Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has signalled that hardline Islamists will get no relief from religious scoldings when he takes over from Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad next year.

Abdullah's closing address to the Kuala Lumpur International Forum on Islam 2002 (Kalif) at the weekend echoed themes that Mahathir hammered home through 21 years in power: Muslims must admit their shortcomings and catch up with the modern world.

"We must be less dogmatic and less rigid in our thoughts," Abdullah told Islamic scholars from countries including Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and a number of western states.

"Some of us in the Muslim world hold on to the fallacy that some man-made interpretations of our religion have become divine laws, or that some scholarship can no longer be challenged or revised.

"This put us in an intellectual straitjacket from which we have never been able to break free," he said in remarks given wide coverage in local media Monday.

Abdullah, 62, who majored in Islamic studies at University Malaya, said religious learning needed to be supplemented with appreciation of economic, cultural and technological changes.

This has been a pet subject for Mahathir, who is credited with having dragged Malaysia from the economic backwaters into the mainstream of Asian development.

Along the way, Mahathir has also regularly berated Malaysian Muslims for being lazy, calling on them to emulate the hard work and enterprise of the country's Chinese minority.

Islam as political tool

Abdullah, who has been named to succeed Mahathir when he steps down in October next year, has not yet been so blunt, perhaps wary that such scathing comments would be unacceptable from anyone without Mahathir's unique status.

But he indicated at the conference that under his rule the hardline Islamic opposition, PAS can expect little compromise towards its ideal of a theocratic Islamic state under syariah law, including amputations for theft and stoning to death for adultery.

"Hurried interpretations of the divine laws is not Islam. That is the work of those who only want to use Islam as a political tool," he said.

"This is the work of those who are trapped in the juristic tradition of following things blindly, for whom the changes of the modern world mean nothing."

The conference on Islam was proposed by Abdullah two years ago, but took on increased relevance in the wake of the Sept 11 terror attacks on the United States, and delegates called for the meeting to become an annual event.

Abdullah acknowledged that changing Western perceptions of Islam would not be easy, but added: "If we fail the Muslim world will never recover and the false stereotypes of Muslims held by the imagination of the West become a reality". AFP