NEW YORK, Jan 27: Islam is gaining a foothold among the indigenous people of the southern Mexican State of Chiapas, where Christianity has been the principal spiritual belief until now.

According to reports in Houston Chronicle and Final Call, a Chicago-based newspaper, there are no precise statistics on the number of Muslims in Chiapas, but local Islamic leaders say the converts number in the hundreds.

"The indigenous world has a very natural relationship with the cosmos, which makes it easy for Indians to understand what Islam is about," Aurelio Perez, the president of the Da'wa mission in Mexico and imam of the Islamic Community of Mexico, was reported as saying by the Chronicle.

Fifteen Indians made the first pilgrimage from Chiapas to Mecca in November with the financial support of Muslim communities abroad, said Imam Perez. Not only did they choose Islam out of conviction, but also because they were fed up with the often bloody clashes between Roman Catholics and Christians of other persuasions, who also tend to be divided along political lines in Chiapas, the paper said.

Chiapas is one of the poorest areas of Mexico. More than one-third of the state's 3.5 million people are Mayan Indians, many of whom live in the most abject poverty.

Due to religious differences, people in Chiapas had been forced to leave their communities, deprived of their homes and possessions, persecuted, thrown into prison and even killed, said Bishop Felipe Arizmendi of the diocese of San Cristbal de las Casas in Chiapas.

Chiapas is the site of the majority, and the worst, of the 20 or so religious conflicts simmering throughout Mexico. Over the past few years, about 300 evangelical, Christian Maya have converted to Islam in southernmost Chiapas state, which has been riven by spiritual struggles for centuries.

The conversions have left the Muslim Maya's neighbours and academics mystified. But their missionary guides hope the new Muslims will prove the first in a wave of converts in Mexico.

The missionaries themselves are but the latest in a long line of religious teachers who have tried to mould the Maya soul. Dominican monks arrived in these chilly highlands with Spanish conquerors nearly 500 years ago.

But the Islamic Spaniards are the first of their kind here. And they have forged a small but devoted following among the Maya. The Spanish Islamic missionaries arrived in 1995, amid turmoil caused by rebellion a year earlier by the mostly Maya Zapatista National Liberation Army.