When Ali Gufron set out from Tenggulun to look for work in Malaysia in the early 1980s, he left behind a village that seems to define backwater: dusty streets, wooden shacks, and residents who spend their days coaxing rice and corn from the parched soil.

Now, this tiny town of 2,000 has been thrust into the spotlight by Mr. Gufron and two of his younger brothers - key operatives in the October Bali terrorist act.

One of the brothers, Ali Imron, was arrested last week as he sought to flee across the Indonesian-Malaysian border. Mr. Imron has since told the Indonesian police the he was the driver of the minivan that carried the larger of the two bombs that ripped through Sari Club and Paddy's Bar, claiming 192 lives.

At first glance, this sleepy town seems a largely irrelevant footnote to the tragedy - after all, the plotters had to come from somewhere. But Tenggulun's story shows how and why militant Islam has spread in Indonesia, particularly in the past 20 years.

A religious dispute in this overlooked community is being repeated in dozens of villages across the world's most populous Muslim nation. It will be as important in establishing the future of Islam, analysts say, as the actions of politicians and intellectuals in big cities.

On one side of the religious struggle are the majority of Indonesian Muslims, traditionalists who have long blended local beliefs with Islamic doctrine and tend to be tolerant of other religions. On the other, is a growing militant minority like Mr. Gufron and his brothers, who look to the austere Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia, emphasizing their ties to the Arab world and "legitimate" Islam and dismissing traditional practice as backward and superstitious.

"We should not hesitate to recognize the potential for the radicalization of Indonesian Islam," says Azyumardi Azra, the rector of Indonesian National Islamic University in Jakarta.

Gufron, who Indonesian police allege was the "field commander" for the Bali attack, and his family have been working hard to radicalize their hometown for much of the past two decades, say Tenggulun residents and Indonesian investigators. "They stopped mixing with other people in the village - they became really pushy about their religious views," says Padrun, a farmer in a porkpie hat cutting bamboo. Like many Indonesians, he has only one name.

Maskun, Tenggulun's village head and a traditional healer who mixes herbal medicine with mysticism, says that probably 10 percent of the village shares the Gufron family's beliefs. But that's up from hardly any in the 1970s.

Maskun says the changes began with a wave of young men, including Gufron, who left the village for Malaysia 20 years ago, mostly in search of economic opportunity.

But Gufron, whom neighbors describe as a "strict" Muslim even as a boy, found more than a job in Malaysia. After a few years there, he sought out an Islamic school in Sungei Tiram, started by two Indonesian preachers who fled their homeland after convictions for militant activity in support of an Islamic state - and found a vocation. Gufron quickly became a confident of the school's founders.

The exiles were Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir. Gufron knew of them because he'd attended Al Mukmin, an Islamic boarding school in Solo, Central Java, that also had been founded by the two preachers to teach Wahhabi Islam.

The elderly Mr. Sungkar died in 1999. Mr. Bashir is currently under Indonesian police custody. He returned to Indonesia in 1999 as the alleged religious leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which has ties to Al Qaeda and seeks a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia. Police this week asked prosecutors to charge him with treason for his role in church bombings two years ago.

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