It is visiting hour at Jakarta's Cipinang Prison and its most famous inmate, the Muslim preacher Abubakar Baasyir, sits on a bench surrounded by acolytes, assistants and lawyers. Several prisoners attend to him, including a confessed terrorist who has become the cleric's servant and coordinates a team of six to wash his clothes and cook his meals.

Friends, family members and supporters visit nearly every day. They give messages to the cleric and take directions from him to his followers on the outside. Prison officials allow Baasyir to teach a class on Islam to fellow inmates four times a week; about 100 prisoners attend each session.

Baasyir is holding court in prison instead of his home or office because Indonesian prosecutors have accused him of being the emir of the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). A 65-page indictment alleges that he was involved in "planning and/or encouraging other people to commit terrorism" including the 2003 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, where 12 people were killed, and the 2002 bombing of a resort in Bali, where 202 people were killed. A court cleared Baasyir in the Marriott attack and found him guilty of approving of (but not of ordering) the Bali bombings.

For the international community, the case is a litmus test of the Indonesian government's resolve in the war on terrorism. Despite the severity of the charges, Baasyir received only a 30-month sentence.

But for me, Baasyir's case poses a different question. That's because he was a co-founder of the Islamic boarding school, Al Mukmin Ngruki, where I spent six years. While I chose a career in journalism, many of my fellow students chose differently. Dozens of Ngruki's alumni have been accused of taking part in a wave of terrorist attacks against Westerners in Indonesia. Security analysts and police investigators believe the link is no coincidence. Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group has called my alma mater an "Ivy League" for Jemaah Islamiyah recruits.

Why did so many of my fellow students end up choosing terrorism while I ended up writing about them?

To begin to answer that question, I decided to meet Abubakar Baasyir in jail. In his mid-60s, he wore a white shirt and worn eyeglasses; a white box cap was perched on his head.

Baasyir, who proclaims himself an admirer of Osama bin Laden but denies being a terrorist leader, said he is just a victim of "the infidel Bush's America." Then he quoted a verse from the Koran: "The infidels will never stop fighting us until we follow their way."

I know that verse by heart. We learned it in school.

In some ways it's no surprise I didn't follow a path toward Islamic extremism. My father, a parole officer, sent me to the school in 1985 when I was 12. Only later did he tell me that he did so to get an inside look at the place because so many of his cases were Islamic militants who had studied there before landing in prison. "It made it easy for me to come and observe the school," he explained.

Moreover, I came from a secular family with a diverse background. My mother came from a strong Javanese family. My father is a Muslim who from age 9 was raised by an uncle who had married into a Catholic family.

Still, it was hard to avoid being swept up in the spirit of Ngruki, one of thousands of Islamic boarding schools around the country. The only music we heard was nasyid, Arabic religious songs, from school loudspeakers. On the dormitory wall hung Arabic calligraphies. One said: "Die as a noble man or die as a martyr."

The dorm's head boy, three years older than I, introduced himself as Fadlullah Hasan. He had a blue bruise on his forehead from bowing to pray five times a day. Like me, he came from the city of Yogyakarta and we grew quite close.

Even at 15, he was zealous. He always got up earlier than the rest of us; after prayers in the mosque, he would lead us in reading the Koran and then encourage us further, back in our rooms. In his speeches, he said that when we graduated we must bring other people to "true" Islam.

Hasan was gregarious and smart. His classmates would come to ask him questions. Among them were Fathur Rohman Al Ghozie, a JI member who later died in the Philippines, and Aris Munandar, who was later alleged to be a JI fund-raiser and who is still at large.

After two months, I realized Hasan was an alias. His real name is Utomo Pamungkas. It is a school tradition to change student names that are not considered Islamic. The student may choose, usually the name of one of the prophet's friends or one of God's 99 names.

Ngruki encouraged anti-Semitism. On Thursday nights, students practiced public speaking. Their favorite topic would be "Islam under threat," typically quoting the verse of the Koran that says the infidels and Jews will never stop fighting us until we follow their religion. When I was 15, it was my favorite topic too.

The teachers campaigned for an Islamic state and implementation of Islamic law. "Indonesia is still under secular law," they would say. "Therefore there is no obligation for us to obey Indonesian law." They quoted the Koran: "Whoever does not follow God's law is an infidel."

One teacher explained to a group of graduating students, including me, about the importance of togetherness among Muslims. "A Muslim must be in an Islamic group called Darul Islam," he said, a clandestine movement devoted to establishing an Islamic state. Later, sitting on a green carpet in his poorly lit house, he recited an oath, which I repeated. I was 18. After graduation, some Darul members asked me to donate 2.5 percent of my earnings and attend meetings to deepen my knowledge of Islam, but I drifted away.

Given this background, it's a wonder that more of us didn't turn to extremism. I'm a Muslim who prays five times a day, reads the Koran and hopes to visit Mecca. But I've also worked for the American media, hosted Jewish friends in my home and spent Friday nights in bars having drinks.

Most of my fellow alumni are more or less like me. They are successful in the secular world. They must realize that some of the school's teachings are unrealistic. To survive, we must work and interact with people who don't share our ideas, and acknowledge a pluralism in our daily lives that is not consistent with a strict interpretation of Islam. Of the 88 percent of Indonesians who are Muslim, most lead secular lives.

But some of my fellow alumni, according to recent interviews I conducted with those detained by the Jakarta police, had a different sort of post-graduate education. They went to military training camps, either Dar Al Ittihad Al Islamy in Afghanistan or Camp Hudaibiyah in the Philippines, as part of a Jemaah Islamiyah program to prepare as many young people as possible for jihadi operations. They didn't mingle with people who didn't share their ideas. Most worked for themselves as entrepreneurs selling sandals or clothes, or running small cafeterias.

Fifteen years after graduating from Ngruki, I met again with my dorm mate Hasan — this time in the Jakarta police jail in 2004. I was working for the media that he considers an extension of the infidels, while he was, and remains, behind bars for his alleged involvement in the Bali blast. Police say Hasan was the money man for the Bali bombers: Gold stolen from a bank was converted to cash and deposited in Hasan's bank account before being used by terrorists.

At first, Hasan was surprised to see me. I could tell he wanted to embrace me, but he hesitated after learning that I was working for The Washington Post. Only after a number of meetings could we communicate normally.

Hasan's peasant father sent him to Ngruki expecting him to become a religious teacher. "I have disappointed him," Hasan said during one of my visits. "Instead of being a religious teacher, I'm being a terrorist. Now I'm locked in here."

After graduating from Ngruki, he taught for a year but soon fell under the spell of Abdullah Sungkar, emir of JemaahIslamiyah, of which he quickly became a senior member. In 2000, Hasan said, he moved to an Islamic boarding school in East Java where he met all the perpetrators of the Bali bombings. Later, he went into hiding in Kalimantan, where the police caught up with him. Hasan talked about his wife and his two children who still live at the school. "Each time I remember them, I feel so sad," he said.

Hasan isn't alone in police detention. Other Ngruki alumni include Muhammad Saefudin and Muhammad Rais, who met with bin Laden in Afghanistan several times in 2001. Rais, who allegedly conveyed a bin Laden message to Baasyir, was arrested for storing explosive materials for the Marriott Hotel bombing; Saefudin was allegedly being groomed as the future JI leader.

For them, the world is divided clearly between good and evil, victim and oppressor. They believe God is on their side. "We saw many of my brothers in Islam killed brutally in Afghanistan and Moro, so it is our calling to destroy the enemy of Islam, all the infidels," Hasan said.

It was a calling some of us never heard.

Noor Huda Ismail, a research assistant for The Washington Post's Jakarta bureau from 2003 to 2004, is a research analyst at the Institute of Defence and Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His e-mail is noorhudaismail@yahoo.com