London, Jan 8 (IRNA) The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) has pledged that Scotland will get its first state-funded Muslim school if it wins power in May's parliamentary elections.

SNP leader Alex Salmond said he will instruct Glasgow council, the local authority covering Scotland's biggest Muslim communities, to ensure that demands from Muslim parents for faith schools are met.

"We must listen to representations from within the Muslim community, in particular, and make a full assessment of the demand for Muslim schools," Salmond said.

Further support was offered in the north-east Scottish city of Dundee, where the country's only private Muslim school was recently forced to close.

The city council's education convener Kevin Keenan told Dundee's Courier newspaper Monday that said he shared "fairly similar views" to the SNP leader.

"I can't comment on exactly how successful a Muslim state school would be but I daresay it would be welcomed in the city," Keenan said.

There has been a growing campaign in Scotland, where there are some 50,000 Muslims, to follows the example of England, where more than a handful of Muslim schools have received approval for state funding since Labour came to power in 1991.

Of Scotland's 2,769 state-funded schools, 401 are Roman Catholic, one is Jewish and four are Episcopalian and in an interview with the Sunday Times, Salmond pledged to extend the right to denominational education to other faiths.

"We already have the good example of the success of Scotland's Catholic schools and our successful Jewish school. My experience, strengthened by speaking to people around Scotland, is that our diversity as a nation is also one of our strengths," he said.

Last July, the SNP pledged that the Scottish parliament would have its first Muslim member after selecting Bashir Ahmad as its second top candidate in Glasgow for May's elections.

The nationalist party is forecast to challenge Labour's control of the 127-member Scottish parliament with opinion polls suggested that it could win an extra 10 seats.