PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN WESTLAKE

Measured by the numbers, last October's bombings in Bali, which claimed 202 lives, were catastrophic. Yet terror seeks not only to kill but also to divide, to turn people against one another based, in this case, on their religious beliefs. Resisting the pressure to abandon tolerant humanism for puritanical dogma requires great strength. But to hold a community together, to heal it? Only a heroic effort will suffice.

When Haji Agus Bambang Priyanto heard the first explosion in Kuta, he rushed to the scene. As the town's traffic chief and a man who prepares corpses for burial at his local mosque, he felt he could offer needed skills. And as a Muslim native to an island where majority Hindus and minority Muslims live and work together, he wanted to help. He found chaos. Fires still burned, bodies littered the ground, and the injured wailed in pain. "People were standing like deer in the headlights," says Wayan Juniarta, the Jakarta Post's Bali correspondent. "Haji Bambang plunged right in." He established access routes for ambulances and enlisted an Islamic community group to search for survivors. He collected sheets to wrap bodies pulled from the wreckage, trying to keep them from falling apart in his hands. All this, says General I Made Mangku Pastika, who headed the subsequent police investigation, "without being asked and without expecting anything in return." At dawn, using newspaper as a prayer mat, Haji Bambang prayed that the dead would be welcomed into the afterlife by their own gods.

As traumatic as the event itself was the discovery that the perpetrators—Jemaah Islamiah extremists—were Muslim. "I couldn't understand why anyone would do this or how they could do it in the name of Islam," he says. In his mind, they are cowards representative of a small group of zealots, not a religion. Since that night, Haji Bambang and other community leaders have worked to ensure that their island remains a place of harmony. As the Muslim delegate to the Forum for Harmonious Religious Relations, he regularly meets with Hindus, Christians and Buddhists to discuss and promote interfaith cooperation. This is Haji Bambang's "counterterrorism" effort, inspired by a gentle heart that was strong enough to survive a hellacious assault.

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