JAKARTA, Indonesia, April 29 — During his five years in Britain as a doctoral student in accounting, Zul Zulkieflimansyh remembers thinking that his homeland, the largest Muslim country in the world, should be doing better by its 220 million people.
A veteran of the tough world of Indonesian student politics, Dr. Zulkieflimansyh, 29, decided that Islam was the answer, and the newly formed Justice Party the perfect vehicle. He returned home several years ago determined to do something to bring about change.
Now, as the government here struggles to hold the amorphous center together, this astute accountant and a group of like-minded colleagues in the Justice Party are meticulously organizing for the next elections and hoping to establish an Indonesian version of an Islamic state.
The party's goal is nothing less than to impose the traditional Shariah, or Koranic law, on this secular nation. Justice Party supporters contend that such a change would instill a sense of purpose, pride and self-confidence in Indonesians and restore a moral focus in a country that has fallen into chaos and widespread corruption.
With the devastating effects of the Asian economic crisis five years ago, and the downfall of General Suharto a year later, Indonesia's political landscape is up for grabs as never before.
About 90 percent of Indonesians are Muslims, though most of them practice a more relaxed, less politically motivated form of their religion than can be found in some other countries with large Muslim populations.
But now Muslim political parties, including the Justice Party, control about 24 percent of Parliament. With elections coming up in 2004, President Megawati Sukarnoputri has been behaving cautiously on many issues, including Washington's war on terror, for fear of destabilizing a delicate equilibrium.
She will have to tread carefully with the Justice Party. Its top echelon — the party leader, Hidayat Nur Wahid; Annis Matta, the secretary general; and Lutsi Ishak, the treasurer — are all graduates of Saudi Arabian universities.
Many of the members join after passing through the strident Islamic student organization, the Indonesian Muslim Student Action Union, known for its aggressive street protests in favor of an Islamic state.
But the party believes in the soft-gloved approach. No militant jihad jargon issues from Dr. Zulkieflimansyh's lips. Instead, he speaks of empowering villagers, setting a clean moral example, and spreading a pure vision of Islam.
"We don't like the idea of forcing people to join Islam," Dr. Zulkieflimansyh said during a meeting at the party headquarters. "We like to invite them." Literature asserting that Jews organized the attack on the World Trade Center is on sale at the front counter.
A slogan on the office door says, "Expand recruitment, strengthen education and then gain victory." Dr. Zulkieflimansyh says, "We want people to understand Islam in a nice way."
With its young, motivated leadership — Mr. Hidayat is one of the older leaders at 42 — and spirited organization, the Justice Party has put its secular opponents on high alert.
When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch a half-century ago, the new leaders chose to eliminate a proposal for a system based on Shariah from their Constitution. During the more than 30 years of the dictatorship of General Suharto, many Muslim leaders agreed with his insistence on keeping Islam out of politics, even if they disagreed with his authoritarianism.
Now, in a political atmosphere of new openness, a race is on for the hearts and minds of Indonesians. Leaders from the moderate form of Islam have delineated what they call the battle between Liberal Islam and Literal Islam, in whose corner they place the Justice Party.
The liberals, suddenly galvanized by the inroads of the Justice Party and more militant groups, deem the Justice Party as dangerous as easy-to-see Islamic militants.
The Justice Party remains small, with only seven parliamentary seats right now, but it is expected to at least triple its presence in Parliament in the next elections. More important, it has already set a trend, increasing the volume of the debate on adopting Shariah.
The party, the liberals say, has been clever in not overly emphasizing its goal of creating an Islamic state. In this way, it has avoided creating unified opposition among those who consider the issue the flash point of Indonesian politics.
The Justice Party's soft style of recruitment is clearly on display in the low-income village of Sukamekar, about a 90-minute drive from the capital. The party has provided a mill for the peasants' rice and donated a tractor and is in the process of setting up some classrooms. At the same time, it has introduced study of the Koran twice a week for a women's group, and a party activist, responsible for the economic progress, visits once a week.
The activist, Nur Syamsudin Buchori, the operations manager of Kosindo, an Islamic cooperative established to help finance village projects for the Justice Party, says the rice mill has brought higher prices for the village rice.
Mr. Buchori's boss in the party, Didik Ahkmadi, leader of the "empowerment" division, views the rice mill in sheer political terms.
"This is a very strategic way to improve the conditions of the people," Mr. Ahkmadi said, standing beside the noisy machine as it churned out clean white rice. "If the government established a rice mill, there would be much corruption. If for example one million rupiah was allotted from the bank, 500,000 rupiah would come to the village."
In the nearby village of Babelan Kota, the party has helped organize a local industry. With financing from the party, families buy discarded imperfect socks from textile factories and mend them for resale.
The women's religious study group was a quid pro quo for the economic help in Sukamekar. Marhani Maruf, 38, who takes part in the group, said that economic conditions had improved only marginally but that at least the party representatives were consistent.
"They come all the time," she said. "The others only come when they want something."
The party's senior leaders insist that they are not interested in establishing in Indonesia all aspects of Wahhabism, the conservative form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
But the introduction of Shariah is a basic goal. "The implementation of Shariah would mean justice would be upheld," Mr. Zulkieflimansyh told a recent seminar where everyone in the room knew that a series of high-profile corruption trials under way in Jakarta were unlikely to result in severe sentences.
Under Shariah, he said, "There is no privilege for Muslims if you do something wrong."
Outwardly the party appears to be tolerant of educated women, and one of its most fervent organizers is Nursanita Nasution, a lecturer in accounting at the University of Indonesia and the mother of seven children.
Ms. Nasution, dressed the other day from head to toe in pink, including her head covering, says she is ready for the fight with the secularists. She has long disagreed with Indonesia's leading Islamic moderate voice, Nurcholish Madjid.
"He said, `Islam yes, politics no,' " she explained. "But Islam teaches us how to wake up in the morning, how to marry, how to educate and how to do the government. It's all in Islam."