Islam: tawhid, the Qur'an, the five pillars and two Chăm branches in Vietnam

IA quick read in five sentences

One, Islam began in the Arabian Peninsula in the early seventh century, around the preaching of Muhammad, whom the religion professes to be the final messenger in a long line. Two, the core of its teaching is tawhid, the absolute oneness of God. Three, religious life rests on five pillars: the profession of faith, ritual prayer five times a day, obligatory almsgiving, fasting in the month of Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca. Four, the religion is divided into two great branches, Sunni and Shia, which parted over a question of succession after 632, while Sufism is not a third branch but the inner dimension of spiritual cultivation within both. Five, in Vietnam the religion has two branches, Chăm Islam and Chăm Bàni, different enough that they need two separate sections.

This page has fourteen sections and is written in a descriptive voice. The library reports what Islam professes, reports what historians can verify, and keeps the two apart with two separate kinds of box. Where two sources disagree, such as the number of adherents in Vietnam or the date Islam reached Champa, the library records both, with their sources. The library does not judge which religion is right or wrong, and within a religion it does not judge which branch is purer than another.

IIThe Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century

In the early seventh century the Arabian Peninsula lay wedged between two empires exhausted by years of war with each other: the Eastern Roman Empire to the northwest and Sassanid Persia to the northeast. Most of the peninsula was desert, and life was organised by tribe rather than by state: what protected a person was their tribe, and to be cast out by one's tribe meant losing one's place in the world. Family honour, generosity to guests and skill in poetry were the three things by which a person was valued. The last detail matters more than it seems: a community that regards language as the summit of talent will receive a text by weighing its words, and that later became central to the way Islam speaks about the Qur'an.

Mecca, a city of trade and of a sacred shrine

Mecca lay on the camel route linking Yemen with the region of Syria, and the Quraysh tribe controlled its trade. In the middle of the city stood a cube-shaped building called the كعبة, transliterated ka'ba, literally the cube. According to traditional accounts, before Islam this place housed the idols of many tribes, and each pilgrimage season drew people and goods to the city: shrine and market depended on each other.

In that setting there already existed the notion of a supreme deity named الله, transliterated Allah, which is simply the Arabic word formed from the article al and the word ilah, meaning god, in other words God with a capital letter. What the preaching introduced was not that name but the proposition that besides Him there is no other. That proposition struck directly at the existing order, both in belief and in the city's sources of income.

IIIMuhammad, the messenger according to the tradition

Before this section begins, one convention that the library keeps strictly needs to be stated. Islam forbids depicting human beings in a religious context, and most strictly of all forbids depicting the messenger. For that reason this page does not describe his appearance, does not create a portrait, and does not suggest any image that would let the reader picture his face. This is both a rule of the library and something the religion itself teaches.

According to the traditional account, he was born in Mecca around 570, was orphaned early, grew up to be a merchant and married Khadija. From 610 he began to preach and met opposition from the leaders of Mecca. In 622 he and those who followed him left Mecca for Yathrib, the city later called Medina. That migration is called the هجرة, transliterated hijra, and it is this event, not his birth nor the first revelation, that was taken as year one of the Islamic calendar. In Medina the new community took on for the first time the shape of a self-governing collective, and this is where many rules on worship, family, inheritance and relations with other groups took form. In 630 Mecca submitted, and according to the traditional account the idols in the Kaaba were removed. He died in Medina in 632.

IVA timeline of fourteen hundred years

The further back one goes, the wider the margin on dates, and where sources differ the library says so directly. Note that the Islamic calendar counts years by the moon, so a Hijri year does not coincide exactly with a solar year.

• around 570Muhammad is born in Mecca
  A date from the traditional account. Modern sources usually say around rather than giving a definite year.
• 610The first revelation
  According to the tradition, the first words were transmitted in a cave on a mountain near Mecca, opening a process that lasted about twenty-three years.
• 622The Hijra, year one of the Islamic calendar
  The migration from Mecca to Medina. The calendar takes neither the founder's birth nor the first revelation as its starting point, but the year the community began to live as a collective.
• around 624The direction of prayer turns to Mecca
  In the early period in Medina the direction of prayer was towards Jerusalem. It then changed to the Kaaba and has remained fixed there ever since.
• 630 to 632Mecca submits, then Muhammad dies
  In 630 the community returned to Mecca almost without fighting. In 632 he died in Medina, and who would succeed to the leadership became the biggest question, which in the long run led to the two branches, Sunni and Shia.
• 632 to 661The first four Caliphs
  In turn Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Sunnis call these four the rightly guided. Shia Muslims regard Ali as the one who should have succeeded from the start.
• around 650The standard Qur'an of Uthman's time
  The collection began in the time of Abu Bakr, entrusted to Zayd ibn Thabit, and in the time of Uthman a standard copy was made and sent to the major centres. Sources give the number of copies as four to eight, most leaning towards six.
• 680The events of Karbala
  At Karbala in present-day Iraq, Husayn, grandson of Muhammad through his daughter, was killed in battle together with the group who followed him. For Shia Muslims this is the event commemorated on the day of Ashura.
• 661 to 1258The Umayyad and then the Abbasid era
  The centre moved from Damascus to Baghdad from 762. The Islamic scholarly disciplines took shape in this period, along with the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian works.
• 9th centuryThe great Hadith collections and the four schools of law
  Al-Bukhari, who died in 870, and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, who died around 875, compiled the two collections that Sunnis rank highest. In the same period the four Sunni schools of law took shape.
• 11th to 13th centurySufism forms organised orders
  Al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111, reconciled jurisprudence with the inner life. The Sufi orders, called tariqa, formed one after another. The poet Rumi lived from 1207 to 1273.
• 13th to 17th centuryIslam reaches Southeast Asia by sea
  The religion followed merchants and preachers along the sea routes through northern Sumatra and the Strait of Malacca, then spread across the archipelago, and that is the route to which most Muslim communities in the region trace their origins. In the nineteenth century, many Chăm groups returned from Cambodia and settled along the Hậu River around Châu Đốc, the root of the Chăm Islam community of southwestern Vietnam.
• 1992 to 2013Seven organisations recognised in Vietnam
  From the Representative Board of the Islamic Community of Hồ Chí Minh City in 1992 to the Management Board of the Al-Noor Mosque in Hà Nội in 2013. The full list is in the section In Vietnam.

VThe Qur'an, Hadith and Sunnah

The body of Islamic literature has one feature quite unlike that of the other great religions: its centre is very slim. Only one book is placed at the level of the word of God, and that is the القرآن, transliterated al-Qur'an, literally the recitation. Everything else, however vast, belongs to the second rank.

The shape of the text

The Qur'an consists of 114 chapters, called sura, divided into verses called aya. The most widely used version, following the Hafs reading, has 6,236 verses. The verse count varies slightly between counting systems, mainly depending on whether the opening line of each chapter is counted, so finding a slightly different figure in another book is not a contradiction but a different counting convention.

The chapters are arranged broadly in decreasing order of length, not in the chronological order of revelation, and they fall into two kinds according to where they were revealed: the Meccan chapters are usually short and fast-paced, speaking much of the oneness of God and the day of judgement, while the Medinan chapters are longer and speak much of community life, family and covenant. To make it easy to read the whole text in one month, it is divided into 30 parts called juz.

Hadith and Sunnah, two words often confused

سنة, transliterated sunna, is the way of life of Muhammad, meaning what he did, said and approved, understood as a model. حديث, transliterated hadith, is a report recording one piece of that way of life. The Sunnah is the content, and the Hadith are the vehicle carrying that content to later generations.

Because each report passed through many mouths before being written down, Muslim scholars built an entire discipline to evaluate them. Each hadith has two parts: the chain of transmitters, called isnad, and the text itself, called matn. This discipline grades each report on a scale of many levels, from those regarded as sound to those regarded as fabricated, based on whether each person in the chain really existed and whether they could have met the person before them.

VICore teachings

Islamic teaching can be presented in a very compact order: one foundational proposition, six things to believe, five things to do. This section follows that order, because it is also how the religion itself teaches children from an early age.

Tawhid, the very core

This proposition does not stop at a single line of doctrine. From tawhid follow the absence of images in places of worship, the absence of clergy acting as intermediaries who dispense grace, and the concentration of the religion's art in calligraphy and geometric ornament. And it is also from tawhid that prayer is directed not towards Muhammad, not towards a saint, but only towards one place.

The six articles of faith

What must be believed is usually listed as six items. This is the list familiar among Sunnis, while Shia Muslims arrange the list within a somewhat different framework.

The first pillar, the profession of faith

شهادة, transliterated shahada, means testimony. It is a short sentence with two parts: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. Whoever recites that sentence with belief, before witnesses, is counted as having entered the religion. There is no ritual washing, no sacrament, and no need for an officiating cleric. It is also recited in every ritual prayer, and it is the phrase a dying person is reminded to say for the last time.

The second pillar, prayer five times a day

صلاة, transliterated salat, is the obligatory ritual prayer, performed five times in a day and night, at times set by the position of the sun: dawn, just after midday, late afternoon, just after sunset and night. Because the times are set by the sun, prayer times change with the date and the latitude. Each prayer consists of a fixed number of cycles of movement called raka, including standing, bowing, prostrating and sitting, with recitations in Arabic. Before praying one must perform a ritual washing with water called وضوء, transliterated wudu: washing the hands, rinsing the mouth, washing the face and the forearms, wiping the head and washing the feet, and if there is no water, clean earth may be used instead. Prayer can be performed in any clean place, except for the Friday midday prayer, which is a congregational prayer with a sermon.

The third pillar, the share set aside for those in need

زكاة, transliterated zakat, is often translated as obligatory almsgiving, but the root word carries the meaning of purifying and of making grow. It is not a discretionary donation but an obligation with a calculable rate: the most common practice is to set aside one fortieth, or 2.5 percent, of accumulated wealth above a minimum threshold that has been held for a full lunar year. Note that zakat is levied on wealth lying idle, not on income, so it has the effect of pushing wealth out of hoarding. The Qur'an names the groups entitled to receive it, among them the poor, debtors and stranded travellers. Voluntary giving beyond the obligatory amount is called sadaqa.

The fourth pillar, the fasting month of Ramadan

صوم, transliterated sawm, is fasting in the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, the month of رمضان, transliterated Ramadan. Throughout that month, from dawn until sunset, those who fast do not eat, drink or smoke, and abstain from marital relations.

This duty does not apply to everyone. Those exempt include children below the age of obligation, the sick, the elderly and frail, women who are pregnant or nursing young children, women who are menstruating and people on long journeys. Those temporarily exempt make up the days later, while those who can no longer fast may compensate by feeding people in need. Ramadan is not only abstinence from food: the month is associated with reading the whole Qur'an, night prayers, giving more than usual, and shared meals for the whole neighbourhood after sunset. The month ends with the festival of Eid al-Fitr.

The fifth pillar, pilgrimage to Mecca

حج, transliterated hajj, is the pilgrimage to Mecca in the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar. It is the only pillar that comes with conditions: it is binding only on those with sufficient health and financial means, and only once in a lifetime. Those who do not meet the conditions bear no fault.

Pilgrims set aside their everyday clothes: men wear two unstitched pieces of white cloth, women wear ordinary modest dress, and in that state every sign distinguishing rich from poor and high from low disappears. The rites span several days and include walking around the Kaaba seven times, going back and forth between the two hills of Safa and Marwa, standing through the afternoon on the plain of Arafat, the symbolic stoning at Mina, and the sacrifice that falls on the day of Eid al-Adha. The lesser pilgrimage, which can be made at any time of year, is called umrah and does not replace the hajj. According to the Saudi General Authority for Statistics, the hajj season of 1446 in the Islamic calendar, that is 2025, had 1,673,230 pilgrims.

Law, and the classification of acts into five grades

Islam places religious and worldly matters within one framework, called sharia, a word whose literal meaning is the path leading to a water source. Sharia is a body of principles drawn from the Qur'an and the Sunnah, not a law book, while its interpretation and application is called fiqh, or jurisprudence, and because fiqh is a human product it has many schools.

An easily overlooked point is the way acts are classified. Islamic jurisprudence does not divide acts into two kinds, permitted and forbidden, but into five grades: obligatory, recommended, permissible, discouraged and forbidden. Most everyday acts sit in the middle grade, and this classification explains why within the same community some keep the rules strictly and others more loosely while both feel they remain within bounds. As for food, what is permitted is called halal and what is forbidden is called haram, the clearest prohibitions being pork, blood, animals that died without proper slaughter, and alcohol and other intoxicants. The law also forbids lending at interest, called riba, the origin of an entire field of finance operating on the principle of sharing profit and loss.

VIIThe calendar, festivals and life rites

The Islamic calendar, called the Hijri calendar, has twelve months reckoned by the phases of the moon, each year lasting 354 or 355 days, and the decisive difference is that it has no leap month. The lunar calendar Vietnamese people use is a lunisolar calendar that inserts an extra leap month every few years to pull the months back in line with the seasons, which is why Tết Nguyên Đán (the Lunar New Year) always falls in late winter or early spring. The Hijri calendar does not do this.

As a result, each solar year the Islamic festivals move about ten to twelve days earlier, and after about thirty-three years they complete a full cycle through all four seasons. A Muslim who lives long enough will fast Ramadan in midwinter when days are short, then some decades later fast in midsummer when days are very long. This is a deliberate choice, so that no festival is tied to any one season. The year 1448 of the Hijri calendar begins around 17 June 2026. Traditionally the start of a month is determined by sighting the new crescent moon after sunset on the twenty-ninth day, so communities in different regions sometimes begin a month a day apart.

The two great festivals

Islam has only two festivals recognised by the whole religion, far fewer than other major religions. Eid al-Fitr is the festival of breaking the fast, on the first day of the tenth month, right after Ramadan ends, and before it each person must pay a small alms so that the poor too have food on the festival day. Eid al-Adha is the festival of sacrifice, on the tenth day of the twelfth month, coinciding with the final days of the pilgrimage season, and associated with the account of Ibrahim's readiness to obey God's command. By custom the meat of the sacrificed animal is divided into three parts, one for one's own household, one for relatives and one for the poor. Beyond these two there are days observed to varying degrees depending on region and branch, such as the Hijri New Year, or the day of Ashura on the tenth of Muharram, when Shia Muslims commemorate the events of Karbala.

Life rites

When a child is born, the custom in many places is to recite the call to prayer into the baby's ear, and on the seventh day to hold a naming ceremony, shave the hair and slaughter an animal to share the meat. Marriage is a contract, requiring the consent of both parties, witnesses and a dower that the groom's side gives to the bride herself, not to her family. For funerals the principle is quick and simple: the body is washed, wrapped in unstitched white cloth, prayed over and buried, usually within a day, without cremation, laid on its side facing Mecca, and tradition advises against building high tombs. This manner of burial is why Muslim cemeteries look very different from the cemeteries of Vietnamese people of other faiths.

VIIIThe mosque and the qibla

The place of worship is called the مسجد, transliterated masjid, literally the place of prostration. The word mosque in European languages derives from it, and Vietnamese calls it thánh đường. The first thing to grasp is that a mosque is not a place with a sacred object inside. It holds no statues, no relics of saints, no sanctuary that only the ordained may enter. In essence it is a clean, open space, large enough and facing the right direction, where people line up in rows and prostrate.

The qibla, a direction decided by mathematics

قبلة, transliterated qibla, is the direction of prayer, and it points to exactly one spot on earth: the Kaaba in the Great Mosque of Mecca. Not east, not south, not a direction suited to the owner's birth year, but the direction of the shortest arc on the surface of the sphere linking where one stands to a specific set of coordinates.

Calculating that direction is a problem in spherical trigonometry, and this very need drove Islamic astronomy in the medieval period: from the ninth century onwards, mathematicians such as al-Khwarizmi and later al-Biruni compiled tables of qibla directions for many cities. In Vietnam the qibla points to the northwest rather than due west, because the shortest arc on a sphere does not coincide with a straight line on a flat map. Someone standing in a mosque in An Giang who finds themselves facing northwest is not mistaken.

Four things always present

Decoration without living forms

Because tawhid excludes any possibility of worshipping images, the art of the mosque follows three directions that create no human or animal forms: calligraphy copying verses of the Qur'an, geometric ornament built from interlocking polygons, and stylised foliage in the arabesque manner. These three are a way of speaking in images about the foundational proposition itself: the infinite cannot be drawn, only suggested by a pattern repeating endlessly without ever closing.

The Rub el Hizb motif, in Arabic ربع الحزب, is one of these motifs. It is an eight-pointed star formed by two overlapping squares offset from each other, with its own Unicode code point, U+06DE. Its original use was very modest: the Qur'an is divided into sixty parts called hizb, each hizb is divided into four, and this mark is printed in the margin so that the reciter knows where they are. From a page divider it passed into architectural decoration and even into the designs of very large modern buildings.

IXSunni, Shia, the four schools of law and the Sufi dimension

This section is the easiest part of a page on Islam to get wrong. The question that separated the two great branches is a historical question about succession, and each side has its own reading of the same sequence of events. The library records the two readings as two readings, without judging which is right, and without using any word that implies one side is the main one and the other secondary.

The question of 632

When Muhammad died in 632, he did not leave an instruction that the whole community understood in the same way regarding who would continue to lead. From that, two understandings formed.

The first understanding holds that leadership of the community is an office for which the community chooses a worthy person from among those close to Muhammad, and in practice Abu Bakr was chosen immediately afterwards. Those who follow this understanding later came to be called Sunni, from ahl al-sunna, meaning the people who follow the transmitted way of life. The second understanding holds that the role had been designated and belonged to Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and also son-in-law of Muhammad, and after him to his descendants. Those who follow this understanding are called Shia, from shiat Ali, meaning the party of Ali, and for them the spiritual leader is called the Imam with a capital I, a position that is designated rather than elected.

Ali later became the fourth Caliph, from 656 to 661, and the events of Karbala in 680 deepened the division between the two understandings. It must be stressed that the two branches do not differ in the foundations: the same Qur'an, the same tawhid, the same five pillars with a few differences in the details of practice, the same qibla. The differences lie in leadership, in which Hadith collections are accepted, and in certain rites of commemoration.

The four Sunni schools of law

Within the Sunni branch, the division happens not in doctrine but in legal method. The four schools, called madhhab, formed in the eighth and ninth centuries around the names of four great jurists, and they recognise one another. A person may follow one school at home and another after moving elsewhere without being regarded as having changed religion.

Sufism is not a third branch

This is where summary tables often go wrong. Sufism is not a branch on a level with Sunni and Shia, but the inner dimension of spiritual cultivation, present in both branches. A person can be a Sunni of the Shafi'i school and also follow a Sufi lineage, and there is no contradiction in that.

The word Sufi is usually said to derive from suf, meaning coarse wool, recalling the rough garments of the early ascetics. The focus of this dimension is inner purification, the repeated invocation of the name of God called dhikr, and a close bond between master and disciple within a lineage called a tariqa. The major orders include the Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya, Chishtiyya and Mevlevi. Al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111, did much to bring this dimension into a place accepted by mainstream jurisprudence, while the poet Rumi, who lived from 1207 to 1273, is the name most widely read outside the Muslim world. It should also be said, for completeness, that relations between Sufism and the schools of law have not always been smooth, and this has been an internal debate lasting many centuries.

XNumber of adherents today

According to the Pew Research Center, in its report on changes in the global religious landscape from 2010 to 2020 published on 9 June 2025, there were about 2.0 billion Muslims worldwide in 2020, about 26 percent of the world population. Compared with 1.7 billion and 24 percent in 2010, this is growth of 21 percent, twice as fast as global population growth of 10 percent over the same period, and the highest growth among the major religious groups.

By distribution, 59 percent of Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region, 20 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 18 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. One notable consequence is that Arabs make up only a small part of all Muslims, and the three countries with the most Muslims are not Arab countries. The largest is Indonesia with about 240 million, 12 percent of the global total. Next come India with 213 million, equal to 15 percent of that country's population, and Pakistan with about 212 million. Together those three countries account for a third of the global total, while the ten largest together account for 1.3 billion, or 65 percent.

Why every figure is an estimate

Counting is easier for this religion than for the religions of East Asia, because Islam has clear boundaries of membership and it is rare for a person to follow two religions at once. But difficulties remain in three places. First, many countries do not ask about religion in their census, so figures for those countries are estimated from sample surveys or inferred from migrants' origins, and the margin of error is not small. Second, self-identification and practice are two different things. Someone who declares themselves a Muslim may keep all five daily prayers, or may keep only Ramadan and the two great festivals, and every count of adherents counts identity, not the degree of practice. Third, the proportion between the branches can hardly be counted, because very few countries record Sunni or Shia on census forms, so the figure of 87 to 90 percent Sunni is an estimated range, not a count.

XIIn Vietnam

Islam in Vietnam is tied almost entirely to the Chăm people, and it is one of the smallest yet oldest organised religious communities on Vietnamese soil. This section records three things: the route by which the religion arrived, which organisations are recognised and in which year, and how many adherents there are according to official sources. Beyond those three things the library does not go further.

Whichever view one takes, the result is the same on one point: the Muslim community on Vietnamese soil formed through sea routes and trade routes, not through conquest, and it entered a Chăm society that already had a layer of indigenous belief and a very thick layer of Brahmanical influence. Those conditions explain why the religion has two such different faces in Vietnam.

Chăm Islam communities live mainly in An Giang, Hồ Chí Minh City and Tây Ninh, with scattered groups in a few more provinces. This branch practises orthodox Islam, keeps all five pillars, reads the Qur'an in Arabic, follows the Shafi'i school of law, and has regular contact with the international Muslim community. The roots of the community in southwestern Vietnam lie largely in Chăm groups that returned from Cambodia and settled along the Hậu River around Châu Đốc from the nineteenth century. Chăm Bàni communities live mainly in the former Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận area, now part of Khánh Hòa province and Lâm Đồng province after the administrative reorganisation of 1 July 2025, and because this part is long the library gives it a section of its own immediately after this one.

Recognised organisations and number of adherents

As of June 2025, seven Islamic organisations in Vietnam had been recognised by the State or granted registration for religious activity: the Representative Board of the Islamic Community of Hồ Chí Minh City, 1992. The Representative Board of the Islamic Community of An Giang, 2004. The Council of Bàni Islamic Sư cả (chief clerics) of Ninh Thuận, 2007. The Representative Board of the Islamic Community of Tây Ninh, 2010. The Council of Bàni Islamic Sư cả of Bình Thuận province, 2012. The Representative Board of the Islamic Community (Islam branch) of Ninh Thuận province, 2012. The Management Board of the Al-Noor Mosque of Hà Nội, 2013.

Please note one small discrepancy: a research article in a specialist journal gives the founding of the Council of Sư cả of Ninh Thuận as 2006, while documents of the government agency give the year of recognition as 2007. This is probably the difference between the year of founding and the year of recognition, but the library has not verified the original document, so it records both.

As for the main places of worship, in An Giang there is the Mubarak Mosque in Châu Phong commune on the bank of the Hậu River, founded in the mid-eighteenth century and rebuilt in 1965 to a design by the architect Mohamet Amin, now a national monument. In Hồ Chí Minh City there is Jamia Al Musulman on Đông Du Street, built in 1935 by the community of South Asian origin. In Hà Nội there is the Al-Noor Mosque. On the Bàni side, one of the major mosques is the Văn Lâm Bàni mosque in Phước Nam commune, now part of Khánh Hòa province.

XIIChăm Bàni, a distinct form

The word Bàni is said to derive from the Arabic bani, meaning descendants. In the Chăm people's own system of classification, the community following Bàni is also called Chăm Awal, awal meaning before or first, set against Chăm Ahiér, ahiér meaning after, the group of Chăm who follow Brahmanism. That paired naming reveals something important: the Chăm do not picture the two groups as two competing religions, but as two halves of one whole, each needing the other to be complete. Many of the great Chăm ceremonies can only be performed when clergy from both sides are present.

Mosques and clergy

The place of worship of the Chăm Bàni is called Sang Magik, recorded in full in some documents as Haluw Sang Magik, where sang means house and magik is a variant of masjid. Vietnamese people in that region commonly call it chùa Bàni (the Bàni pagoda), a name that borrows the Buddhist word chùa but has no connection with Buddhism, and since it has become a stable popular name the library records it.

The clergy are collectively called Acar, recorded in some places as Achar or Char. They follow the community's own form of religious life, wear white and live apart from ordinary daily activity. The ranks from lowest to highest are Acar, Katip, Imưm, and at the top the Po Gru, called Sư cả in Vietnamese, the head of a mosque. According to a study in a specialist journal, Bình Thuận had 355 clergy in 2022, with 10 Sư cả and ten mosques, while Ninh Thuận had 99 in 2020, with 7 Sư cả and seven mosques.

The month of Ramưwan

This is the most visible difference and also the most often misunderstood. The fasting month of the Chăm Bàni is called Ramưwan, recorded in some places as Ramưvan, a variant of the word Ramadan. But the way it is kept is quite different. In orthodox Islam, every believer who meets the conditions fasts for the whole month. In Bàni, only the Acar fast for the whole month, and they stay inside the mosque throughout that time for contemplation and prayer, doing so on behalf of the whole community. Ordinary people are not required to observe the same abstinence. This is a mechanism of representation that orthodox Islam does not have, and it is the clearest distinction between the two branches.

Ramưwan is also not only a month of fasting. It opens with the tending of ancestral graves, lasting several days, when whole families go to the cemetery to clean their ancestors' graves and invite the ancestors home, followed by offerings at home with trays of rice, dried fish, bánh tét (cylindrical sticky rice cakes), sweet soup and fruit. The month joins the Islamic fasting month and the Chăm veneration of ancestors into a single whole, and that is the most concentrated image of the entire Bàni branch.

Further differences

XIIIThrough the eyes of feng shui

Islam does not teach feng shui, and the mosque has its own rule for choosing direction that excludes all others. The direction of a mosque is the قبلة, the qibla, pointing to exactly one set of coordinates on earth, the Kaaba in Mecca. It is calculated by spherical trigonometry, that is, by mathematics and astronomy, not by the lie of the land, the flow of water or the age of the builder. On any plot of land, whether its terrain is good or bad by any measure, the mihrab must still face that direction. There is no room for a second method of choosing direction. The library states this first so that no one reads this section and comes away thinking Muslims ought to consult feng shui when building a mosque.

Islamic teaching also takes a clear position on divination: seeking to know the future by methods of prediction is classed as not permitted, because it touches the very proposition of tawhid, that only God knows what has not yet happened. So the question of whether a Muslim should have the orientation of their house read in the traditional manner falls within the authority of the religious leaders of that person's community, not of a library page.

So what does the library read

The Hall of Myriad Paths library has a fixed section devoted to the eye of traditional Vietnamese feng shui, kept on every religion page. Its purpose is not to attach feng shui to the religion in question but to give Vietnamese readers, used to the traditional way of seeing, a point of comparison.

Read in the traditional manner, a mosque has three easily recognised features. First, water placed at the entrance. The water court for wudu lies just before the prayer hall, and in the great mosques of earlier times it was a pool in the middle of the courtyard. The traditional Vietnamese approach calls this minh đường tụ thủy, water gathering in the open space in front, and regards it as a favoured configuration. This resemblance is not borrowed: both sides place water where people pass through, in a hot climate. Second, an axis converging on one point. The whole prayer hall is oriented towards the mihrab, and the traditional Vietnamese approach also reads a building along its axis, the difference being that the axis of a Vietnamese communal house or pagoda is judged by compass direction, while the axis of a mosque is judged by coordinates thousands of kilometres away. Third, open space. The prayer hall has no benches or chairs, is laid with mats or carpets, has a high ceiling and many doors for ventilation, and the traditional approach has always valued openness. Here, what creates the open space is a ritual requirement, because people need to prostrate in rows, not a calculation about qi.

Three layers to keep apart

The first layer, what the religion teaches. There is only one rule about direction, the qibla, and it is decided by mathematics. Beyond that there are rules on the cleanliness of the place of prayer and on the absence of images. There is no provision about the lie of the land, dragon veins or the owner's birth year.

The second layer, what local builders did out of building habit. This is where the features that outsiders take for feng shui actually come from. Chăm mosques in the south have multi-tiered roofs, wide verandas, raised floors against flooding and many doors to catch the river breeze. Bàni mosques in the south-central region have the look of Chăm architecture, with thick walls and small doors suited to a region of harsh sun and drought. That is craft and climate, not a clause in a law book.

The third layer, the library's own reading. The overlap between the two layers above is not accidental, because traditional feng shui and folk building experience both draw on the same set of conditions: sun, wind, rain and water. When a religious rule requires people to place water at the entrance and keep the main hall open, the result looks very much like a building whose site was carefully chosen, even though the two start from different places. This is the library's interpretation, not a teaching of the religion.

XIVCommon misunderstandings

This last section gathers the questions the library hears most often when people outside the faith ask about Islam. The four most common slips: mistaking a state emblem for a religious symbol, translating an ordinary Arabic word as the proper name of a particular deity, confusing the founder with the object of worship, and merging two very different Chăm branches into a single picture.

?Quick Questions

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