Indonesia's pesantren schools have been accused of breeding JI terrorists. Matthew Moore and Karuni Rompies talk to teachers and pupils and find deep suspicion of the West.
Across Java next month, Indonesian academics and Islamic teachers plan to lecture small groups of students on a subject that's never been part of their curriculum: anti-terrorism. Each of this first group of week-long workshops, to be held in Java's three provinces, hopes to attract about 50 students who will be picked from a cluster of Indonesia's vast array of 14,000 pesantren or Islamic boarding schools.
Most pesantren students will never be invited to these workshops; they study in mainstream schools run by Indonesia's two big Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, long known for their moderate views and outspoken in their condemnation of terrorist attacks.
Under the plan, co-ordinated by the Indonesian Government with funding from the United States, the invitees will come from a group of 141 schools selected because of their supposed sympathy with the views of Jemaah Islamiah, the South-East Asian group blamed for a host of bombings including Bali.
The program is an ambitious, long-term attempt to try to cut off the supply of young men who might sympathise with JI's stated aim of mounting a jihad against the West to create an Islamic Asian state.
According to one of those involved, who did not want to be named, the program hopes to build a communication network of students from these pesantrens who will eventually become "frontliners in moderating the radical influence".
The idea will be implemented nearly a year after the Bali bombings and long after the arrests in Indonesia of more than 90 people accused of involvement with JI. There's no doubt that since then the country has changed a great deal in its attitude to terrorism. It has passed anti-terrorist laws and used them to arrest and prosecute the Bali bombers while co-operating with foreign countries to track and arrest JI members.
For most of this year, the reports of their trials in Denpasar have provided a daily insight to Indonesians of how JI has operated in their country. One effect of this has been the disappearance from the mass media of most of the wild conspiracy theories on who was behind the Bali bombings that appeared in the weeks after the blast.
But a visit to several pesantrens in central Java showed such theories are flourishing, undisturbed by the evidence in Bali or more recent bombings such as that of Jakarta's Marriott Hotel.
In his turquoise shirt and black business trousers, the deputy head of the Ibnul Qoyim pesantren in Yogyakarta, Aceng Mustofa, looks like he could be running a music store in the city famous as Indonesia's cultural capital. Instead he runs the girls' campus where children from the age of 13 study subjects including Arabic and English, even when fasting two days a week – all part of the training he hopes will equip them for lives to be spent as preachers scattered through the country's tiny villages, where most of the population lives.
Unlike some pesantrens, he encourages students to keep up with current events and newspapers are hung in display cases in the playground for them to read. The news from the Bali trials, though, has done little to influence his thinking about who was responsible.
"They were organised by the US to corner Muslims," was his blunt answer when asked to nominate who was behind the bombings. He remains just as certain when asked for the reasons why the US would carry out such an act.
"They want to corner Muslims because the ultimate goal is to colonise Indonesia, at least to colonise the country's ideology." He cited the US support for human rights as evidence of how its ideology was undermining his work. Asked for an example, he said this philosophy had helped pornography to flourish in Indonesia. "People say you cannot stop me reading it because it's my human rights." Aceng admitted he had no evidence of US involvement in the Bali attack, which he conceded was carried out by Amrozi, Imam Samudra and the others police had charged. But he was adamant they could not have worked alone. "They are criminals working with the US." He did not sympathise with the actions of these bombers although he thought plenty of his countrymen did.
"I think there are lots of Indonesians who sympathise with them ... they see them as fighters, as heroes." His school was nominated this week as being one of a small group of pesantrens that "propagate JI teachings, provide religious and occasionally military training to recruits and shelter members and fellow-travellers who are in transit or are seeking refuge from the law." According to a report by a Brussels-based think tank, the International Crisis Group (ICG), a JI figure called Herlambang hid his brother's wife and child at the Ibnul Qoyim school when police were trying to find his brother.
Aceng denied this report and said it was "impossible to use this place to hide".
Down the road at the school's campus for boys, the headmaster, Rohadi Agus Salim, also denied harbouring anyone running from the police or having any connection with JI.
It's not difficult getting such denials but ascertaining the level of sympathy JI enjoys in such places is much harder. The teachers and students were open and friendly but adept at avoiding questions they didn't like.
"I don't know so I have no opinion," Rohadi said when asked for his views of JI's activities. "We live here every day, 24 hours a day, we have no idea of this underground movement, we don't know ... we are too busy to look." The only suggestion there might be a flicker of interest in what was happening outside their school was a sign on a noticeboard for newspaper cuttings which reads: "Islamic World Fighting News".
There are similar views at the pesantren Dar us-Syahadah about 40 minutes' drive from the central Java town of Solo. This is a new pesantren, nestled into the side of a hill called Honey Mountain, opened in the mid-1990s and included in the ICG report's list of four schools that make up an "Ivy League" where JI members send their own children.
It provides a fairly narrow education of biology, sociology and English, with most emphasis on religious training and Arabic, the language used on the public address system. Boys caught conversing in Indonesian risk having their heads shaved. A cryptic sign in English hangs in a tree: "The Time is Sword".
Muhammed Ali, 19, has been at the school for four years and has just been given some work as a teacher. His father sent him there because he was a "bad boy", he said, listening to pop music bands such as the Spice Girls and Boyzone, which diverted him from religion. Since he's been at the school, he's learnt his father was right. "It's no good for you [pop music]; it's like a disease; you cannot pray," he said.
With newspapers and television banned at the school, he said he had little idea of JI or its bombings but said the school and its headmaster had no connection to the group. But he had met the man police allege is the spiritual leader of JI, Abu Bakar Bashir, and he was certain he was a good man who could not be JI's leader. "His speaking makes people love him," he said.
The deputy headmaster, Muhammed Imron, said the school had no connection with JI or with Abu Bakar Bashir, who he said had visited the school only once. He was reluctant to discuss in other than philosophical terms the Bali bombings or other attacks blamed on JI. "We just concentrate on what we are doing here. If something out there happens ... Islam loves peace. It does not promote violence." He understands the word jihad to mean serious study rather than the holy war meaning more commonly attributed to it.
Although it is only a new school, it has a new mosque and several new dormitory buildings which could never be paid for by the $25 monthly fees – which include all meals. The money for these new buildings and for the land comes from the Yasmin foundation, according to the school's headmaster, Mustaqim.
The school provided us with a number for the Yasmin foundation to get an explanation of where the money comes from. However when the Herald rang the number, a voice said we had rung the school and they were unable to provide other contact details.
We then visited the address listed in the phone directory. A woman who answered the door at first denied all knowledge of the foundation then said it was located near Abu Bakar's school in Ngruki.
Her husband Budi subsequently admitted he had an aerial on the roof that somehow allows a wireless connection to a telephone in a house occupied by a man called Yadi, who is connected with the foundation through his friendship with Heru Priyono, who heads the Yasmin foundation.
While Budi said he had been letting the foundation use his aerial and his address for three years, he had no idea where Yadi was or how to contact him.
The local community leader, Jopo Bagus, is deeply suspicious of the household. He wonders why Budi's wife covers everything but her eyes when she comes out of the house, highly unusual among Indonesian Muslims. And he wonders why the household has never mixed with the community in the 13 years they have been there. "It's an unusual form of Islam," he said.