More Muslims live in Asia than any other region on earth and as U.S. President George W. Bush edged closer to war on Iraq many local groups responded with concern on Friday.
Others saw religion as not at the heart of the issue, describing war as a purely international matter.
Responses were wide-ranging after Bush told the world he would force a vote in the United Nations seeking authorisation to invade Iraq in a step closer to war.
"If the U.S. fires their missiles, the victims will mostly be Muslims...women, children and Islamic worshipping places," said Muhammad Rizieq, chief of Indonesia's Islamic Defenders' Front.
"There will be fallout," said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in an interview with CNN when asked about the impact of a war on his nation just before Bush spoke.
"It is being seen as the Islamic world is being targeted by the people of the Western world."
Many Muslims in Asia take a similar view, say analysts.
Asia is still believed to be the chosen hiding place of Osama bin Laden, suspected inspiration for hijackers in the September 11, 2001, because he can find sympathetic safe havens.
It is also the region that saw the single most devastating attack by militant Islamists on a civilian target since the September 11 attacks when 205 people were killed as they danced last October in a bar on the resort island of Bali.
NEW BIN LADENS
"If the war starts tomorrow, the next day we will have thousands of new Osama bin Ladens who will be ready to destroy U.S. facilities anywhere on earth," Rizieq told Reuters.
"We are campaigning for the public to besiege and take over the U.S. embassy if war breaks out."
Rizieq's group is known for raiding nightclubs in Jakarta and has turned out demonstrators on a number of occasions, but its rhetoric is sometimes more dramatic than its action and it is relatively small compared with moderate organisations in the world's most populous Muslim nation.
Muhammad Ismail Yusanto, spokesman of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a hardline Muslim group based in the Middle East, said: "We will certainly hit the streets to protest the war.
"Even now when the war has yet to break we have already done some rallies. We will scream out loud that (war) is obviously evidence of U.S. despotism," he said.
Analysts say the response to a war from Indonesia, where the message of bin Laden has struck a chord with the many poor in the economically struggling country of 210 million, is likely to be among the most radical.
Pakistan, too, will see anger, they say.
Muslim populations of other Asian country voiced anxiety at the prospect of war after Bush spoke.
"It's not just going to affect Islam and the Islamic world, there's going to be an international effect," said Secretary General Nasharudin Mat Isa of Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS).
"This will create another situation, hopefully not, like what happened after September 11. Of course there will be action, there will be dissatisfaction among the Muslim community," he said.
"Maybe this will lead to another attack."
Most of the population of the Philippines are Christian, but the south has for decades been the scene of an insurgency by various radical Islamic groups, some believed to have at least tenuous links with bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
However, its biggest Muslim rebel group, suspected by the government in an airport attack this week that killed the bomber and 20 others, distanced itself from any extremist reaction.
"We look at this as an international dispute, not as a religious dispute," Eid Kabalu, the group's spokesman, told Reuters by telephone.
"If there is a way to settle this, then let it be settled under the United Nations."