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This presentation critically engages with Thomas Bauer’s argument on the decline of ambiguity in modern Islamby examiningits 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.
