... it isn't my intention to make Malay claims regarding Funan. ... My belief is that at the time of Funan, there were Malay people already living in the mainland. There are all these places starting witg Kompong in Cambodia, and there are thousands of these Kampong in Malaysia, which means village. As to how deeply tied they were to Funan, I don't know and haven't learnt enough about it. ... To reiterate, I make no claims that Funan was Malay, but certainly that the Malays had ties to Funan from even back then, and this was stated in old Malay records.
Malaccan, thank you for offering your view as well. It is interesting to note that while I used the word Phnom or Funan to claim Funan as belonging to the Khmers, I also find it fascinating about your pointing out of the word "kompong" to seek association of the Malays to Funan itself.
So I did a little research. I believe the word "Kompong" was a much much later addition to the Khmer vocabulary. While the word kompong means village in Malaysian, it is not so in the Khmer language. It simply mean river port or sea port. That is it. There are five provinces with water ports in Cambodia. They are called as follows: Kompong Som/Sihanoukville (Sea port), Kompong Cham, Kompong Chhnang, Kompong Speu, Kompong Thom.
So when you hear the word Kompong being used in Cambodian language, it simply refers to a water port or harbor.
You should also know that Funan was very famous for it sea port back in the day when it controlled the maritime trade. However, Funan's sea port was not called by the word "kompong" at all. It was called "O' Keo" instead. The Khmer word of "O' " means just like a port or a harbor or a protected body of water suitable for anchorage. So if Funan was of the Malays, then it would be called by the terms Kompong Keo already. But it was not.
So I looked futher. I found this interesting publication that talks about the Malays in Cambodia. According to that paper, the Chams started migrating to Cambodia after the fall of their capital Vijaya in 1471. The Chams migrated to Cambodia in 4 differents time periods. So this is indeed much later later than the Funan period which lasted from first century to the 7th century. In fact, experts say that the migration of the Malays to Cambodia must have taken place after the beginning of the 13th century. In addition, all the Malays in Cambodia are Muslims who claimed to migrated from their country of Minangkabau in central Sumatra. This clearly shows that there were no Malays in Funan. In fact if there were Malays in Funan, they would have been Indianized or Hindunized, not Muslims.
So that is why I argue that the word Kompong is a new addition to the Khmer vocabulary and the Khmers have denote it to mean just water port or harbor, not village at all. In addition, I again conclude that Funan has always been of the Khmers and not of the Malays because the direct descendants of the people of Funan are the present-day Khmer people of Cambodia now.
The origin of Malays in Cambodia is obscure. The Khmer texts refer to the Muslim community with the compound term "Cham-Jva" meaning Cham-Javanese (Mak Phoeun 1988:85). The term acknowledges the unity of the two people as Muslim, but also seems to recognise the ethnic difference between them. Moura could find no documentary evidence concerning the origin of the Malays in Cambodia, so he asked
contemporary Malays if they knew when their community had arrived and where they had come from. The response he obtained was
that Minangkabau in central Sumatra was the country of their origin (Moura 1883:I, 457). Since he had no information about any migration from Sumatra to Cambodia in recent times, following the shift of the Khmer capital from Angkor to the Quatre-Bras region, he reasoned that these Malays must have left Sumatra before the fourteenth century. Furthermore, since
all the Malays who lived in Cambodia were Muslim, and since the people of Minangkabau were only converted to Islam early in the thirteenth century, Moura concluded that
the migration of Malays to Cambodia must have taken place after the beginning of the thirteenth century.The idea of "migrations" of peoples to account for the diffusion of culture was a stock notion of Moura's day and is somewhat old-fashioned today. However, it is well known that a large community of Minangkabau settlers colonised an area on the Malay peninsula across the straits from Sumatra by the fourteenth century. It may have been Malays like these who also made their way further north to Cambodia. This movement was probably not so much a migration as the cumulative effect of the comings and goings of many small, independent groups of traders. Minangkabau culture esteems the trading expedition called merantau (going to the river's reach) as an occupation for men who do not inherit property in that matrilineal society. It may have been such itinerant traders, who would have tended to settle along the river or at strategic river junctions in Cambodia, who met these newly arriving Chams in the fifteenth century, recognised them as their distant cousins and fellow immigrants. I suspect that the first emigration from Champa consisted mainly of Chams who had already had contact with Islam and found that they shared the faith with the Malays or Sumatrans they met in Cambodia.
The Cham-Malay Community in Cambodia
By the end of the sixteenth century, at a time when the Europeans were first becoming involved in Southeast Asia, we begin to find many more references to the Muslims of Cambodia, who, according to Le Clère, were recognised as the significant competitors in commerce by the Europeans (Le Clère 1914:348). At that time, when far-flung Spanish clerics and empire builders had hoped to see Indochina brought under the control of Philip III, one of them gloomily noted the influence of the "moroos," the Muslims of Cambodia,
… whom the tolerance of the kings of Cambodia and of the Tjams allow to build mosques everywhere, and who endeavour to proslytise and who hate the Christians to the extent of wishing to drink their blood (Gabriel Quiroga [1604], quoted in Cabaton 1927:II, 506).
According to Mak Phoeun, in the late sixteenth century two Muslim chiefs brought several pieces of artillery from Champa, that is Panduranga, and gave them to the Khmer king. In return for these valuable firearms and, we can assume, the knowledge of how to use the weapons or the promise to man the guns when needed, the king gave the Muslims rank and land in Cambodia to settle. These Muslims persuaded the Khmer king to invade Champa, undoubtedly to settle some score of their own back in Panduranga. At around this time, in 1594, the king of Champa sent help to the sultan of Johore to fight against the Portuguese (Lafont 1988b:71). Johore, at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula, had become an important Muslim trading stronghold after the defeat of Malacca in 1511.
While the Khmer army was on this Cham campaign in May 1596, the Khmer king was murdered in his palace in Srei Santhor by some Europeans led by a Portuguese, Diego Veloso and a Spaniard, Blas Ruiz. David Chandler points out that these Iberians used their understanding of the technology of firearms, especially the naval cannon, to terrorise local people and gain great influence even though they only had a hundred men in their command (Chandler 1992:86). The incident suggests one of the reasons the Chams continued to be welcomed by Cambodian kings was that they brought the Khmers up-to-date information and technology from their contact with Muslim trading partners in the region.
Veloso and Ruiz supported a successor to the throne who evidently displeased the Muslim community in Cambodia. Strife erupted between the Europeans and Muslims and many Portuguese and Spaniards were killed. The Muslims then, according to the Khmer Royal Chronicles, withdrew to Tbong Khmum (now Kompong Cham province), where they were in the majority.
It is at this period, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, that the Cham-Malay communities became numerous and populous enough to have their own name for a riverside port village, kompong, be accepted as the common term for their settlements in Khmer. A little later, in the early seventeenth century, Kompong Cham became the name of the present-day city and province (Mak Phoeun 1981:131, 406).
The leaders of these anti-European Muslims were Po Rat, whose title po suggests he was a Cham, and Laksmana, whose name in Malay means "admiral," suggesting he was a Malay or a Cham sailor. The Muslims of Tbong Khmum proclaimed Po Rat the king of an independent domain in eastern Cambodia, named Laksmana as the uparaj or second-in-command, and named other Muslims to positions of authority in the rebel province.
The new Cambodian king, Paramaraja V (Cau Bana Tan 1597-99) was killed in the attempt to defeat the Muslim rebels and it was some time before the Khmer authorities re-established control of the region and drove Laksmana and his army back to Champa, where they perished (Mak Phoeun 1988:86; see also Cabaton 1906:36-37; Manguin 1979:269 n. 3, 4 gives a bibliography on early Europeans in Cambodia).
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Muslims again rise to prominence in Cambodian politics. Using the military support of Malays and Chams, a contender for the throne killed his rival and became King Ramadhipati I (Cau Bana Cand 1642-58). According to the Khmer Royal Chronicles and contemporary European accounts, the king married a Muslim woman, rewarded the Muslims with favours and privileges, and converted to Islam himself, taking the Muslim name Ibrahim. In some Khmer accounts this king is called "Ram Col Sah" ("Rama who entered religion"). Contemporary European accounts call him "Rama the Apostate" (Mak Phoeun 1988:88; see also Winkel 1882: 483; Moura 1883:I, 261; Cabaton 1906:37).
The Muslims took advantage of their ascendancy to build mosques all over the country and to convert members of the royal court in Oudong to Islam, requiring them to wear Cham costume at court functions, consisting of a long tunic and a Malay ceremonial dagger, the keris (Mak Phoeun 1988:88).
At the beginning of his reign, in 1643-44, the Muslim king of Cambodia ordered the massacre of Dutch traders in Phnom Penh, probably with the help and encouragement of his Cham-Malay allies. Ibrahim's forces killed and wounded over two hundred people and captured two ships. The king was eventually obliged to pay an indemnity to the Dutch East India Company, but European trading ventures in Cambodia were halted after these events (Coedès 1966a:198).
The privileges of the Muslims at court understandably created a reaction among Buddhists. Civil war soon broke out and in the midst of the anarchy, in 1657, the Muslims of Tbong Khmum again erupted in revolt, along with the Muslim community of Siem Reap. The Buddhist faction at court called for help from the Vietnamese to suppress the Muslims. However, in exchange for this aid, the Vietnamese annexed Cambodian provinces in the Mekong Delta.
The civil wars of the country furnished them [the Nguyen] a pretext for intervention. The King of Cambodia had just converted to Islam under the name Ibrahim. At the request of the Buddhists, Nguyen Hien Vuong invaded Cambodia, captured Ibrahim and had him cede Bien Hoa and Baria [to the Vietnamese] in lower Cochinchina (Grousset 1929:617).
Chandler says that Ibrahim was taken off in a cage by the Vietnamese (Chandler 1992:88), and reprisals were taken against the Muslim community.
His death was followed by a violent reaction against the Muslim faction which had risen under his ambition and spirit of solidarity. Under the pretext of a revolt the new king had a great number of Chams and Malays massacred and compelled many others to flee to Siam (Cabaton 1906:38).
Mak Phoeun points out that not only Muslims fled to Ayudhya, but also Khmer relatives of the king, royal princes, civil and religious dignitaries with titles beginning po (meaning Cham nobility) or duon (from the Malay tuan--lord--signifying a religious teacher among the Cham Muslims). Among these refugees to Thailand, according to the Chronicles, was the Muslim wife of King Ibrahim, Anak Mnang Kapah Pau (Mak Phoeun 1988:89).
A few years after Rama/Ibrahim's death and the defeat of the Muslims, we find Muslim soldiers back in the capital, Oudong, at the service of the royal family. This time, in 1673, they responded to the call of the queen and the court to help defeat a usurper who had seized the throne. The Muslims carried out their task and replaced the rightful heir on the throne and then stood by as loyal bodyguards with the whole court grateful to them (Cabaton 1906:38-39; Mak Phoeun 1988:89-90).
http://www.cascambodia.org/chams.htm
.
Internetsites can be helpfull but we have to investigate wich ORIGINAL sources are used. 
I was back in KL last week... all that Malaysian air must've given me an extra boost in ASEAN pride. Sorry 
And I thought that they weren't Muslims... haha
I'll share and post it..., hmmm...., maybe in my next post...
Why don't you start a thread on the various Indonesian empires. That would really make an epic read! 
me out?
