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

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

Mostafizur Rahman, PhD*., Ritu Khatun., Md. Shohel Rana

Department of Folklore Studies, Islamic University, Kushti-Jhenaidah, Bangladesh

*Corresponding Author

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.908000541

Received: 16 August 2025; Accepted: 23 August 2025; Published: 19 September 2025

ABSTRACT

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.

Keywords: Bani Islam, Cham Muslim, Ethnoculture, Folklore, Religious Syncretism, Vietnam.

INTRODUCTION

There is a cultural abundance in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that officially consists of 54 ethnic groups. The Buddhist and the Confucian cultures have influenced most of the majority of the Kinh community, but the minority have maintained a diverse range of practices. The Cham people come out among the rest with a deep history. Being an Austronesian ethnic group and the descendants of the ancient Champa kingdom that existed for several hundred years in the present day Central Vietnam, the Cham have a heritage steeped in language, practice, and religion different than that of the Vietnamese.

Hinduism (Brahmanism), rooted in the Indian civilization, and Buddhism preceded the transformation of the Cham into substantial usage of Islam that had been introduced by trade relationships that the Cham had with the Arab, Persian, and Malay merchants. The current population of Chams in Vietnam makes more than 178,000 population; categorically, they can be divided into three groups, namely the Brahmanized Chams, a collection of orthodox Sunni Muslims as well as Bani Islam Chams. Although the orthodox cham, who mainly live in Southwest Vietnam, model their behavior to be in accordance with the rest of the world Islamic community, the Bani of Central Vietnam constitute an interesting study on folkloric and ethnocultural perspective. The Bani observe a localized and syncretic version of Islam that completely mixes Islamic doctrines with previously existing native customs and traditions. Their faith is a heterodox assertion that stands sharply in contrast to the worldwide Islamic traditions, especially its non-observances of the Five Pillars in their canonical forms and its exclusive clerical hierarchy. This community with traditions based on the history of a great Malayo-Polynesian kingdom is a good topic to explore the processes of cultural adaptation and development of folk religion. 

LITERATURE REVIEW

Academic interest in Cham people dates back to the 19 th century where pioneering contributions were made by French scholars who were the first to describe the numerous rituals of the society. E. The first major works of Aymonier in 1891 were revolutionary since it was the first elaborate accounts of the Bani Islam community. He began with the idea that Islam got to Champa already by the tenth century and reported on the unique religious structure and practices of the Bani. Later scholarship developed this basis. Dorohiêm (1974) and Nguyen Van Lauan (1974) are among the researchers who provided greater understandings of the religious life of Cham people, especially those in the southern region of Vietnam who had a more orthodox version of Islam.

Since 1975, there has been an overall view of the Cham culture and family organization by Vietnamese scholars such as Phan Xuân Biện, Phan An and Ngoph Vn Doanh. Although no one can thank these works enough, they tended to generalize Islamic practices. A later generation of thought has dealt specifically with this. Scholars such as Rie Nakamura (1999), Yasuko Yoshimoto (2012), and Betti Rosita Sari (2019) have addressed this issue and how the actions of Bani religious views and their transnational connections do not exist or have no practical transnational connections. The latest entry in this field is the work of William B. Noseworthy and Pham Thi Thanh Huyen (2022) are the critiques of the conventional heterodox label suggested that the Bani are best interpreted as a Cham particularist religious society where orthopraxy (correct practice according to its own traditions) rather than conformity to international orthodoxy is more important.

The present study is based on this new scholarship yet produces a critical gap in that no specific focus through the lens of Folklore Studies has been applied. This literature materials indicate that there was a prior literature that dealt with the Bani in terms of anthropological and historical perspectives which the practices were perceived against an orthodox Islamic reference point. What is lacking is an analysis of their traditions as a lived self-sufficient folkloric system. This article discusses the rituals, beliefs and social organizations not only as aberrations of another religion but as acts of presentation, expressions of identity and means of preserving culture of the Bani.

Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framework that can be presented in this work consists of the concept of religious syncretism and an amalgamation of folklore and performance theory. Syncretism, applied here, is the convergence of the various traditions of religions into the new, stable system as opposed to it being conceptualized simply as the form of impurity of a parent religion. This process finds its extreme in the Bani faith, where elements of Islamic doctrines are combined with Brahmanist gods and ancestor worship among the natives.

Also, Bani rituals and particularly the annual Ramâwan festival can be discussed through performance theory as the cultural performance. They are not merely religious practices as they are events in which the community acts, strengthens, and expresses its group identity. Prayer and fasting being an exclusive task of a professional clerical group, the Acar, might be interpreted as a particular social performance creating an organization of the community and cultivating its specific vision of this world. With this framework, it is possible to view its analysis in ways that de-centers the Bani-internal logic and expressions of culture, rather than focusing on how they are deficient in ways depending on a language of heterodoxy.

Research Problem, Rationale, and Questions

• Research Problem: A large percentage of academic writing on the Bani Islam Cham has traditionally viewed their practices in deficit terms; casting them either as an aberration (as unorthodox) or as an imperfect/partial Islamization. The approach does not adequately recognize inner logic and cultural integrity of their traditions as a system of folklore.
• Rationale: It would be crucial to have a representation of what happens as an understanding of the Bani Faith as a self-sustaining system. It helps to add another understanding of the academic perspective of religious pluralism and localization in Southeast Asia. Among the policy makers in Vietnam, it can emphasize the approach that they cannot afford to homogenize the heritage of the Bani and make them fit into the orthodox Islam, but to appreciate their differences as viable. To the folklorists, the Bani can be considered a very interesting case study on how a minority community in a complex social environment is able to keep identity by utilizing their traditions.
• Research Objective: The overall aim of the article is conducting ethnographic study in the most significant folkloric traditions of the Bani Islam Cham society to show the way these practices form self-contained cultural continuation and identity negotiation system.

Research Questions:

1. What are the core folkloric practices—including rituals, clerical roles, and syncretic beliefs- that define the Bani Islam Cham community in Vietnam?
2. How do these practices functionally integrate elements from Islam with pre-existing Brahmanist and indigenous traditions?
3. How do the Bani utilize these folkloric performances to demarcate their identity in relation to orthodox Cham Muslims and the broader, non-Muslim Vietnamese society?

METHODOLOGY

A qualitative study design, on an ethical-cultural study basis, was implemented in this investigation as an anthropologic approach. The study was conducted through the intensive documentary research of the already existing scholarly literature the works of the academic monographs, peer-reviewed articles, and ethnographic reports on various aspects of the life of the Pquis nation were analyzed during the period between the beginning of the 19 th century and nowadays. It was a rich historical and contemporary contextualization of the Cham community practices which was possible through such a methodology as a deep synthesis of a century of studies. Sources were selected with the help of a purposive sampling idea, which concentrates on resources that directly are related to the religious, cultural, and social life of the Cham people in Vietnam, and Bani Islam community, in particular. Foundational works by French ethnographers, post-colonial Vietnamese scholarship and more recent transnational and international academic research have been examined. The use of such multi-pronged data collection made the study on a strong empirical and theoretical basis.

A qualitative thematic analysis was mostly done as a method of data analysis. The information collected was compared properly in order to generate relevant information pertaining to the research questions. The following major themes were observed across the literature: i) the organization and workings of the Bani clergy (Acar); ii) the particular modalities of their religious observances and their deviation to the Five Pillars of Islam; iii) the syncretic character of the system of belief, such as the belief in ancestors, and local deities; and iv) the importance of such practices to how communities identified themselves and how they socialized. The descriptive nature of this approach strictly outlined these phenomena in a way which could be empirically verifiable and explanatory notes were added to explain the causal and correlational inter-relationships between the phenomena.

In order to validate the research in this literature based study, triangulation procedure was used. Comparisons were made between sources (of various periods and scholarly traditions) (e.g. French colonial, Vietnamese national, contemporary international) on their findings. This made the interpretation more balanced and critical taking into consideration the biases that individual researchers might have.

The study relied on secondary sources which was the major weakness of the study. No original fieldwork was carried out, thus the analysis was limited by original authors perspective and the scope of it.

Nonetheless, this study was able to create such an overview that would be challenging to create with a field study alone by incorporating a broad scope of related studies.

The research carried ethical concerns that included provision of responsible and factual representation of the people of Cham according to the existing scholarly literature without perpetuating colonial or orientalist stereotypes. The academic standards were applied to properly cite the works of prior scholars..

RESULTS

The documentary analysis presented the reader with a nuanced picture of the Bani Islam Cham as a clearly determined ethno-religious group. As an antecedent of their practices and social structure as discussed over a hundred years of research, there are a few major areas into which it was divided. Geography and Socio-Religious Organization. Cham people in Vietnam were stratified geographically and on religious grounds. The Bani Islam community was largely clustered in the central provinces of Ninh Thuận and B56—ょ pillaratch Unfortunately, its historical center in B56 on early Champa was split into the two provinces. There was also the Brahmanized (Hinduized) Cham in this region. In sharp comparison, Cham who followed the type of orthodox Sunni Islam existed mainly in Southwest Vietnam, in such provinces such as An Giang and in Hồ Chí Minh City. The majority of Brahmanized Chams lived in Central Vietnam and the Bani members made around one-third of Chams in Central Vietnam.

The Clerical Structure: The Acar

One of the main peculiarities of the Bani community was a definite system of clerics that were divided into a separate system as compared to the system of leadership in orthodox Islam. Religious practice was far delegated to what was referred to as the Acar clergy.

• Familial Representation: A single individual or two individuals were chosen by each family unit or maternal line and they became Acar and acted as family representatives in all religious aspects. This delegation relieved the lay members of a direct obligation to conduct complicated ceremonies.
• Clerical Hierarchy: Clergy was divided int multi lay stages that comprised of the following positions; the Acar, the Madin or Madintan and Po Gru (respected persons who maintained religious law).
• Ritual over Exegesis: It was frequently noted in the literature that the Acar (though well versed to recite passages of the sacred Quran), was frequently deficient in an exegetical knowledge of the Arabic text. They were interested in how to perform rituals correctly, which had a distinctive role in their religious practice.

Divergence from the Five Pillars of Orthodox Islam

The Bani Islam Chams’ practices showed a significant departure from the Five Pillars that form the bedrock of mainstream Muslim life.

The table below summarized these distinctions based on the synthesized sources.

Key Folkloric Practices and Syncretic Beliefs

The Bani’s religious life was a rich blend of Islamic elements with indigenous and Brahmanist traditions.

• The Ramawan Festival: This was the most significant of Bani festivals. The festival was very colorful and it commenced three days before the fasting month with rituals and the ancestral grave visits. It was outlined by feasts called Mbeng Muk Kei (“feasts of the ancestors”), the aim of which was to invite the spirits of the dead to become a part of the family during a month. This tradition supported the primary importance of worship to the ancestors in their society.
• A Syncretic Pantheon: The Bani believed in a supreme being they referred to as Po Auloah (Allah) and were well aware of the prophets of Islam including Muhammad (Po Rasulak). Nevertheless, they did not neglect their spiritual world where they could honor also yang (deities and spirits, partly of the Cham Brahmanist pantheon), but above all muk kei (the spirits of their ancestors).
• Inter-religious Symbiosis: There is historical evidence of an incredible amount of ritual collaboration between the Bani and the Brahmanized Cham (Jat). The Bani religious leaders helped with great Jat celebrations and they in turn were helped by the Jat aristocrats who attended the Bani mosques in Ramawan in order to honor Po Auloah.
• The Kate Festival: This great festival, celebrated in the seventh month of the Cham calendar, was so much the focus of the Brahmanized Cham, that it also had cultural significance to the Bani. It is highly oriented towards the worship of ancestral spirits and was, in fact, declared a national intangible cultural heritage in Vietnam in 2017, making clear its importance to the shared Cham identity.

DISCUSSION

The findings of this ethnocultural research depict an interesting image of Bani Islam Cham community as the category of people whose specific and strong folklore system characterizes them. Its results question the traditional perceptions which interpret the Bani in general as either a heterodox or syncretic branch of Islam. Rather, they show a society with consistent interpretive framework, in which conventional orthodox and apparently contradictory activities have been practically normalized as a predictable and meaningful system of culture.

Interpretation: A System of Cultural Adaptation and Resilience

The religious system of the Bani is not the failing or uncomplete Islamization but result of a long and successful centuries-lasting scheme of cultural assimilation. Both their institutionally specialised system of clergy and the division of ritual tasks are not symptoms of religious leniency but functional responses to a mutually reinforced interaction with the shared ancestor-centred cosmology and strong matrilineal culture in the pre-Islamic social reality, and the retention of Islamic identity. Acar system was quite successful in establishing a safety space, which helps the community adjust to an Islamic structure without sacrificing the significant postulates of the worldview existing among their ancestors. The commission of prayer and fasting means that aspects of Islamic prescriptions are fulfilled on the communal basis whereas, the external life of individuals stays based on adat Cam (Cham custom).

On the same note, the Ramawan festival is a work of genius because of its synthesis of cultures. Incorporating the pre-colonial, deeply significant tradition of ancestor worship (Mbeng Muk Kei), into the time cycles of the Islamic holy month, the Bani invented a rite that in one breath is both Cham and Islamic. This is the climax of their bid to assert their membership into their two identity, that is, a communal performance of their presence. It is only with the help of such folkloric performance that their syncretic religion becomes an embodiment, it is religion that is transmitted through generations and preserved against any outside influence.

Relation to Existing Literature and Theoretical Implications

This discussion is compatible with the new academic trend, represented by the article of Noseworthy and Huyen (2022) urging to reconsider the Bani as a religion of Cham particularism. This theory is by far similar to the findings of the study, which reflected a system of internal orthopraxy. To the Bani, proper practice of their own distinctive forms- is an even stronger test of religious rightness than a standard of orthodoxy universally accepted. They do not identify themselves as bad Muslims, rather they are Bani, and being Cham and being Muslim are to them inseparable likewise, unlike their orthodox Cham Muslim neighbours, who they sometimes terms as Cham Jawa (“Malayised Chams”).

As a case study of folk religion, the Bani present a compelling object of analysis, as the study of folk religion folk. Their system is not a thing of the past but the living tradition, which makes active negotiations of the situation of the community between globally recognized religion (Islam) and the local context (Cham). Their syncretism is not a haphazard amalgamation, but is highly systematic and purposeful, and consists of cultural bricolage, the picking and recontextualization of specific elements to form a meaningful whole. Another strong evidence of this unity in cultural heritage is also the permanent significance of such Cham script (Akhar Thrah) and the manuscript culture, which the two communities, Bani and Brahmanized Chams have in common, which acts as a binding force towards the Vietnamese linguistic domination.

Limitations and Future Research

Being a study based on the analysis of already existing literature, the given work also has limitations determined by the scope and perspectives of the original researchers. Modern, longitudinal ethnographic research in the field is urgently needed to determine the present influence of the globalization, social media, and exposure to orthodox Islamic movements on the folkloric traditions of the Bani. In the future studies would have to address whether the younger generations are keeping the Acar system in place and whether the syncretic nature of Ramawan is reduced. The oral traditions, legends and stories shared by the Bani to tell their history and to justify their peculiar practices should be looked at through research thus being collected and elaborated.

CONCLUSION

To sum up, this paper has shown that the Bani Islam Cham of Vietnam are much more than a foot note in the history of Islam in Southeast Asian. They are the inheritors of a vibrant and a rich folkloric system which has enabled them maintain a uniqueness of identity over the centuries. Their religion is a complex amalgamation of Islam, Brahmanism and native influences and this discussion aids in considering their religion as something not divergent but rather as a testament to the ingenuity of culture to invariably rebound and respond. The Bani was able to negotiate between the encounter with a world religion and their traditional practices through specific creations such as the RamÂwan festival and a representative system of clerics. The findings can offer a good revelation of religious syncretism. It is time to organize future investigating activities on the basis of modern fieldwork to have an insight into the changing nature of such traditions into modern times.

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