pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”
For American allies read Israel; the despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia (who had allowed the American military to build bases on the holy land), Egypt, and other autocratic regimes in the Middle East; and any Muslims who opposed al-Qaeda, which sought to restore the caliphate that once stretched from Morocco to Malaysia. Thus Muslims like Anwar who spoke out against the dream of a theocracy rooted in the most extreme interpretation of sharia law (amputations, stonings) were judged to be apostates—subject, that is, to the death penalty. If bin Laden divided the world into Dar al-Islam (the Realm of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the Realm of War), Anwar had a more nuanced approach, seeking to create Dar al-Salaam (the Realm of Peace). And he would begin in Southeast Asia, since it had no nostalgia for the caliphate, no myth of greatness. In Indonesia, for example, Islamists, Hindus, nationalists, and secularists had worked together to craft a constitution, debating ideas like the framers of the American constitution.
“Yes, there were tensions between the different groups,” Anwar said. “There were huge debates and disagreements. But because they were all seated at a big table, like in Philadelphia, the arguments were more substantive.”
He looked to Indonesia for inspiration, believing that the success or failure of the world’s largest Muslim country to create a workable democracy was crucial to the international order. “This is the true and unprecedented drama of faith and freedom of Islam in modern times,” he said at Oxford. And it held more promise than what was playing in the Middle East, where in the absence of a civic space Islamists exploited the sanctity of the mosque (where the authorities dared not intrude) to gain adherents, fueled by hatred of the West. The modern founder of radical Islam, the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, executed in 1966, argued that all Westerners carried in their blood “the Crusader spirit”—a perception reinforced by George W. Bush’s cavalier description of the war on terror as a crusade. Out of such infelicities of speech are clashes of civilization made, with writers on both sides furnishing arguments to harden attitudes—e.g. the British historian Anthony Pagden’s assertion that in Islamic countries, “The present is linked to the past by a continuous and still unfulfilled narrative, the story of the struggle against the ‘infidel’ for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world.” But conquest is the dream of ideologues of every stripe. And if Anwar could not lift the scales off the eyes of the Islamists he would nonetheless work to ensure that their dogmatism did not blind the majority of Muslims, who wanted only to live in peace.
Presently we were joined by his wife, Dr. Wan Azizah Ismail. She is a beautiful woman, an ophthalmologist by training, who headed Keadilan, a coalition of parties that formed the main opposition to UNMO, and she would serve three terms in parliament before turning her seat over to him. (Anwar was not allowed to run for office until 2008, his corruption conviction having been upheld.) She teased him about serving chocolate cupcakes, and after fetching another pot of tea from the kitchen began to banter with him with what seemed to be unfeigned amusement. Whether there was any basis in fact for the sodomy charge leveled against him (he would be charged with the same crime some years hence, on the verge of his return to power, in what many saw as another politically motivated campaign), it struck at the heart of their marriage—and yet she betrayed no sign of bitterness. On the contrary. She finished his sentences with a light touch, which made him smile; their playfulness with each other suggested a deep bond. No one ever knows what goes on inside a marriage, but it is not easy to pretend to be playful, even for a politically savvy couple well versed in Shakespeare. She was witty, and the stories that he told to punctuate his points grew funnier in her presence.
For example, he once traveled to Pahang to give a speech for a cabinet minister who hoped to turn the province into a tourist destination. To prove that the area was free of crocodiles, the minister dove into the river, which prompted Anwar to quip that he was safe since crocodiles don’t attack other crocodiles—a joke with a barb: the Malay word for crocodile also means “lecher.” At lunch he was seated next to the minister’s wife, who complained about her husband’s wandering eye. Do you know how I survive? he said to her. My wife’s an ophthalmologist, and every morning she puts a drop in each of my eyes so that only she is beautiful to me. The minister’s wife said, Give me two drops!
When I asked Anwar what had become of the minister and his scheme to attract tourists to Pahang, he replied that in league with Mahathir the minister had managed to squander all the timber in his province, and now he was its governor.
“He sounds like all politicians,” I said.
“Almost all,” Anwar corrected me.
He was determined to rise above partisan politics. Unable to air his views in the local media (“We have freedom of speech,” he explained with a grin. “We just don’t have freedom after speech!”), he had started a blog to answer questions on any subject from his countrymen. Nor was he afraid to take them to task for criticizing atrocities committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib while ignoring or even condoning problems in their backyard—censorship, innocent people detained without trial, rampant corruption. This was a forum for him to work out his ideas about Islam and freedom, which he had first tested in his political career, then reflected upon in prison, and now hoped to put into practice. In dark circumstances he had discovered that clarity of vision is an effective counter to terror, and in his new life he was trying to rally his countrymen to see that it was in their interest to heed the call of their better selves.
His theme was courage—which put me in mind of Georgia O’Keeffe’s confession that she was always afraid, and that her fear had never stopped her. At the opening of her museum in Santa Fe this had rattled around my mind. I was to appear on a panel to discuss her work, and in the vestibule outside the auditorium a man struck up a conversation with me. His father had worked for O’Keeffe as her gardener, and he was eager to describe a ritual of hers: how every fall she would gather hundreds of paintings that did not measure up to her exacting standards and burn them in a bonfire. It was a ceremony of liberation, predicated on the realization that these works lacked the clarity of line and color that she demanded. He remembered how delighted she was to watch them go up in smoke—and it occurred to me that this was how she freed herself to see anew, to figure reality afresh, to strike out into unclaimed aesthetic terrain. At every stage of her painting life she had transformed herself, discovering new ways to render the world in images of flowers, and bones from the desert, and ladders propped against the adobe wall of her house, and clouds glimpsed from above: step after step, always afraid, always alert to the next insight (in + sight). She aged gracefully in her paintings, fearless in her explorations.
It was time to leave—Anwar had to pack for his trip—and I suspected that when I went over my notes about our meeting it would seem natural to invoke Shakespeare, not Hamlet or The Tempest but Julius Caesar, the consummate drama of honor: “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Caesar tells his wife in the second act. “The valiant never taste of death but once.” Anwar was still very much alive.
Palms lined the road to my hotel on the outskirts of KL. Laborers rested on the construction site of a new high-rise. The odor of rotting leaves and sewage wafted up from the metal grates on the sidewalk, along which I would walk in blazing heat to an Internet café, where for two ringgits (about fifty cents) I could check my e-mail. The café was filled at all hours of the day and night with young men playing video games, the most popular of which featured an American soldier walking down a street in Baghdad, shooting insurgents.
One day I joined an official from an opposition party for lunch at a Kelantan-style restaurant near a public housing project in KL. The official, who was preparing to run for parliament, brought along several volunteers—a toothless man who introduced himself as the president of the housing project’s residential commission; a student from the University of Malaya; an insurance claims processor; a Chicago Bulls fan who worked as a clerk
