Philip Taylor

Explores the unique world of the Khmer Krom, the indigenous people of Southern Vietnam who are regarded with ambivalence by nationalists in both Vietnam and Cambodia. As well as its ethnographic insights and offer of an indigenous, non-Vietnamese history of the region, the book will also attract environmental studies scholars interested in a close-grained study of the ecology of a river delta.

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.