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We are pleased to invite you to a 223rd Gellner Seminar with Zoltan Pall (Faculty of Law, Charles University). The seminar will be held on on Thursday, February 12th, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. in seminar room B1, Kampus Hybernská (Hybernská 4, Praha 1).
The Reemergence of Ambiguity: Salafism and Muslim Moral Worlds in Cambodia
This presentation critically engages with Thomas Bauer’s argument on the decline of ambiguity in modern Islam by examining its paradoxical reemergence within Salafism among Cambodia’s Muslim minority. While Salafism aspires to remove uncertainty from Islamic belief and practice through a literalist and universalist framework, its implementation in Cambodia has revealed tensions with local social realities and clashes with Cham cosmologies rooted in pluralism and ritual fluidity. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, I show how educated, middle-class Muslims from Salafi backgrounds increasingly confront contradictions between doctrinal rigidity and lived experience. Many develop practices of selective accommodation and epistemic openness that amount to a renewed tolerance of ambiguity. This process marks a departure from earlier analyses of moral ambivalence, pointing instead to a deeper reconsideration of religious authority, truth, and certainty. Situated within Cambodia’s post-conflict transformation, the rise of a Muslim middle class, and renewed engagement with national culture, the case suggests that Salafism, in failing to suppress ambiguity, may paradoxically function as a catalyst for its return.
Bio:
Zoltan Pall (PhD, Utrecht University) is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Interregional Study of Constitutionalism, Charles University. He is the author of Salafism in Lebanon: Local and Transnational Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, Kuwait, and Cambodia, as well as in Egypt, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. His current research focuses on everyday experiences of constitutionalism in authoritarian contexts in the Middle East and on the dynamics of Muslim transnational networks in Southeast Asia.