Summer 2014: M., S. and C., early twenties, seem astray in the city of Qom, Iran. They are Chams, Cambodian Muslims. None speaks or reads a word of Persian – or Arabic – just yet, but all have a year to learn. None are religious experts just yet, but all are entering a programme that will make them so in a few years (numbers unsure), years with little journeys back to Cambodia (returns uncertain). They are Muslims in a vastly Buddhist country. They are Chams among a Khmer majority. And they are sayyids – descendants of the Prophet – born Sunnis, now ‘going Shi‘a’, as they say themselves, as others say about them. Shi‘a: yes and no, they rejoin, not yet, maybe, yet to be. For this movement towards the other side of Islam – if sides there ever were – is ongoing, trying, and all very contemporary. But Shi‘a, certainly, for sure, very precisely, very soon, probably as it has always been, or at the very least as it should always be from now on. Or so whisper the ancestors, read the chronicles, inscribe the lineages. In all this, there is a clear imprecision, a constant uncertainty that we may need to write and read with. Taking in all those apparent contradictions, this chapter attempts to look at the recent Shi‘a connections tied by (a few) Cambodian Cham Saeths (the transcription of sayyid in Cham) who so-happen to be Sunnis. It could be tempting to anchor those trajectories as conversions, and to ground them in Iran where those travels to Shi‘a seminaries take place, or strictly in the contemporary since they have been carried out in recent years. Instead, I suggest a long duree perspective inspired by those primarily concerned and those living along side them – may they be staying in Cambodia and not going to Iran, may they be staying Sunnis and not going Shi‘a. Doing so implies three things: