Indonesia's Abu Bakar Bashir is a soft-spoken, smiling Muslim preacher who provokes anger in the West for his alleged terrorist links but lacks strong influence at home, analysts say.
Bashir, 66, is to hear a court verdict after a trial in which prosecutors accused him of leading the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group linked to a series of deadly bombings in recent years.
"I don't think he's that influential in Indonesia generally," said Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia project director for the International Crisis Group of political analysts.
She described Bashir, always dressed in a white robe and shawl, a white skullcap and glasses, as "very business-like, outgoing, gregarious." He is a radical preacher filled with extreme anger at the West but with a down-to-earth attitude, said Jones, who has extensively researched JI.
"This is not a person that gives a sense of being in a spiritual dreamworld," she said from Singapore.
Pressure from the West and intense media scrutiny since his arrest in late 2002 has made Bashir "into a martyr," she said. "He's become far more important since his arrest than he was before it," said Jones.
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 after police arrested him.
But even within JI, Bashir only has a certain amount of influence within a faction of the organization and played an active role as JI leader only from late 1999 until April 2002, Jones said.
Since 2000 he had been devoting more and more time to the Indonesian Mujahideen Council, an umbrella group which he heads and which seeks Islamic sharia law, Jones said. She is not sure why his interest shifted toward the Mujahideen Council.
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.
"He was always a sidekick to his partner Sungkar," Jones said. Sungkar died in 1999, a year after Bashir and several other members of his Ngruki network returned to Indonesia following Suharto's downfall.
Bashir, arrested one week after the October 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people and 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.
His youngest son Abdul Rohim, 26, has been mentioned by convicted militant Rusman Gunawan – the younger brother of reputed top JI leader Hambali – as the head of the Al-Ghuraba student group in Pakistan. Indonesian prosecutors have alleged that the Al-Qaeda-linked group consisted of Jemaah Islamiyah cadres seconded to Gunawan to be trained as militants. Rohim remains free and has been seen attending his father's court sessions.
Bashir has urged his followers to remain calm and polite during the 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.
Bashir has admiringly described Osama bin Laden as a "true Muslim fighter" but has always denied he himself is linked to terrorism.