The Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) is currently supporting original research on contemporary Islam for the 2004-2005 academic year. Dr. Anna M. Gade, Assistant Professor of Religion at Oberlin College, is conducting research entitled, “Religious Revitalization and Recovery among Cham Muslims,” which explains how Muslim communities envision local and global futures against the background of social experience in the region. She is the author of Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia (University of Hawaii Press, 2004), a book on Islamic revitalization, the Qur’an, and religious education in Muslim-majority Southeast Asia.

Dr. Gade’s work is ethnographic; comparing the experience of several communities in depth. She believes that the questions of religious and social revitalization that shape her research are also key social issues for Cambodian communities of all faiths. They are also crucial issues for the comparative study of global Islam. Gade’s comparative work shows that communities across Cambodia imagine Islamic revitalization in a variety of modes. Most of the Muslims in Cambodia are of the Cham ethnic minority; Cham heritage is traced from the pre-Islamic kingdom of Champa. The Muslims in Cambodia currently numbers under a half million people, and as a group, suffered especially during the period of Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot (1975 -1979).

One of the communities that Gade works with is located across the river from the CKS office in Siem Reap. The city mosque, whose call to prayer can be heard every day, is adjacent to the Muslim school in which Gade teaches. Religious leadership hopes to offer computer and English language instruction to Muslim youth in Siem Reap in the future. “I don’t think many people, including residents of Siem Reap, realize how close Islam is to Angkor Wat,” Gade remarks. In Siem Reap, Gade explains, the mosque is just down the road from the booming construction of the main tourist district downtown.