The coming of Islam to Champa
Rie Nakamura (2000) examines the historical process by which Islam became established among the Cham people of central Vietnam, drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam and Cambodia to argue that the distinctive form of Islam practised by the Bani Cham today is a product of conversion during the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the Cham were still actively engaged in Southeast Asian maritime trade but their Hindu kingdom was in terminal decline. The article addresses a long-standing historiographical debate over whether Islam reached Champa through early Arab-Persian merchants or through later Malay proselytizers, and uses the existence of two divergent Cham Islamic traditions as its central analytical problem.
Summary
Nakamura’s central puzzle is why contemporary Cham communities in Vietnam and Cambodia practise two markedly different forms of Islam: the Bani (an indigenized, syncretic form with ancestor veneration, a six-rank priesthood, and weekly rather than daily prayer) in the south central coast of Vietnam, and orthodox Sunni Islam (Shafi’i school) in the Mekong Delta and Cambodia. She resolves this by proposing a two-wave model of Muslim contact with Champa. The first wave, beginning as early as the ninth century, comprised Persian, Arab, Indian, and Chinese Muslim merchants who established a significant foreign community in Champa by the eleventh century but did not trigger widespread native conversion. The second wave, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the height of Malay Muslim maritime trade, brought Malay proselytizers into direct contact with the Cham population and produced the mass conversion that generated the Bani tradition.
The article draws on a wide range of primary sources to construct this narrative: Arabic inscriptions from Panduranga deciphered by Ravaisse in the 1920s, Chinese tributary records naming Muslim Cham envoys, the mid-fourteenth-century report of the Arab geographer Al-Dimashki, seventeenth-century Portuguese missionary travel accounts by Hainques and Mahot, and Malay annals including the Sejarah Melayu and Sejarah Banten. Nakamura also incorporates her own ethnographic observations, particularly her 1996 visit to a Jahed mosque at Oudong in Cambodia, where she found priests whose practices, priestly ranks, and use of the Cham script (akhar thrah) were nearly identical to those of the Bani in Vietnam. This field evidence becomes the linchpin of her argument: if the Jahed represent the form of Islam that Cham refugees carried from Champa, then conversion must have occurred in Champa itself before the migrations to Cambodia, not in Cambodia as Maspero had previously suggested.
Nakamura further argues that the Bani form of Islam became “eclectic” and isolated because the Cham lost their access to maritime trade networks and were pushed inland by Vietnamese expansion before Islam could establish a stable religious infrastructure comparable to other Southeast Asian Muslim communities. The Bani tradition thus represents a frozen, early stage of Islamic adoption that never underwent the orthodoxy-driven standardization experienced by other Muslim populations in the region.
Key Findings
- Two Arabic inscriptions deciphered by Ravaisse in the 1920s confirm a Muslim community in Panduranga (modern Phan Rang/Phan Ri area) by the latter half of the tenth or early eleventh century, indicating a city-like settlement with autonomous foreign inhabitants under Cham royal protection (pp. 58–59).
- Archaeological excavations by Japanese researchers at Cu Lao Cham and Tra Kieu (former capital Sinhapura) recovered Islamic ceramics alongside Chinese wares, dating Champa’s trade contacts with the Islamic world to at least the ninth century (p. 58).
- Portuguese missionary accounts from 1665–1678 (Hainques and Mahot) record that by the 1670s “more than half” of the Cham population, including the king and his court, had converted to Islam, with the Malays explicitly identified as the agents of conversion (p. 61).
- The Sejarah Melayu and Sejarah Banten credit Cham refugees—specifically a princess (Putri Champa) and her relatives—with introducing Islam to Java in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicating that Cham Muslims were themselves active proselytizers in the wider Malay world (pp. 61–62).
- Nakamura’s 1996 field observation at the Ta San Mosque in Oudong, Cambodia, found Jahed priests whose six-rank hierarchy, ritual names, musical instruments, and use of akhar thrah were virtually identical to those of the Bani in Vietnam, providing direct ethnographic evidence that the Bani form originated in Champa prior to the refugee migrations (pp. 63–64).
- The oldest graveyards of contemporary Bani communities in Vietnam are located near the sea, while newer ones are 20–30 kilometres inland, corroborating the historical process by which the Cham were progressively pushed away from the coast by Vietnamese expansion (p. 64).
Conclusion
Nakamura concludes that the Bani form of Islam is best understood as a historically contingent product of a specific conjuncture: the Cham converted during the final century of their kingdom’s independence, at the peak of Southeast Asian maritime commerce, and were immediately cut off from the broader Muslim world by Vietnamese territorial absorption. This isolation prevented the development of a standardized Islamic religious infrastructure, producing a distinctive and syncretic tradition that bears little resemblance to mainstream Southeast Asian Islam and whose possible connections to Shia practice remain an open question requiring further comparative analysis.
Context
- The article draws on Nakamura’s own fieldwork in Vietnam (1993, 1995/6) and Cambodia (1996), supported by the Luce Foundation and Toyota Foundation, as well as on the Paris Foreign Missions archives (Hainques and Mahot travel accounts) and the Malay annalistic tradition.
- Historiographically, the article intervenes in the debate between Cabaton’s and Manguin’s earlier formulations (1979/1985) by providing ethnographic evidence that challenges Maspero’s hypothesis of conversion in Cambodia, and by situating Cham Islamization within Reid’s broader framework of the “critical phase” (1550–1650) of religious transformation in Southeast Asia.