cham Muslims of Cambodia have deployed notions of nationality, citizenship, history, ethnicity and religion in Cambodia’s new political and economic climate. It is the product of a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in Phnom Penh and Kampong Chhnang as well as Kampong Cham and Ratanakiri. While all Cham have some ethnic and linguistic connection to each other, there have been a number of reactions to the exposure of the community to outside influences. This dissertation examines how ideas and ideologies of history are formed among the Cham and how these notions then inform their acceptance or rejection of foreign Muslims as well as of each other. This understanding of the Cham principally rests on an appreciation of the way in which geographic space and historical events are transformed into moral symbols that bind groups of people or divide them. i Ultimately, this dissertation examines the Cham not only as an Islamic minority, but as an Islamic diaspora – a particular form of identity construction which has implications for their future development and relations with non-Muslim peoples. It reconsiders the classifications of diasporas proposed by Robin Cohen and William Safran, by incorporating Arjun Appadurai’s conception of locality as a construct that must be continuously rendered in praxis to generate the socially shared understanding of space, geography and its meaning for communitarian identity. This treatment of Islamic transnationalism within the context of diaspora studies can contribute to the broader conversation on the changing face of Islamic identity in an increasingly globalized world. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I must first express my sincere gratitude to the members of my committee, Hjorleifur Jonsson, James Eder, Mark Woodward and Thomas Hudak, for their careful readings of my work, their constant encouragement and the enthusiasm they have shown for my project. None of this would have been possible without their support. Other members of the faculty were very generous with their time and energy in helping me formulate my ideas and define the scope of my work. For this I must thank Nora Haenn, Michelle Hegmon, Peter Welsh, John Chance and Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda. The friendship and camaraderie I found at ASU was key to getting me through the experience of grad school and I couldn’t imagine having done it without my friends. Heartfelt thanks to Jaime Holthuysen, Dolma Roder, Ramsi Watkins, Sidney Rempel, Matt Peeples, Jason Sperinck, Noah Theriault, Fon Srijuntr, Lars Krutak, Father Miguel Rolland and Bülent Arikan. I would also like to thank those people who helped me find and develop my interest in academic work and anthropology in particular. Kurt R. Jankowsky, Barry Alpher, Jorge López Cortina, Peter Vail, Marvin Sterling, José Power, Erik Davis, Ian Baird, Michael Henderson, Phillip Musgrave, Carl Crawley and Raymond Nault all contributed to me embarking on this work and provided feedback and encouragement whenever I needed it. I’d also like to thank Ahti Westphal, Elyse Lightman, Brendan Brady, Ben Hyman, Jordi Calvet Pages, Steve Goodman, Cajsa Collin and Anh Ly for their friendship throughout. iii This dissertation was completed after extensive language training in Khmer, and for this I want to thank Loak Kru Frank Smith and the teachers at SEASSI, Neak Kru Sokhary, Neak Kru Hannah and Loak Kru Kheang as well as Andy Roberts, Alison Carter, Jenna Grant and Dacil Keo for keeping me company on the path to fluency. Naturally, I could never have completed my work without the acceptance and support of the communities in which I conducted my research. Thank you to Tuan Ael, Abu and all the other people who made this possible. Very special thanks are due to Bjørn Blengsli and Emiko Stock, for having set the foundations for Cham studies and for being so good as to share their considerable scholarship with me. In addition, I would like to make special mention of Georgianna Miller who kindly assisted me with departmental paperwork and patiently explained the rules of the road to me. This research was made possible with funding and support from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, the Graduate College of ASU, the Asian Pacific American Studies Program, the Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) for study at the Southeast Asia Summer Studies Institute (SEASSI), and the generous support from the Balkemore-Freeman Foundation. Finally, I thank my family – my mother, father and sister – for being supportive and patient with me throughout this entire process. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER Page INTRODUCTION 1 0.1 Background 1 0.2 The Broad Strokes 3 0.3 The Structure of this Dissertation 8 0.3.1 Chapter One 8 0.3.2 Chapter Two 10 0.3.3 Chapter Three 10 0.3.4 Chapter Four 11 0.3.5 Chapter Five 13 0.3.6 Chapter Six 15 0.4 The Fieldwork 16 1.0 THE CHAM 26 1.1 History and the Historical Imagination 26 1.1.1 The Rise and Fall of Champa 27 1.1.2 The Cham Migrations 32 1.1.3 French Colonial Period 39 1.1.4 Pol Pot Régime 44 1.2 Contemporary Cambodian Islam 45 1.3 Notes on Nomenclature 49 v CHAPTER Page 1.4 Cham in the Ethnic Ecology of Cambodia 53 1.4.1 The Upland Minorities 55 1.4.2 The Vietnamese 58 1.4.3 The Chinese 61 1.4.4 The Thai 63 1.4.5 The Cham 67 2.0 US AGAINST THEM... 72 2.1 New Movements, New Conflicts 72 2.2 Meeting the 'Real Cham' 76 2.3 Fighting Unorthodoxy 80 2.3.1 Cham Naming Practices 81 2.3.2 Orthodoxy and Prayer 84 2.4 Khos vs Khos 88 2.5 The Imam San and their World 94 2.6 New Issues in Cambodian Islam 97 2.7 The Salafist Movement 97 2.7.1 Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab 99 2.7.2 Ijtihad – Independent Reasoning 100 2.7.3 Shirk and Bid’ah 104 2.8 The Tabligh 106 2.9 New Islams and Muslim History 110 vi CHAPTER Page 2.9.1 The “Conversion of Lenin” 111 2.9.2 The Battle of Uḥud 113 2.9.3 Islamic Spain and the Lost World 116 3.0 MUSLIM (IN)DEPENDENCE 121 3.1 The Community of Imam San 121 3.2 The Story of Imam San 122 3.2.1 Mawlud Phnom 125 3.3 Mawlud 128 3.4 The Chai 130 3.4.1 When and Why 132 3.4.2 The Path to Mediumship 135 3.4.3 The Ship of State 139 3.4.4 Kabuki of a Nation 141 3.4.5 Belonging in the Hostland 146 3.4.6 The Future of the Past 154 3.5 Muslim Gaze 159 3.6 A New Generation 167 3.6.1 'The Students' 167 3.6.2 Purity 172 3.6.3 Modernity 177 3.7 Obstacles 180 vii CHAPTER Page 4.0 A NEW SENSE OF BELONGING 189 4.1 The Ummah – the Islamic Diaspora 189 4.2 New Contacts 192 4.3 Hajj 193 4.4 Saudi Arabia – The Cradle of Islam 196 4.5 Malaysia – An Islamic Modernity 202 4.5.1 Making the Modern Muslim 203 4.6 Phnom Penh 219 4.6.1 Fear of the Foreign 221 4.6.2 Barriers and Defenses 223 4.6.3 Disconnected 231 4.7 “We too have Hilltribes” 241 5.0 THE GEOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION OF COMMUNITY 253 5.1 Spatialized Identity 253 5.2 Defining Diaspora 257 5.3 Toward an Ethnography of Diasporas 261 5.4 Making Space 274 5.5 Putting People in their Place 285 5.6 Diasporas in Time 296 6 CONCLUSION 304 viii Page BIBLIOGRAPHY 309 APPENDIX 324 A - IRB Approval 325 ix Introduction The People, their Problem and our Problem with them 0.1 Background On the 10th of October of 2008, an opinion piece appeared in the Phnom Penh Post titled ‘A Homeland for the Chams: Find creative ways to connect young Chams with their history’. The title was positively pregnant with assumptions about the nature of Cham identity and the predicament in which this group finds itself – beginning with autonomous statehood as an antidote to statelessness, social change as a product of historical amnesia, and ending with a ‘creative’ program, never before tried, to supply people defined by their deficiencies (stateless and without history) with the requisite tools for living a fulfilled and properly ethnic existence. The article itself touches on many problematic themes in the study of Cham people in particular as well as of the construction of ethnicity more generally. In particular, it explicitly likens the victimization of a stateless minority during the Pol Pot period with the fate of European Jewry under Nazi rule and holds that the establishment of an independent homeland is a fair and proper compensation for years of collective punishment.