Like the madrasas in India and Pakistan, the Indonesian pesantrens – religious boarding schools, the local variant of the madrasa – have in recent years drawn some unfriendly attention due to suspicions of their involvement in radical and possibly terrorist activities. The Indonesian authorities did not appear to share those suspicions, certainly not concerning the pesantren in general, but those of the Philippines, Singapore, Australia and the US, as well as numerous international journalists have shown grave concern. This was mostly due to the fact that some highly visible terrorism suspects share a connection with one particular pesantren in Central Java, the PP (Pondok Pesantren) Al-Mukmin in Ngruki near Solo or with one of a small number of offshoots from this school. Ustad Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, who was one of the founders of this pesantren in the early 1960s, returned in 1999, after having spent fourteen years in Malaysian exile. He has been accused of being the spiritual leader of an underground movement known as Jama’ah Islamiyah, which is believed to be active throughout Muslim Southeast Asia and to have carried out a large number of terrorist acts in this region. Several of the perpetrators of the Bali bombing of 12 October 2002, which killed some two hundred people, were associated with a small pesantren in East Java where Ngruki graduates gave lessons; all of them held Ba’asyir in high regard as the most learned and disinterested of the ulama.

The links that this particular pesantren had to terrorist acts appeared, upon closer inspection, to be more tenuous than had been originally claimed. Furthermore, nothing could be more misleading than to extrapolate from ‘Ngruki’ to other Indonesian pesantrens. The PP Al-Mukmin and the handful of secondary pesantrens that it has spawned were established with the express purpose of constituting an alternative to the existing ‘traditional’ pesantrens; its founders were Muslim reformists highly critical of the pesantren tradition. The curriculum and the general culture of this pesantren make it stand out from the vast majority of pesantrens in Java and, for that matter, Southeast Asia as a whole.