Religion and History in Cambodia

Cambodia is overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist, around 97 percent per Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Muslim Cham, Christian and animist minorities. Buddhism reached the Khmer lands by the early centuries CE, coexisting for centuries with Hindu court religion under the Khmer Empire, whose capital at Angkor produced Angkor Wat, built in the twelfth century by King Suryavarman II originally as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu before its gradual conversion to Buddhist use, making it among the largest religious monuments ever constructed. Theravada Buddhism became the dominant popular tradition from around the thirteenth century onward, displacing the Hindu-Mahayana court religion of the Angkorian elite, and the ordained sangha remained central to village education and social life into the modern era. The Cham minority, descended from the once-independent Hindu and later Muslim kingdom of Champa on the Vietnamese coast, practice a distinct form of Islam blending Sunni orthodoxy with older local custom, and were targeted with particular severity during the Khmer Rouge period for their distinct ethnic and religious identity.

Cambodia's ancient temple heritage extends beyond Angkor to Preah Vihear, an eleventh-century Hindu temple on the Thai border whose disputed sovereignty produced armed clashes between Cambodian and Thai forces as recently as 2011 before the International Court of Justice reaffirmed Cambodian sovereignty over the temple in a 2013 ruling.