Ba'asyir: Reviled by some, revered by others

Ba'asyir: Reviled by some, revered by others

Abu Bakar Ba'asyir is a soft-spoken, smiling Muslim preacher
reviled in the West for his alleged terrorist links but revered
by his small group of followers as a defender of Islam.

Ba'asyir, 66, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison
Thursday after a Jakarta court found him guilty of involvement in
a "sinister conspiracy" that led to the 2002 Bali bombings which
killed 202 people.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer once called
Ba'asyir a "loathsome creature" while an Indonesian Islamic
magazine named Ba'asyir its "Man of the Year" in 2002.

"Ba'asyir is a person we should look up to," Sabili magazine
said in its editorial of the man who admiringly describes Al
Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden as a "true Muslim fighter."

Always dressed in a white robe and shawl, a white skullcap and
glasses, Ba'asyir is "very business-like, outgoing, gregarious,"
said Sidney Jones, who has extensively researched the Jamaah
Islamiyah extremist network which Ba'asyir was accused of leading.
He is a radical preacher filled with extreme anger at the West
but with a down-to-earth attitude, said Jones.

"This is not a person that gives a sense of being in a
spiritual dreamworld," she said from Singapore.

Married to housewife Aisyah Baraja, Ba'asyir has two adult sons
and a grown-up daughter.

In the early 1960s he was active in several Islamic student
organisations at Al-Irsyad University in his home town of Solo in
Central Java, before founding in 1972 the Al Mukmin Muslim
boarding school at nearby Ngruki.

He and his close friend Abdullah Sungkar, both of Yemeni
descent, were jailed by the Soeharto regime from 1978 to 1982 for
inciting people to reject the secular national ideology in favour
of an Islamic state.

They fled to Malaysia in 1985 when the Supreme Court granted a
prosecution appeal for a longer sentence. It was there, according
to prosecutors, that they officially founded JI in 1993.

Sungkar died in 1999, a year after Ba'asyir and several other
members of his Ngruki network returned to Indonesia following
Soeharto's downfall.

From 2000 he devoted more and more time to the Indonesian
Mujahideen Council, an umbrella group which he heads and which
seeks Islamic sharia law, said Jones, who does not regard Bashir
as influential in Indonesia generally.

Ba'asyir, arrested one week after the Bali bombings which
authorities blamed on JI, was later tried for alleged links to
bombings and convicted of treason.

Higher courts overturned the conviction and he served time
only for immigration offences before being re-arrested as he
stepped out of prison in April 2004.

Ba'asyir urged his followers to remain calm and polite during
his just-concluded trial.

But he maintains that U.S. President George W. Bush, "the
enemy of Allah," has pressured Indonesia to incarcerate him to
prevent his campaigning for Islamic law.