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considerable number of students across Indonesia adhere to the extreme belief that Indonesia should become an Islamic caliphate rather than remain a multi-faith republic, and many are even ready to go on jihad to fight for their religious beliefs, a study has revealed.

In what it dubbed an “alarming” phenomenon, the Alvara Research Center found that 18.3 percent of 2,400 high school students interviewed in the survey perceived an Islamic caliphate as the ideal form of government for Indonesia. About 17.8 percent of the 1,800 university students participating in the study was of the same opinion.

Even more alarming is that a larger number of the students — about 23 percent of both samples of high school and university students — said they were willing to go on violent jihad.

“This is a warning that we need to heed, especially the data showing that they are willing to go on jihad,” Alvara CEO Hasanuddin Ali said during the launch of the survey on Tuesday.

The university students involved in the first survey on radicalism among students conducted by the Jakarta-based research firm are from 25 top-notch universities across the country. In the years ahead, these students are likely to occupy strategic positions in the country after graduating. The 25 universities include Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta, and the University of Indonesia (UI) in Depok and the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), both in West Java.

The study also captured how students perceived non-Muslim leaders, with 29 percent of each respondent group saying that they would not support a non-Muslim leader even if democratically elected.

Another finding was that 21.9 percent of high school students and 19.6 percent of university students said that Sharia-influenced bylaws needed to be implemented in the country to “accommodate” Muslims as the majority population.

In all those findings, the number of students adhering to such extreme views was still far fewer than those rejecting such beliefs. For example, the number of university students who rejected any Islamic rule accounted for 82.1 percent of the total respondents.

However, the trends are still worrisome in a country that has long been struggling to root out radicalism, particularly amid concerns of rising intolerance on campuses.

“Just one person [planning to] commit a suicide bomb attack would cause trouble for Indonesia, let alone 23 percent of the population,” said Nusran Wahid from Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the country’s largest Muslim organization, who attended the survey launch on Tuesday. “We can conclude that Indonesia is facing an emergency situation.”

A similar survey released by the Setara Institute in May last year of high school students in Jakarta and Bandung found that around 11.3 percent of the 760 students interviewed said the best system to be implemented in Indonesia was an Islamic caliphate. Meanwhile, 29 percent of the students said a local leader — district head, regent, mayor or governor — should be a person of the same religion to them.

Didi Wahidin, director for university student affairs at the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry, said the ministry continued to monitor lecturers in universities and vowed to introduce more nationalism-based activities as extracurricular programs for university students.

While it did not probe into what caused the students to lean toward such extreme views of Islam, the Alvara survey produced another interesting finding that the students opted for popular preachers who often appear in television programs, like Yusuf Mansur, Mama Dedeh and Abdullah Gimnastiar, who are regarded as conservatives, as their role-model preachers rather than moderate Muslim clerics.

The three clerics were the top three of 12 role models in the survey, while Quraish Shihab, a moderate Muslim preacher, who often voices pluralism and tolerance, came fourth among university students and ninth among high school students.