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 and unable to threaten any Muslims. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “and fight the 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