Description

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 modernizing 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.