Putri Prameshwari – In the latest move by a local government to adopt regulations inspired by Shariah Law, a district in East Java Province has reportedly banned public elementary school students from going to junior high school until they have read the entire Koran.

The move by the Lamongan district administration, which issued a regulation mandating that Muslim children must read Islam's holy book from cover to cover and participate in extra religious study sessions, affects the junior high aspirations of some 60,000 public school students.

"It will be an extracurricular activity in elementary schools," Mustafa Nur, head of Lamongan's Education Office, told the state-run Antara news agency over the weekend. He said Lamongan's public schools were mandated to add two extra hours of Koran reading per week, as well as practice writing in Arabic.

"However, the regulation does not apply to non-Muslim students," Mustafa said, adding that it was issued to educate students in understanding values taught by the Koran so they can be applied to daily life.

Once a student has read the Koran, Mustafa said, they will receive a certificate enabling them to enroll in public junior high school. He said the district administration has recruited 600 teachers to lead the extracurricular classes.

In the years following the 1999 regional autonomy law, dozens of Shariah-inspired bylaws and regulations have been passed by provincial and district governments, raising concern among some groups about back-door attempts to turn secular Indonesia into an Islamic state.

Muhajir, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Education, said the autonomy law enabled district chiefs to pretty much impose any regulations they wanted to. He said there were more than 600 elementary schools in Lamongan, with about 60,000 students enrolled.

"[The central government] cannot do anything to interfere," he said. "No matter what the regulations are."

However, Arief Rachman, an education expert at the Jakarta State University, said he supported encouraging public school students to become more religious as long as it was done fairly. "Public school is not only for Muslims," he said. "Students from other religions must also have their [own] qualifications."