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."