CAIRO — California's Santa Ana city is home to some hundred Cham families, a community that first arrived 30 years ago after fleeing the Khmer Rouge's reign in Cambodia and is known for its adherence to Islam.

"Religion is the way of life," Ghazaly Salim, a telephone installer who spends his off time attending to the local mosque, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday, January 12. The community is famous for sharing the moments of joy together in ease and also shouldering burdens together in hardships.

"[This] is what our grandfathers taught us," stressed Ghazaly, who helped establish the community 30 years ago.

Cham people are the ethnic remnants of the Kingdom of Champa, which existed along the coastline of what's now Vietnam as far back as the second century AD.

Between the rise of the Khmer Empire and Vietnam's territorial push to the south, the Champa kingdom began to diminish. The first religion of Champa was a form of Hinduism, brought by sea from India. But as Arab merchants stopped along the Vietnam coast en route to China, the majority of Cham people embraced Islam. Today, Cham are a people without a homeland. Their communities, numbering a few hundred thousand, live as scattered refugees across Asia and the world. Ethnic Cham, nevertheless, still form the core of Muslim communities in Cambodia and Vietnam.

They speak Cham language, which is similar to the language of ethnic Malays. Back to Roots The first order of business for the Cham families that settled in Santa Ana three decades back was to build a mosque.  For three years, they pooled their minimum-wage salaries and asked for help from local Arab Muslims until they finally raised enough to buy a single-story apartment and turn it into a mosque.