If investigators confirm the charges by the US and Indonesian governments that Saturday night's carnage in Bali was the work of Muslim militants, the 'Islam encourages violence' debate sparked by the Sept 11 attacks is sure to intensify and put pressure on moderate Muslims.

Sensing this possibility, some of the leading voices championing moderate Islam in South-east Asia have been quick to speak up and raise issues about these acts of terror and separating them from Islam.

Having condemned the car bomb attack on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said Tuesday that such attacks will continue ''as long as people harbour hatred''.

Mahathir said that terrorist attacks were ''not a good way to fight for any cause, as it was not planned for ultimate victory but to exact revenge and retaliation,'' reported a local English-language daily.

In Indonesia, where officials in Bali are intensively questioning two Indonesians in connection with the attack killed at least 182 people and injured more than 300 people, Muslim lawyers have chided the country's defence minister for blaming the al-Qaeda network for the attack without citing evidence.

Reckless statement

''That was a reckless statement under the present circumstances; unfounded allegations might provoke a bigger problem,'' Mahendratta, coordinator of a group of Muslim lawyers, was quoted as saying by Antara, the Indonesian state news agency, on Tuesday.

Likewise, the agency quoted Bali Police chief, Brig Gen Budi Setyawan, as saying: ''There is no clue (whether or not al-Qaeda was behind the bombings). An international network could have masterminded it,'' Budi said.

Earlier, Indonesia's Defence Minister Matori Abdul Djalil went on record saying that the Bali attacks are ''linked to al-Qaeda with cooperation of local terrorists''.

The al-Qaeda group of Osama bin Laden has been identified by the US government as the mastermind behind the Sept 11 acts of terror in New York and Washington.

On Monday, the leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), also cautioned against pointing fingers at Islam for encouraging such acts of terror.

''It (the Bali bombing) was an act against humanity and no religion can justify it. The authorities must solve the case and bring the perpetrators to justice, but must do so according to facts, not analysis,'' Hasyim Muzadi of NU was quoted as having said.

The 'Islam encourages violence' or 'Islam equals terrorism' debate picked up after last year's attacks in the United States, which killed nearly 3,000 civilians. Those who linked Islam and violence pointed to the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept 11 attacks, all of whom were Muslims.

Among those who have raged against Islam have been leading religious figures in the United States. The past 12 months have seen people such as US television evangelist Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham link Islam with the ''forces of darkness,'' writes Chris McGillion in Tuesday's edition of the 'Sydney Morning Herald'.

Falwell has said that the followers of Prophet Mohammad are ''bent on destroying all non-Muslims,'' adds McGillion, the paper's religious affairs columnist.

Similar views about Islam held by neo-conservative writers in the United States have also fed this debate.

Pressure on Saudi

In early August, the US media reported that some neo-conservative writers and thinkers close to the administration of President George W Bush were turning the pressure on Saudi Arabia for the conservative strand of Islam it practises that traces its roots to the 18th century Wahabism.

Wahabism, they implied, has an anti-US streak, highlighted by the fact that the majority of the hijackers in the US attacks and Osama, the man Washington accuses of planning them were Wahabis, whose idea of an ideal Islamic state was the Taliban's Afghanistan.

But Muslim moderates in South-east Asia have been at pains since Sept 11 to counter those who accuse Islam of encouraging violence, by offering the region's tolerant face of the faith as evidence that it is not so.

Indonesia, in fact, has been held up as a prime example of Islam's moderate face. It is the largest Muslim country in the world, with 170.3 million out of its 220 million people adherents of Islam.

The Nahdlatul Ulama, with a membership of 40 million Muslims, encourages the country's faithful to take a moderate path.

Yet in the eyes of many, this image has suffered due to Saturday's massive bomb, and will place this region's Muslims in a further predicament if investigators link militant Muslims to the bloodshed.

At the same time, statements from some religious leaders accused of holding extremist views are not helping create space for moderates.

Work of foreigners

For instance, the line of argument used by Abu Bakar Baasyir, an Indonesian Muslim cleric that intelligence officials in the region have linked to planned attacks, will not help deflect charges that Islam encourages violence.

Abu Bakar told journalists at a press conference that the Bali attack was the work of foreigners, ''most probably the United States,'' to give the impression that Islamic extremists are present in Indonesia. The authorities will look to accuse Muslims including himself for the attack, he added.

In a commentary in Tuesday's Arab News, Abdul Qader Tash says a hostile approach, which ''presents Islam as aggressive and antagonistic towards the West,'' is not the way to go.

''Our efforts will be wasted,'' he writes, if Islam is seen as trying to destroy the West and ''build an Islamic civilisation on its ruins''.

In the wake of attacks like the Bali blasts, South-east Asia's Muslims face the challenge of convincing many that Islam does not encourage violence, by looking into the community and launching a debate about what has gone wrong with the way some Muslims interpret their faith and use the religion for political purposes.

It is not the hour for apologists. — IPS