As the band launches into the popular 1980s song The Final Countdown by rock group Europe, several thousand Indonesians at an election rally in central Java start cheering.
They join in as a speaker on stage exhorts them to chant -- not the words of the song -- but Allahu Akbar (God is greatest).
Welcome to a rally for one of Indonesia's most conservative Islamist parties, the Prosperous Justice Party. Instead of pushing Islamic issues, party leaders promise to tackle graft and the economy.
Along with Islamic prayers and strident condemnation of Israel, there is Western music.
As parliamentary polls on April 5 draw closer, parties that want to implement Islamic Sharia Law or turn Indonesia into an Islamic state have largely dumped their conservative platforms in public.
Now, they are campaigning on issues that surveys show most people care about, such as corruption and the price of food.
Predictions have proven off the mark that support for Islamist parties would spike at a time of growing disenchantment with secular rule in the world's most populous Muslim nation since the downfall of autocrat Suharto in 1998.
"Indonesian society is more Islamic than at any time in the past, but this hasn't flowed through to mean we have more Islamist politics," said Greg Fealy, an expert on Indonesian Islam at the Australian National University.
"For Indonesians it's all very well to be more Islamic, more devout, more self-consciously Islamic in private life, but it's not necessarily a determining factor in how they vote or in how they think the state should be configured," Fealy said.
Added Azyumardi Azra, rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta, the country's most prestigious center of Islamic learning: "The dominant parties will be those which do not base their ideology on religious dogma."
Conservative Islamist parties won 14 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1999. Polls show this will not change much on April 5, with only the Prosperous Justice Party tipped to make any gains, partly because of its reputation for cleanness.
Indeed, at its rally in the Central Java capital Semarang, supporters said they would choose the party because of its integrity and anti-graft stance, not its Islamic base.
Two big secular-nationalist parties won 56 percent of the vote in 1999. Two moderate Muslim-oriented parties, which do not use Islam as their foundation, took most of the rest.
Recent polls show little support for Sharia in Indonesia, where Islam arrived with Arab traders centuries ago and blended with a range of other beliefs including mysticism and animism.
Fighting terror also ranks low, even though Muslim militants have launched a spate of attacks in recent years, including bomb blasts on Bali island in 2002 that killed 202 people.
That is where Islam is playing a subtle role in the election campaign, some analysts say, pointing to the lack of attention major parties are giving to fighting terror or curbing Islamic militancy because of concerns Muslim voters could be offended.
The Supreme Court's recent move to halve the jail term of militant preacher Abu Bakar Bashir, accused spiritual leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah network who is serving time for immigration offences, gave the impression Indonesia was trying to appease conservative Muslim voters.
Others say it is not Islam, but fear of being branded a US stooge that has kept politicians quiet on the subject of terrorism.
Muslim parties could also play a key role in deciding who wins Indonesia's presidential election in July, as no candidate is expected to triumph without support from other parties.
Another factor keeping voters away from the Islamists is that the two big secular-nationalist parties, President Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesia Democratic Party-Struggle and Suharto's former ruling vehicle Golkar, have taken Islam more seriously.
In Megawati's party, surveys show growing numbers of members are pious Muslims, said Robert Hefner, an author on Indonesian Islam at Boston University. As for Golkar, its leadership is increasingly filled by Muslim intellectuals.
"There are some basic cultural changes that these [two] parties have responded to, tapping Islamic sentiment while steering clear of the hot-button issues, namely Sharia and the establishment of an Islamic state," Hefner said.
Besides the Prosperous Justice Party, the United Development Party of Vice President Hamzah Haz and the Crescent Star Party are the most identifiable Islamist parties in Indonesia. All eschew the violence of the fringe militant groups.
Such conservative Islamist agendas were banned under Suharto, and to many Indonesians, hold little sway today.
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