The Vietnamese Cham Muslim Community: An Ethnocultural Study in the Context of Faith and Practices

This ethnocultural study examined the Bani Islam Community of Vietnam that is characterized by an exclusive and indigenized Islam type in opposition to orthodox Islam followed by other Cham Muslim. The general purpose was to re-contextualize the religious forms of the Bani by transcending the measure of procession of heterodoxy as it is a typical conceptualization to discuss these religious forms in a holistic package, actively creating their identity and conserving the ethnoreligious identity. This paper was written using a qualitative approach to the synthesis of more than a hundred years of historical and ethnographic literature. The results showed that certain culture such as Ramawan festival, the assignment of religious responsibilities to a clerical caste called the Acar, the institutionalized worship of the dead operated as living folklore. Such practices are intermediaries to the community in terms of the Islamic heritage and the pre-Islamic past. The paper affirms that the folklore of the Bani tribe has been an important tool of cultural survival and negotiation of their identities and can be seen as crucial in explaining religious particularism and syncretism in the Southeast Asian landscape.