Cham Muslims in Vietnam Who Established a Prosperous State for Four Centuries

Many people know Vietnam, that small country which astonished the world with its fierce resistance to colonialism and its defeat of great empires such as Japan, France, and the United States in successive wars. Its people, who offered immense sacrifices, became a symbol of liberation for nations from Western colonial domination.

But few people know about the history of Muslims in that land—Vietnam—and about their state, the Cham Kingdom (Champa Emirate), which arose in southern Vietnam and lasted for four centuries. During that time, it established a civilization and inscribed heroic epics on its soil while resisting invasions by pagans and Buddhists, then Japanese, French, and American colonialism, and finally communism. It remained steadfast from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century, when those colonial powers overcame it and brought it down in 1823.

Vietnam is a country located in Southeast Asia. It borders China to the north, Laos and Cambodia to the west, and is surrounded by the South China Sea to the south and east.

The word “Vietnam” in the Vietnamese language means “South of the River.” The river referred to here is the Mekong River, which runs across the country.

Its name underwent modifications according to the will of the ruling emperor at the time. In 1839 (the nineteenth century), Emperor Minh Mang changed the country’s name to Dai Nam (“The Great South”), then the name returned officially to “Vietnam” in 1945 (the twentieth century).

It is an agricultural country with fertile deltas in the north, a tropical climate, and many mountains. Its capital is Hanoi, and it includes 63 provinces and six municipalities, all under one central government. Its area is 331,689 square kilometers, and its population is about 102.5 million according to the 2025 census, expected to reach 103.7 million in 2026. Ho Chi Minh City, with about 10 million inhabitants, located in the south, is the economic capital of the country.

Wars for Independence

Before addressing the main stages of Islam’s history in the land of the Cham Muslim state (Champa Emirate) in Vietnam, we pause briefly at Vietnam’s own history before Islam arrived, after its arrival, and after the fall of the Cham Muslim state in the twentieth century, and the circumstances surrounding that.

Vietnam fought three wars in the twentieth century against major colonial powers that occupied its lands, and managed to defeat them after offering millions of dead and wounded in the furnace of those successive wars.

In 1945, at the end of World War II, Japan invaded Vietnam. The Vietnamese people rose to resist that invasion and managed to defeat it with support from the United States.

Between 1946 and 1954, Vietnam fought a fierce resistance war against French colonialism, which tried to occupy it but failed. The French army was forced to end the war and sign a peace agreement in Geneva, Switzerland, after eight bloody years. One result of this agreement was the division of Vietnam into two states: North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

China and the Soviet Union supported communist North Vietnam, while the United States supported South Vietnam, closer to the Western bloc. This led to a conflict that escalated into a war, turning Vietnam into a stage for the two superpowers to display their strength. The Vietnamese paid the price of this war, which ended with the U.S. withdrawal in March 1973 from the former capital Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). On April 30, 1975, it fell to the sweeping invasion of North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong (National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam), an armed resistance movement active between 1954 and 1976. South Vietnam came under the authority of the northern revolutionary government, leading to the unification of Vietnam on July 2, 1976, and the declaration of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam we know today.

April 30, 1975, was not an ordinary day in Vietnamese history. North Vietnam triumphed, and the two halves of the country were reunited after wars with two empires—France and the United States—that claimed the lives of about two million Vietnamese. France lost nearly all its influence in the region, while the United States lost about 58,000 soldiers and $120 billion.

Divergent Beliefs and an Atheist Ideology

Vietnam, in terms of belief and according to communist ideology, is an atheist state. The Vietnamese folk religion and Mahayana Buddhism are the two largest religions in Vietnam by number of followers. According to Pew Research Center (2020), about 45% of the population follow Vietnamese folk religion, about 16.2% follow Buddhism, and about 29.9% are unaffiliated with any religion (with some sources reporting higher percentages of atheists). Islam accounts for less than 1%. About 8.4% of the population follow Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism in equal proportions. There is a large minority of Catholic Christians and other Christian denominations such as Protestantism, in addition to Buddhism, Hoa Hao, and the syncretic Cao Dai religion.

According to statistics from the Vietnamese Government Committee for Religious Affairs, by 2018 Buddhists made up 14.9% of the population, Christians 8.5% (Catholics 7.4%, Protestants 1.1%), Hoa Hao Buddhists 1.5%, and Cao Dai followers 1.2%. Other sects such as Hinduism and the Baha’i faith together represented less than 0.2%. Popular beliefs (ancestor and deity worship), not included in official statistics, have revived since the 1980s.

Note: The writer intervened to change some words that conflict with Islamic doctrine, such as “Buddhist religion” or “Hoa Hao religion.” The term “religion” is reserved for divinely revealed faiths such as Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

Christian missionary activity increased through French, Spanish, and Dominican missionaries from the Spanish East Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to a lesser extent through American Protestant missionaries during the Vietnam War.

At that time began Vietnam’s story with Islam, in Ho Chi Minh City, with its Muslim citizens and mosques, where the first steps of Islam’s arrival in Vietnam took place.