Since the 1993 reinstallment of the monarchy after the devastating rule of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, foreign NGOs have been mushrooming in Cambodia. Several among these are transnational charities that are based in Malaysia and the Arabian Gulf. They have established themselves in the country in order to provide aid to Cambodia’s Muslim minority. These charities also invest vast resources in order to reconstruct the Cambodian Muslims’ religious infrastructure and leadership that had been almost completely destroyed by the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79).
The main objective of TRANSCAMUS was to understand how transnational Muslim networks and charities based in the Middle East and Malaysia have transformed the religious identity, leadership and social fabric (especially the gender relations) of Cambodia’s Muslim minorities, and how they have contributed to the current shaping of Cambodia’s Islamic field.
In the framework of this main objective the project was concerned about several interrelated questions:
- How have the activities of Gulf and Malaysian charities s evolved in Cambodia?
- How have the transnational flows contributed to altering the concepts of masculinity and femininity?
- How does the Cambodian case study inform us about larger dynamics of the economy transnational of Islamic networking?
- How does the sociopolitical and sociocultural context of Cambodia shape the structure and activities of Islamic NGOs and networks?
- Since the COVID-19 pandemic made field research impossible for a long time TRANSCAMUS also focused on the online representations and social media presence of various Cambodian Muslim groups connected to the Middle East and Malaysia.
Beyond filling an important gap in the literature, which is scarce on Islam in Cambodia, TRANSCAMUS has immense benefits for society. The results of the project are highly relevant to policy makers, policy researchers and NGO community. Funding Muslim groups and institutions from the Persian Gulf is a major concern of the EU. The results of TRANSCAMUS provides comparative perspectives by showing how Middle Eastern funding has impact on Muslim minority communities in a Southeast Asian country. By this the publications came out or will come out of the project provide a broader picture on how Muslim transnationalism works, and thereby contribute understanding networks that transmit the flows of material capital and ideas from the Gulf to Europe.
-The project concluded that transnational NGOs and significantly contributed to shaping the social fabric of the Muslim communities in Cambodia. Middle Easter and Malaysian charities played crucial role in transmitting Islamic ideas that deeply influenced the religious practices of local Muslims. For example, local practices and rituals that characterized Cambodian Islam in previous times have been abandoned, and the pilgrimage to the graves of Muslim sites declined.
At the same time, the Cambodian social context also shaped the local manifestations of Islamic movements and schools of thoughts that set foothold in Cambodia along with the transnational NGOs.
While one might read contemporary Islamic discourses as patriarchal, in reality Islamic and NGOs contributed to the increased presence of Cambodian Muslim women in the country’s job work force, hence their empowerment in society. Both the Salafi and the Muslim Brotherhood inspired NGOs run boarding schools where thousands of Muslim women received education leading to better prospects in studying at higher education, and receiving relatively well-paying employments.
