The Cham arrived in what is now Cambodia over several centuries as refugees and migrants from the collapsing Champa kingdom on Vietnam's coast, gradually adopting Sunni Islam and settling along the Mekong River, the Tonle Sap and in villages near Phnom Penh such as Chrang Chamres. During the Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-1979, the Cham were singled out for particularly brutal persecution, and a large share of the community — along with its mosques, imams and religious texts — was destroyed in just a few years.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, Cham communities have rebuilt mosques and Islamic schools with support from Malaysia, Kuwait and other Muslim-majority donors, and Phnom Penh today hosts a functioning, visible Muslim minority again, even though it remains a small fraction of Cambodia's overwhelmingly Buddhist population.
Cambodia has no independent national calculation standard, so the Muslim World League's angles are used here, consistent with the reference most Cham community mosques and regional Islamic organizations across mainland Southeast Asia already follow.
Yes — historians estimate that a disproportionately large share of Cambodia's Cham population was killed under the Khmer Rouge, targeted in part for their distinct religious identity, language and refusal to abandon Islamic practice.
The largest Cham Muslim communities are found along the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers and in Kampong Cham and Kampong Chhnang provinces, with a smaller but active population in Phnom Penh neighborhoods like Chrang Chamres.
Estimates generally place Cambodia's Muslim population at a low single-digit percentage of the national total, making it a small minority within an overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist country.
Yes — both trace descent from the same historic Champa kingdom, and Cham communities on either side of the Cambodia-Vietnam border maintain related, though not identical, religious and cultural traditions.