This paper critically engages Thomas Bauer’s argument of the increasing disappearance of ambiguity from modern and contemporary Islam. It argues that opting out of ambiguities from Islamic discourses and practices can succeed only temporarily, but eventually due to sociopolitical transformations they recreate ambiguities. The paper develops this argument through a study of the insertion of Salafism in the predominantly Buddhist Cambodia’s Muslim minority. Middle Eastern, especially Kuwait Islamic NGOs, and the social networks developed around them played crucial role in building up a significant Salafi community in the country. The imported discourses of the Salafi religious authorities of the Gulf promise the elimination of ambiguities from both the religious and mundane life of the individual by arguing that the scripture covers all aspects of the individual’s life if it is interpreted in a literalist way and if the relevant hadith is carefully excavated, attracting considerable segments of the Cambodian Muslim minority. Yet, this success comes at the cost of compromises and the regeneration ambiguity which existed before the coming of Salafism to Cambodia, namely the vast field of ambiguity that is generated by differences between Islamic doctrine and everyday practice. Building on field interviews in Kuwait and ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Phnom Penh, Battambang and Kampot, and rural areas of Cambodia, the paper analyses the attempt of the discourses of Kuwait Salafis to create a Muslim life in which religious matters are certain, and it also examines by contrast the various forms of ambiguities that fill the lives of young Cambodians attracted to Salafism.