Can Islamists and liberals unite against a corrupt status quo? Illustration by Guy Billout

Anwar Ibrahim’s voice was barely audible above the background din of chattering guests and a cocktail-bar pianist at the Hilton Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Anwar—who had rebounded from six years in prison on corruption and sodomy charges to become the best hope for a more democratic, less corrupt Malaysia—speaks softly. He is still under constant surveillance, he said. Sensitive political business has to be handled in other capitals—Jakarta, Bangkok, or Hong Kong. Security is a constant worry. Intelligence sources from three countries have warned him to be careful. “I’m taking a big risk just walking into this hotel to see you, but what can I do?” he murmured. “It’s all too exhausting. But, you know, sometimes you just have to take risks.”

This was the same Anwar Ibrahim, one struggled to remember, who was once at the heart of the Malaysian establishment: the Minister of Culture in 1983, the Minister of Education in 1986, the Minister of Finance in 1991, a Deputy Prime Minister in 1993. He was poised to succeed Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. And then he got overconfident. Starting in the summer of 1997, when the Malaysian currency and stock market lost more than half of their value in the Asian financial meltdown, Anwar did something that Mahathir found unforgivable. (Last names among the Malay are generally patronymics.) Even as the Prime Minister was imposing capital controls and blaming “rogue speculators,” such as George Soros, for the crisis, Anwar launched an attack on “nepotism” and “cronyism” in his own party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), which had been in power since independence. The “cronies” included members of Mahathir’s family. While Mahathir tried to bail out banks and corporations run by his allies, Anwar talked about transparency and accepting some of the International Monetary Fund’s recommendations for liberalizing the economy.

Mahathir does not like to be contradicted. In 1998, Anwar was removed from the cabinet and from UMNO. He was charged with corruption, and with sodomizing his speechwriter and his wife’s chauffeur, and convicted. Under Malaysian law, “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” carries a sentence of up to twenty years. Anwar denied everything and took to the road, addressing crowds all over the country. When he was barred from speaking in halls, he spoke in mosques or parking lots, standing on top of trucks or cars. “The government is trying to keep the people away from me,” he declared. “I am not afraid. No matter what happens, whether in prison . . . I will still strive, I will still fight, I will not step down.” While awaiting trial, Anwar was badly beaten by the chief of police, and he says that attempts were made to poison him.

After his arrest, Anwar says, Mahathir gave a slide show for his cabinet colleagues, to justify the purge of his former heir apparent. There were photographs of current and former U.S. officials—Robert Rubin, William Cohen, and Paul Wolfowitz—along with the World Bank president, James Wolfensohn. “These are the people behind Anwar,” Mahathir explained. (Mahathir denies showing any pictures, but allows, “I informed the cabinet about Anwar’s associates.”) Nobody was likely to miss the implication; Mahathir has clearly stated his conviction that “Jews rule this world by proxy.” At the Hilton, Anwar, who started his career as the president of the Malaysian Muslim Students Union, and is still a devout Muslim, shrugged. “They say I’m a Jewish agent, because of my friendship with Paul,” he said. “They also accuse me of being a lackey of the Chinese.” His eyebrows twitched in a gesture of disbelief, and he emitted a dry, barking laugh.

When Anwar was released from prison, in 2004, after six years in solitary confinement, he announced that he would return to politics. Last year, Mahathir was asked by a reporter whether he thought Anwar would ever be the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Mahathir replied that “he would make a good Prime Minister of Israel.” So far, it looks as though Mahathir has underestimated his man. Anwar was returned to parliament last year in a landslide (his constituency is in Penang, on the northwest coast). His coalition of opposition parties—which includes both a secular, mostly Chinese party and the Islamists of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS, as well as his own multi-ethnic People’s Justice Party (P.K.R.)—has taken more than a third of the seats in parliament and several state governments. In the next general election, possibly as soon as 2010, Anwar Ibrahim may well become the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

To make sense of Anwar’s rise, fall, and rise, it helps to know something about the role of race and religion in Malaysia. The country’s population is more than half Malay, defined by ethnicity and the Muslim faith, but large numbers of Chinese (now about a quarter of the population) and Indians (seven per cent) arrived in the nineteenth century, when the British imported coolies from China and plantation workers from India. Tensions arising from this mélange—and, in particular, the fear held by Malays that they will always be bested by these minorities—have gripped Malaysian politics since the country achieved independence from the British, in 1957. In recent years, the situation has been further complicated by a surge in Islamic fervor among many Malays.

Mahathir, whose father had some Indian ancestry, had always been obsessed with race, and the modern era of Malaysian politics can be traced to his book “The Malay Dilemma,” published in 1970, a decade before he came to power. It is a distillation of the kind of social Darwinism imbibed by Southeast Asians of Mahathir’s cohort through their colonial education. The Malay race, the book argues, couldn’t compete with the Chinese for genetic reasons. Whereas the Chinese had been hardened over the centuries by harsh climates and fierce competition, the Malays were a lazy breed, fattened by an abundance of food under the tropical sun. Unfettered competition with the Chinese “would subject the Malays to the primitive laws that enable only the fittest to survive,” Mahathir warned his fellow-nationals. “If this is done it would perhaps be possible to breed a hardy and resourceful race capable of competing against all comers. Unfortunately, we do not have four thousand years to play around with.”

And so the Malays had to be protected by systematic affirmative action: awarded top positions and mandatory ownership of business enterprises, along with preferential treatment in public schools, universities, the armed forces, the police, and the government bureaucracy. Otherwise the “immigrants,” as the ruling party still calls the Chinese and the Indians, would take over.

“The Malay Dilemma” was immediately banned for being divisive. The country was still reeling from the race riots of 1969, when, after a predominantly Chinese party enjoyed an election victory, hundreds of Chinese were attacked by Malays. Killings led to counter-killings. Such inter-group tensions were hardly new: ever since Britain left its former colony, political parties have used ethnic resentments to gain votes, while PAS sought to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state. Presiding over this fraught mosaic of ethnic and religious politics throughout the nineteen-sixties was the aristocratic Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman—until, in the fall of 1970, he was brought down by the brand of Malay nationalism advocated in Mahathir’s book.