JAKARTA - Abu Bakar Bashir is a soft-spoken, smiling Indonesian Muslim preacher reviled in the West for his alleged terrorist links but revered by his small group of followers as a defender of Islam.
Bashir, 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 Bashir a "loathsome creature" while an Indonesian Islamic magazine named Bashir its "Man of the Year" in 2002.
"Bashir 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, Bashir is "very business-like, outgoing, gregarious," said Sidney Jones, who has extensively researched the Jemaah Islamiyah extremist network which Bashir 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, Bashir 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 Suharto 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 Bashir and several other members of his Ngruki network returned to Indonesia following Suharto`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.
Bashir, 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.
Bashir urged his followers to remain calm and polite during his just-concluded trial.
But he maintains that US President George W. Bush, "the enemy of Allah," has pressured Indonesia to incarcerate him to prevent his campaigning for Islamic law.
03/03/2005 06:34 GMT