Abu Bakar Ba'asyir at the center of controversy
Blontank Poer, The Jakarta Post, Surakarta
Forcing the religious conversion of a state and government and justifying any means to carry that out. This appears to be the stigma Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir bears following the Bali bomb blasts that killed 202 people on Oct. 12 last year.
And so Ba'asyir and his Pondok Pesantren Al Mukmin (Islamic boarding school) in Ngruki village south of Surakarta have become part of the picture of today's international terrorist networks.
His deep knowledge of religion, however, has preserved his composure. It is this imperturbable attitude that has triggered speculation about Ba'asyir's being the key figure with a cunning, elusive role in the movement to establish Islamic leadership.
Police have detained him since November last year. They have charged him with involvement in a series of church bombings on Christmas Eve in 2000, and a plot to assassinate then vice president Megawati Soekarnoputri.
Although not yet a suspect in the Bali bombing case, police believe he took part in meetings to plan the attack.
Nearly all the Bali bombing suspects have admitted to knowing him, and some said Ba'asyir was present at the planning meetings.
But these accusations have been met with skepticism by those in Ba'asyir's inner circle, those who claim to know him best.
Strangely enough though, one person who has come to his defense is a convicted terrorist. Once a student of Ba'asyir, his name is Muhammad Achwan. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for blowing up a church in the East Java town of Malang in 1985, until he received clemency from then president B.J. Habibie and was released in 1999.
Achwan believes that "other parties" planned the terrorist moves to intentionally discredit the founder and leader of the Al Mukmin pesantren.
The likely parties, the erstwhile bomber opined, were highly militant and zealous Muslims striving to set up a sharia-based state and government.
They along with their collaborators, military intelligence operatives working within the government, were the real culprits of the Bali bombing.
"Ustad (teacher) Abu is a moderate figure and tolerant of differences," Achwan said.
That's why he attempts to apply the sharia in Indonesia peacefully and openly through the founding of Majelis Mujahidin (Islamic defenders assembly). As an amirul mukminin (caliph), he forbids his followers from committing violence that causes the innocent to suffer," he explained.
Ba'asyir himself meanwhile chooses to remain silent instead of debating it all through the mass media.
"He has repeatedly declared he will not be disturbed by worldly threats as long as his life is not endangered. To him, being patient with other people's improper treatment is rewarding," he added
The only flaw by which to corner the Al Mukmin leader is, in his view, Ba'asyir's association with a co-founder of the pesantren (Islamic boarding school), the late Abdullah Sungkar, in opposing the sole state philosophy of Pancasila in the 1980s.
As Sungkar appealed to his supporters not to vote in the 1977 elections, both had to face Soeharto's New Order regime and flee to Malaysia, where they continued their campaigns against Soeharto.
Though Soeharto was their common political opponent, Ba'asyir and Sungkar had different styles of leadership.
While the former was known for his gentleness and patience, the latter was a rigid and more radical figure, fighting frontally against Soeharto by training troops, so that followers of the Abdullah Sungkar became quite militant.
Muhammad Nursalim, a former pesantren student at Ngruki and now an official in the Sragen regency religious affairs office, described Sungkar's struggle in his master's degree thesis at Muhammadiyah University, Surakarta, entitled "The Abdullah Sungkar faction and NII (Indonesian Islamic State) in the New Order period".
He maintained that Sungkar built his self-styled network after he quit NII.
Sungkar called his group Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), which provided religious teaching to form militant platoons of Muslims as well as to apply training methods to build paramilitary forces.
JI candidates had to undergo tough phases of selection including physical drills in martial arts and firearm uses.
When Sungkar died on Oct. 24, 1999, at least 5,000 of his supporters had been given military training by joining actual battles in Mindanao, Southern Philippines, and Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, but the exact number of his men was not known.
The high militancy and total obedience demanded by Sungkar reportedly made his group members less inclined to follow Ba'asyir's style of leadership, yet the possibility of conflict between both factions has remained obscure.
An ex-member of the Jihad Command in East Java told The Jakarta Post on condition of anonymity that Ba'asyir compromised too much with the Indonesian government, and his relatively tolerant interpretation of sharia, applied through Majelis Mujahidin, was a big mistake.
"One of the principle tactics of Sungkar's organization was underground struggle, which prohibited open identities," said source who was also New Order regime's political fugitive.
He added that therefore, nobody knew for certain the exact strength of Sungkar's forces both at home, in Malaysia and other countries.
Such developments may have led most of the JI platoons to refuse to join Ba'asyir after the death of Sungkar.
The same source pointed out that Ba'asyir failed to meet two of the seven requirements demanded, specifically battlefield experience and preparedness to launch covert operations to bring down the secular government.
When asked to confirm Ba'asyir's model of struggle, Muhammad Achwan, who would accompany his mentor on visits to East Java, only briefly commented: "Abu has indeed preferred open popularization of the sharia over a secretive operation, while providing political education."
This East Java Majelis Mujahidin devotee admitted that before the Bali terrorist attack, Ba'asyir had asked him to approach a radical band suspected of planning violent acts, which met 11 times from the end of August to the end of September among others in Surabaya, Lamongan and Mojokerto, all in Java.
But all attempts to prevent such acts were to no avail.
According to Achwan, Ba'asyir was convinced that an armed movement was impossible under current circumstances, and his stance even strengthened when the foreign mass media launched massive reports on the linkage between JI and the al-Qaeda network as indicated in the confession of al-Qaeda operative Omar al-Faruq.
"If this method is adopted, the American and Indonesian governments will further impose pressure on the growing Islamic movement," cautioned Achwan, referring to the issuance of the government antiterror laws as an example.
Even in Surakarta, where Sungkar built his political career, his men are small in number. "To my knowledge, those who are real followers of Ustad Sungkar number less than ten," said M. Rodli, former chairman of the city's Justice Party branch, who has conducted investigations and advocated on Ba'asyir's behalf.
Despite their respect for Ba'asyir as an elder, according to Rodli, they have little, if any, loyalty or obedience toward Ba'asyir, who in the thesis on the Sungkar faction was mentioned as the author of Tarbiyah Islamiyah, a mandatory book in the institution jointly developed with Sungkar.
Ba'asyir's moderate attitude once even surprised Islamic groups in Surakarta. When the reform faction in the city council invited him as a resource person in a discussion to draft a regional regulation on the distribution of liquor in 2000, the three-party faction firmly rejected the unregulated sale of alcohol, and expected his blessing.
To the councillors' consternation, the Al Mukmin leader voiced his tolerance of alcohol distribution as long as no vendors were allowed to sell near schools or places of worship, while signs reading "Muslims prohibited" were required at each place where it would be sold.
More shockingly, Ba'asyir also criticized and rejected acts of vandalism of food stalls which also sold beer. For what reason? "Because most of the sellers are economically weak," he stressed.