Cham group in Southern Vietnam can be seen in Philip Taylor’s book, Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta: Place and Mobility in the Cosmopolitan Periphery (2007), which explores in detail the Islamic Cham community in southern Vietnam by presenting their socio-cultural and socio-economic history based on extensive field work done in the Mekong Delta from 1999 to 2005 with various interviews conducted with the local Chams in the Vietnamese language. Origins and Religion Islam has played a key role in the lives of the Muslim Chams of the Mekong Delta, not only as a religion, but also as a source of origin, a vital unifier in their self-identification as Chams. While some Chams agree with scholarly views of their ancient origins from the kingdom of Champa, many deny such ancestry and state instead a variety of origins in Islam itself, as well as Malaysia and Angkor, Cambodia. While this denial was viewed by scholars as a rejection of displacement and ancestral links to central Vietnam, fear of reprisal from host nations, and silence resulting from a traumatic past of guilt and persecution as in the case of the Cambodian Chams, these pluralistic views might indeed point to the Chams as having diverse origins, which may in turn lie in the cosmopolitan creed of Islam that they have fervently embraced. The Chams of the ancient Champa kingdoms along the south-central coast of Vietnam originally practiced Hinduism. Today, the Central Chams of Vietnam consists of two groups: the Balamon Chams, who practice an indigenized form of Hinduism, and the Bani Chams, who practice and indigenized form of Islam. The Islamic faith was introduced to these early Chams with the arrival of two waves of foreign Muslims on their shores: the first being Arabs, Indians, Persians and later Chinese Muslims beginning in the 9th century, and the second being Malay Muslims in the 16th and 17th centuries when maritime trade flourished in Southeast Asia in which Muslim traders played a significant part. Most historians recognized the presence of a “significant Muslim community among the indigenous Cham population” only after the fall of the Vijaya kingdom of Champa in 1471. The Chams have adopted Islam because of their disinclination for “genealogical identification” of these two groups that led the Cham Muslims to move south. For the Chams of the Delta, Islam’s appeal lies in its universality and its ability to overcome various barriers of