Strict Islamic states unlikely in Southeast Asia: Experts
Strict Islamic states unlikely in Southeast Asia: Experts
Agence France-Presse, Singapore
The emergence of strict Islamic states in Southeast Asia was unlikely because of strong religious tolerance in a region with several areas of large Muslim majorities, analysts said on Thursday.
Harold Crouch, an expert on Indonesia, told a seminar on "Islam in Southeast Asia" that press reports of a resurgence of political Islam in the world's largest Muslim nation were unfounded.
Although protests by small hardline groups opposed to the U.S.-led bombing in Afghanistan received wide media coverage, it was not an indication of a rise in political Islam, he said.
"In my view, there is absolutely no chance that Islamic law will be imposed in Indonesia," said Crouch, who heads the International Crisis Group (ICG) Indonesia project.
"Indonesia will not, in our lifetime, adopt Islamic law," he told the seminar organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. The ICG provides in-depth analysis of issues in troubled areas.
Crouch, from the research school of Pacific and Asian studies at the Australian National University, said "exclusive" Islamic political parties in Indonesia polled only 14 percent of the vote during the 1999 elections.
Political scientist Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, from University Sains Malaysia in Penang, said Malaysia's opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) had failed to spell out an "operational blueprint" of the kind of Islamic state it wanted to promote.
Although Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has repeatedly described Malaysia as an Islamic state, PAS has said it was not Islamic enough.
Carmen Abubakar, a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of the Philippines in Manila, said government efforts to settle a separatist insurgency in the southern Philippines should address widespread poverty in Muslim populated provinces.
"If the material conditions of the people do not change, negotiated political settlements will not work," she said.
"There are now people moving for independence because autonomy as it is implemented has not changed the material conditions of the people."