saved them from the corruption of the racialist politics of Malaysia, the shabbiness of the money culture and easy Western imitation.” Anwar was then at the start of his career, directing a Muslim youth movement which had become a potent political force. He was an attractive man, Naipaul decided; “and it added to his attractiveness that in spite of his great local authority he gave the impression of a man still learning, still thinking things out.” The sketch of Anwar ends with Naipaul voicing regret that he did not have more time to talk with him. He wanted to travel with him, to see the country through his eyes, but there was no time.
I was also keen to speak with Anwar, who was still in prison during my first stay in Malaysia, and so it was Naipaul’s image of a politician in his ascendency that I held in mind until I met him on a second visit to KL, in the summer of 2005. His fall from power had been dramatic, the overturning of his sodomy conviction a triumph, his release from prison a promise—of what, no one could say. He and his wife were packing up their house in an upscale neighborhood, preparing to move to a new residence, and the furnishings gave the impression of a work in progress. In the front hallway, on a table by a mirror, was a vase of peacock’s feathers; the kilim in the next room was furled among cardboard boxes of books. Anwar served tea and chocolate cupcakes at the dining room table. Through a glass door I could see a guard on the patio performing his evening prayers, making prostrations in the shade.
“I went through the Riverside edition of Shakespeare four and a half times in prison,” said Anwar, his eyes full of mirth. “If they had kept me for another six months I would have finished it five times!”
He cut a regal figure in his brown jubah, betraying no signs of the abuse that he had suffered in prison or of the back surgery that he had undergone in Germany upon his release ten months before. His 1998 arrest, on charges of corruption and sodomy, was widely seen as politics run amok, his true crime having been to challenge the authority of Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, the country’s guiding force for over two decades. Mahathir had been Anwar’s patron, helping him rise through UNMO’s ranks, grooming him to be his successor, until the Asian financial crisis forced their differences in governing philosophies out into the open. How to solve what looked like the beginning of a global financial meltdown? Anwar favored the free market recommendations put forth by the International Monetary Fund, Mahathir imposed currency and capitol controls, and when Anwar promised to investigate corruption in the ruling party, Mahathir responded in kind. A book was published in KL, titled 50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister, which accused him of engaging in sexual misconduct with his former speechwriter and his adopted brother—allegations that led to their arrest, imprisonment, and forty lashes of the rattan cane. Anwar was arrested on the strength of their confessions, later recanted, and tens of thousands of his supporters took to the streets in protest; his conviction was an occasion of national disillusionment and international outrage.
During his first six months in prison, when the guards abused him daily and he was not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio, Anwar established a routine to preserve his sanity, rising at five in the morning to perform his prayers, after which he would take breakfast, exercise, and read until dark. (Soon after his release from prison, at a conference of Muslim scholars in Istanbul, he rattled off the titles of several books, and then, fearing that he might sound pretentious, noted his special credentials: six years in solitary confinement. He advised the scholars to consider a stint in prison, if they wanted to get some reading done!) His favorite play, of course, was Hamlet, though he also loved The Tempest. Like the young prince, he had broken with a corrupt father figure, Mahathir; like Prospero, he had bid farewell to his audience, the Malaysian body politic, over which he had all but reigned for sixteen years. Now he was about to go to Australia to lecture on what he had learned from Shakespeare, notably the virtue of humility, and he was quick to acknowledge limits in his ability to understand others. If policy makers started from that premise, he said, they might have more sympathy for the Other.
“The problem,” he said, “is that because the focus is on the Middle East we have no other lens through which to view our divisions.”
Hence the need for a new vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which for Muslims was the primary issue—a fact that American policy makers ignored at their peril. He counseled the White House to play the role of honest broker in the region, engaging ally and enemy alike to resolve not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to bring to an end the Iraq War, which enraged Muslims the world over; against the infamous “axis of evil” invoked by George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, which singled out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for their defiance of the international community, Anwar called for an “axis of engagement” with Iraq’s neighbors—Syria, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan—in the common cause of peace.
But there was no sign of the White House removing its blinders about the failures of its policies in the region, said Anwar—which surprised him. He expected dictators to be in a state of denial, not American political leaders.
“Until you accept facts as they are,” he said, “there will only be death, not just to Americans but to Iraqis. If you continue to reject facts, then the policy will be flawed.”
Against this shortsightedness he set the wisdom of the Bard, who delighted and instructed him in his darkest moments, above all on the meaning of free will. For what prison taught Anwar to value most was freedom. The dehumanization of the individual, the systemic degradation of innocent men and women, the regimen of terror—these were the costs of Malaysia becoming a prison, he said, and vowed to liberate his countrymen. Unlike Hamlet, he seemed capable of acting on his beliefs, chief among them that Islamic governments had to carve out more space for freedom.
It was true that in drawing up UNMO’s Islamic agenda he and Mahathir had been inspired by the Iranian Revolution (among other things, as minister of education, Anwar had banned the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses). But it was also true that Anwar hoped to create a Southeast Asian model for Islamic governance in keeping with the more tolerant interpretation of the faith introduced by the Sufi traders. We were speaking on the first anniversary of the Muslim terrorist bombings in London, which had killed more than fifty people—continuing proof of the crisis in modern Islam, according to Anwar. He insisted that radical Islam bore no relation to the teachings of the Prophet, to the traditions of tolerance and learning and love, to the interior journeys undertaken by the Sufis who had brought from Arab lands the message to surrender to Allah. And he had taken a leading role in articulating a moderate vision of his faith.
“Who Hijacked Islam?”—this was the title of a well-known essay that he wrote in his prison cell just after 9/11 and published in Time. Islamic civilization, he argued, was forged in part by wealthy men who supported universities and hospitals and by princes who patronized scientists, philosophers, and writers. And it was despair at the futility of political struggle in autocratic Islamic countries that drove Osama bin Laden to use his personal fortune “to wreak destruction rather than promote creation.” Anwar believed that the project of modernity had suffered in Muslim countries because of its complicity with illegitimate power: “The great suspicion of modernity by Muslims is often because it came without liberty,” he said in a lecture at Oxford; “it came with exploitation and brutal oppression first with colonialism, and later with indigenous military or civilian authoritarianism.” Where the state maintained total control, blocking the development of a civic space in which to work out a different destiny for the ulama, the community of the faithful, there was bound to be resistance. And the alienation that marked Islamic society, the bitterness spawned by the perception that modernity had left Muslims behind, led to acts of desperation, like the 1998 fatwa issued by bin Laden:
The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country where it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated
