The haunting call to prayer floats over the onion-domed mosques and simple wooden houses of this riverside Muslim community, where a spiritual and cultural revival is under way.
Scores of men from the ethnic Cham community, young and old, pack into the brick, stucco and cement mosques for Friday prayers two decades after the ultra-nationalist and atheist Khmer Rouge destroyed their temples and killed tens of thousands of Muslims nationwide.The scenes of healthy religious activity owe much to the generosity of overseas Muslim benefactors, motivated by religious and humanitarian concerns, who have helped speed the rebirth of a minority devastated under the brutal 1975-79 Khmer Rouge rule.
Malaysians, Indonesians and Arabs have funneled money into the Cham community since a U.N.-brokered peace treaty was signed in 1991, ushering in a two-year peacekeeping force that numbered soldiers from several Islamic nations.
"Their aim is firstly to have enough mosques for Muslims to pray in and secondly to educate them to understand Islam," said Ismail Osman, adding: "They want to strengthen Islam."
The Cham official has elicited help from contacts made in Malaysia and Indonesia during years in exile. Matt Ly and Ahmad Yahya, two of the three Muslim members of Cambodia's 120-member parliament, have also won key funds for their rival Islamic agencies.
Overseas Islamic aid agencies here stress the humanitarian nature of their mandate, while acknowledging a religious angle.
Ismail Osman, a top official at the Ministry of Cults and Religion, estimated that donors in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East had given $7 million to $8 million since U.N.-run polls in 1993 restored an internationally recognized government.
He said they had helped rebuild or construct more than 250 mosques and several schools for the Chams, who first settled in Cambodia some 500 years ago after the breakup of the central Vietnam empire of Champa.
Ahmad Yahya, a deputy for the royalist FUNCINPEC party, agreed that foreign assistance had helped revitalize the Cham community, saying: "We are moving in the right direction, but it is picking up slowly, so we need help from each (overseas Muslim) individual to develop Cambodia."
The MP, whose Cambodian Islamic Development Association has been a conduit for channeling aid to the Chams, insisted that local Muslims were in charge of their own destiny.
But some analysts believe a price may be attached to aid and they fear the specter of a fundamentalist crusade in this small southeast Asian nation, where the Cham population of about 400,000 accounts for less than 5 percent of the population.
William Collins, author of a study on the Chams, said the Arabs who fund construction of the bigger mosques might want them to purify local Islam and bring it more in line with the Middle East.
Collins told Reuters that an evangelical brand of orthodox Islam had been imported in some areas from Malaysia and the southern Thailand provinces of Yala and Pattani.