``Anyone who offers prayers five times a day cannot be bad. Besides imams have lot of spare time and it is one way of using their underutilised manpower,'' Islam said.

With financial support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the IMM has begun training imams to impart anti-HIV instruction, along with routine sermons and ministrations, to the million-strong faithful in this country.

The project has the blessings of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed although she and her Awami League party profess secularism and regard religious orthodoxy as a creation of the country's past military dictators.

``They (military regimes between 1974 and 1996) rehabilitatedfundamentalistic groups in order to establish political power -- it is now a serious problem,'' Hasina told visiting foreign journalists last week.

But Hasina said she could see no reason why the country's 2,00,000 imams should not do their bit for a new drive to create awareness against HIV using their influential religious platform.

The IMM is currently training its fourth batch of 50 imams and plans to train up another 15 as part of a larger programme to give basic medical training to religious leaders enabling them to act as ``barefoot doctors.''

Training imams, who are a law unto themselves in this country is no mean task, says Dr Halida Khandaker, one of the trainers. ``Talking about sex is taboo to them and they find it embarrassing to discuss the details of HIV transmission,'' she says.

Khandaker who is the director of Confidential Approach to AIDS Prevention (CAAP) a non-governmental organisation, said typically she found each new batch reacting rigidly at first but then easing up by the endof the three-day course.

``The imams harbour many misconceptions. They say that homosexuality is sin. And many did not want to believe that HIV existed in the Arab countries (regarded as holy lands),'' Khandaker says.

Bangladesh has only 102 known cases of HIV but most of these were acquired and even detected in West Asia, says Professor Nazrul Islam, head of Virology at the Bangabandhu Medical University here.

Typical is the case of 20-year-old Mukti, one of his patients who acquired HIV in Bahrain and was deported to Bangladesh after she tested positive during a routine medical examination.

Last month, Mukti became the best known HIV case in the country when she addressed a meeting jointly organised by the Foreign Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and UNAIDS. Labour export is a major dollar-earner for cash-starved Bangladesh which sends some 2,00,000 of its citizens abroad each year -- mainly to do menial and unskilled jobs in oil-rich West Asia.

Women who go to the Arab countriesseeking employment risk sexual exploitation. Earlier this year the government banned the export of nurses but later lifted it because of unemployment and hardships at home.

As for male expatriates, they compensate for prolonged absences from home by turning to commercial sex workers (CSWs) or taking to homosexual practices.

``I tell men who go to the Arab countries not to have sex with prostitutes and to avoid homosexual acts,'' said Md Amirul Islam, the imam of a mosque in Manikgang district, 80 km from Dhaka.

IMM's Islam is convinced that the spread of HIV around the world is the result of people going astray from religion and morality. ``By spreading the teachings of Islam, imams automatically help AIDS prevention because in Islam there is no afterworld for those who indulge in extramarital sex,'' he said.

According to him the concept of perdition in Islam actually helps. ``The aim is to draw a dangerous picture of AIDS that it invariably leads to death.''

The imams do not directly promote theuse of condoms but advocate its use by married couples where one of the partners is suffering from a venereal disease.