Cambodia's Muslims and the Malay World: Malay Language, Jawi Script, and Islamic Factionalism from the 19th Century to the Present.

• Author: Errichiello, Gennaro

ASIA

Bruckmayr, Philipp. Cambodia's Muslims and the Malay World: Malay Language, Jawi Script, and Islamic Factionalism from the 19th Century to the Present. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2019.

Based upon extensive archival research and fieldwork, Philipp Bruckmayr's book represents a detailed analysis of the formation of Cambodia's Muslim minority community of Cham and Khmer speakers. His book represents an outstanding analysis of the adoption of the Malay language and the jawi script on behalf of the Cham minority in Cambodia. As suggested by the author, this book, which is focused on a country that is not associated with the historical Islamic ecumene, is written for those scholars who are interested in the "processes of religious standardization that have been underway in the Muslim world since the nineteenth century" (368). At the core of this book is the process of Jawization that has contributed "to a homogenizing trans-Southeast Asian Islamic discursive tradition, with its main vehicles of Malay language and the jawi (and peyon) script" (362). Such a process has led to the formation of a large Muslim community, forming part of the jawi ecumene "that gradually encompassed co-religionists in contemporary Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, (Southern) Thailand, the Philippines and, evidently, Cambodia and Vietnam" (362).

The adoption of Malay "both accompanied and provided the basis for an unprecedented expansion of Islamic schooling. [Moreover], it symbolized the full immersion of an important and steadily growing segment of Cambodian Muslims into an emerging trans-Southeast Asian Muslim scholarly culture and its social manifestations" (1). In chapter one, Bruckmayr traces the origin of the process of Jawization, and in particular, he tends to distinguish between the term melayu (Malay), and jawi. The former "eventually came to denote much of Southeast Asian Muslim culture and its bearers" (9), whereas the latter "came to denote, among other things, the melayu language (classical Malay) as written in an adapted Arabic script" (9). The process of Jawization from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, which is a primary focus of Bruckmayr s book, is discussed in detail in chapters two through four. These chapters focus on the preconditions that encouraged and functioned as catalysts of the Jawization in Cambodia; the growing numbers of jawi hajjis and students in the holy places of Mecca...