Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Immense social change tied to urban migration means an encounter with both Western liberal ideas and global Islam. And the encounter with the former encouraged Malays to take refuge in the latter. In Kuala Lumpur especially, with its 1.5 million people, more Muslim women have taken to conservative clothing, including the tudong. In the 1970s, men began wearing Arab robes and headgear. Arabic vocabulary took root, especially in formal greetings, like as-salamu alaykum. The dakwah (Islamic “revivalist”) movement grew. Whereas older mosques were built in the local Malay style, in turn influenced by the Indian Subcontinent, newer ones evinced Middle Eastern architecture. Islam Hadari (“civilizational” Islam) became a political phrase that sought to unite economic development with Islamization.19

  Malays now go abroad to study Islamic law at such conservative Middle Eastern institutions as Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, and the International Islamic University of Malaysia offers courses in law and economics in both Arabic and English, for Arabs and Iranians both are flocking to Malaysia. Saifuddin Abdullah, the deputy minister of higher education, explained to me that Malaysia is a perfect location for Middle Eastern Muslims. “They can get a modern education in English. The food here is halal [permissible according to Islamic law]. Malaysia is relatively inexpensive and the climate is pleasant. We’re multicultural and progressive relative to the Middle East. Most Arabs and Iranians want a more liberal version of their own homelands and they find it here.”

  Professor Abdullah al-Ahsan, the deputy dean of the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, remarked that Malaysia is the only Muslim country with regular elections going back to 1957, even if it has been a one-party state, dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). “Malaysia has made an impact. It is a model country in the Muslim world. People go on from our institution to high positions throughout the Middle East.” Perhaps Professor al-Ahsan’s most famous student was the current Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who studied in Malaysia during the first half of the 1990s. Davutoglu’s innovative foreign policy toward the Islamic world has made him the brains behind Turkey’s awakening as a middle-level power no longer firmly anchored to the West. “It was Malaysia that gave Davutoglu the opportunity to see the outside world”—or rather a version of it that was both cosmopolitan and Islamic. Thus, Davutoglu was able to envision similar possibilities for his native Turkey.

  It is important to realize that Malaysia’s civilizational Islam has roots that predate the rush to modernizing cities. Khaldun Malek, a Muslim intellectual in Penang, explained to me that Malaysia’s organic ties to the Middle East go back to the medieval era, when the predictable monsoon winds, friendly as they were to sailboats, allowed for an Indian Ocean cultural unity that did not have to wait for the age of steamships. Steamships, in fact, only intensified pan-Islamism, so that the late-nineteenth-century Islamic modernism of the Persian Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, with its emphasis on reacting to the challenge of a technologically ascendant West by finding universalist principles within Islam itself, made its way to the Malay archipelago long before the urbanization of our own era. Malaysia, through all of these developments, has blossomed as an outgrowth of the Middle East in Asia. What delimits Islam here, and provides it with moderation on one hand and insecurity on the other, is the unique fact that this is a society that is 60 percent—not 80 or 90 percent—Muslim. And the remainder of the population is composed overwhelmingly of vigorous civilizations in their own right.

  Sinic civilization in particular is a challenger to Islamic dominance. Malaysia’s Chinese community is arguably the most authentic in the world, without the deracination that accompanied the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China itself; and without the fierce Westernization pursued by the Chinese community in Singapore. Moreover, whereas the Chinese community in Malaysia used to be characterized by diversity, numbering, for example, Hokkien Chinese from Fujian in southern China, and locally born Malay Chinese, known as Peranakan, a monochrome and, therefore, potentially nationalistic Chinese identity has now taken root in the big Malaysian cities—another upshot of globalization. This is comparable to the monochrome Hinduism that in recent decades has taken root in India, replacing the various regional and village cults of yore. It was this monochrome Hinduism that has been the foundation for Hindu nationalism. The Chinese in Malaysia are very different though, being a commercial-minded middle-man minority without the same call to national greatness as the Hindus, despite their identification with some specific political parties. Yet the potential for Malaysian Chinese to more narrowly identify themselves in ethnic terms exists, faced as they are with what The Economist calls “the sharpening of ethnic and religious dividing lines” here.20

  “As a boy, Muslims always came to my house,” one Chinese scholar in Kuala Lumpur told me. “Now it is rare to host Muslims in a Chinese home. Even if your dishes and silverware are clean, they contain the residue of pork and thus are not halal, and this contaminates your entire house in Muslim eyes.” I heard a variation of this story throughout my stay in Malaysia. But a Muslim scholar I know said the observation was true only up to a point: in the past, he explained, elites only dealt with elites, and so Muslims would visit Chinese houses because all were part of the same cosmopolitan circle. But now newly middle-class Chinese are having to deal with newly middle-class Muslims who are fierce about their dietary restrictions.

  Chinese and Indians know Malay, but the Malays, whose Islamic fervor is felt mainly in the cities, speak no Chinese and Hindi. Malays are also synonymous with the urban poor—Malaysia’s salient problem, as it is for so many developing countries. Tensions abound, in other words, kept in check by an oil-and-gas-fueled consumerism, a plethora of social welfare organizations, and an unemployment rate that is very low by the standards of the developing world—4 percent by some estimates. Crucially, there have been no ethnic riots for over four decades, and despite different ethnic communities living apart from each other as in Sri Lanka and Fiji, there have been no ethnic wars and insurrections as in those places.

  And so Malaysia, despite its divisions, constitutes a comparatively successful postcolonial experience, in which millions have—we should not forget—been lifted out of poverty and social mobility enshrined.

  The glittering vista of economic and technological dynamism that is contemporary Malaysia did not happen by accident. It is, to a significant extent, the product of one man: Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, a medical doctor who was prime minister from 1981 to 2003. The youngest of nine children, Mahathir was born in 1925 in a semirural slum in Alor Setar, in northwestern Kedah state, with its overtones of Islamism, and would not become prime minister until he was fifty-six. From the time of his youth money was a constant problem. In short, he had a difficult upbringing and before achieving power spent decades rising through the hurly-burly of local politics (with all of its discrimination against those from the socioeconomic margins like himself), so that once he had achieved power he was determined to do something dramatic with it. Truly, he constructed his governing worldview on his very personal experiences. During World War II, while he saw cruelty firsthand—the bayoneting of a British soldier by Japanese troops—his overall impression of the Japanese occupation was of Malay “backwardness and incompetence.” Soon after the war, while in modern Singapore, the utter lack of sophistication of his fellow Malays was etched deeper into his memory, as he witnessed them in comparison to the more modern and urbanized Chinese and Indians. It was this nose-to-the-ground sensibility about the crudeness of daily Malay life that allowed him to see a “pent-up reservoir of ill-feeling” between Malays, Chinese, and Indians in advance of the intercommunal riots in 1969 that saw hundreds die of wounds from knives, machetes, and crowbars.

  Mahathir’s rise in politics is ascribed to his ability to capture Malay resentment toward the other, more advantaged ethnic groups. Unlike the Chinese and the Indians, who had vast homelands to which to return, the Malays had
nowhere else to go, and yet these bumiputra, or “sons of the soil,” Malay and not, felt dispossessed in their own land, even as they made up about 60 percent of the population. In his 1970 book, The Malay Dilemma, he upheld the indigenous Muslim Malays of the Malacca Strait and the southern littorals of the South China Sea as the “definitive race,” whose language non-Malay immigrants like the Chinese and Indians would simply have to learn. Muslim Malays would be in control of the bureaucracy, armed forces, police, judiciary, and other pillars of the state, as well as of the various monarchies. There would be a tyranny of the majority, in other words, something that made the nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill worry about new democracies.21 Indeed, Mahathir’s solution to Malay backwardness was “constructive protection,” a kind of affirmative action for Malays, in order to gradually bring them up to the developmental level of the other groups. The Malays would have distinct social and economic privileges, but not so many as to make them lazy.22

  Mahathir spoke openly about Malay slothfulness, passivity, and their negative attitudes toward time, money, and property. Mahathir would transform Malay culture to a similar extent that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk transformed Turkish culture: only while Ataturk attempted to secularize the Turks, Mahathir opted for Islamization. Thus, in a way, Mahathir’s achievement was greater: coming to power the year V. S. Naipaul published his book, he proved Naipaul wrong, demonstrating that Islam was not incompatible with economic dynamism and social energy. Under Mahathir, the call to prayer was now broadcast over state-run radio and television and Malay women—in a reverse of Kemalism—covered themselves with “various versions of the veil,” even as he used Islam’s strict ethical standards to root out cronyism and corruption. By his ability to combine religiosity and devoutness with science and technology, Mahathir made Malaysia, at the far periphery of the Muslim world in Southeast Asia, central to the values debate in the Middle East.

  Whereas Singaporean strongman Lee Kuan Yew buttressed local patriotism with secularism, Mahathir buttressed Malaysian patriotism with Islam, whose appeal was limited to the dominant Malays. Saifuddin Abdullah, the deputy education minister, told me that Mahathir “defined moderate Islam for the entire world, by building a modern country with Islamic technocrats. Mahathir knew,” Saifuddin went on, “how to be modern without being Western—as he looked toward Japan and South Korea, not just the West.” Mahathir in his own person signaled the rise of middle-level powers and of the non-Western “rest” of the globe.

  Arabs and Iranians both revered Mahathir for his support for the Palestinians, and his consequent attacks on the Jews and the West. Mahathir was a champion of Muslim Bosnia and against the American invasion of Iraq. His militant Islamist foreign policy was an attempt to give Malaysia more of a national identity. The problem was that his very emphasis on devout Islam inflamed interethnic relations between the Muslim Malays and the non-Muslim Chinese and Indians.23

  Raising the stature of his own ethnic group constituted only part of Mahathir’s sweeping agenda. Mahathir announced his ambition by his heroes: in addition to Ataturk, he admired Russia’s Peter the Great and South Korea’s Park Chung Hee, great state builders both. During the twenty-two years Mahathir was prime minister, the economy grew by an average of 6.1 percent annually, making Malaysia one of the developing world’s fastest growing countries at the time. The emphasis on basic commodities gave way to the production of manufactured goods, which soon accounted for 70 percent of exports. His government poured money into airports, highways, bridges, skyscrapers, container ports, dams, and cyber networks. The “tech-savvy” Mahathir understood how transportation and communications infrastructure would be critical for a nation’s success in the twenty-first century. The late Barry Wain, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia Edition, writes in his scrupulously objective biography of Mahathir, Malaysian Maverick, “With a combination of ruthlessness and dexterity,” Mahathir as prime minister “delivered social peace and sustained economic growth, introducing increasing numbers of Malaysians to middle-class comforts, even as significant numbers of non-Muslims (Chinese, in particular) opted to emigrate. Though if they were critical, few were willing to jeopardize their rising living standards, or risk ostracism and worse.” As one Malaysian commentator noted, “One of Mahathir’s signal triumphs was to have persuaded Malaysian society that ‘less politics’ and ‘more economics,’ ‘less democracy’ and ‘greater stability’ were the guarantees of continued prosperity.” Chandra Muzaffar, the head of a local NGO who had been jailed once by Mahathir, told me that “now there were Malay doctors and lawyers, and a real Malay middle class to go along with the Chinese one. This,” he went on, “was achieved without violence and through a functioning democracy.” And yet, Mahathir’s ruling style was that of a traditional authoritarian. He jailed political opponents and civil society activists alike, allowing no one to question his vision of a modern, high-technology, and industrialized Malaysia.24

  Mahathir’s rule combined an attention to detail with elements of the grandiose. He was anal and visionary, treating his country as though he were still a doctor with a sick patient. He would personally conduct spot checks of drains and public toilets, and record violations in a notebook. He insisted that civil servants wear name tags for identification in case of complaints. Nevertheless, his ability to think big, combined with a rarefied sense of aesthetics, led to the creation of a Japanese-designed, postmodern mega-airport servicing Kuala Lumpur—one of the world’s largest and most beautiful such facilities. The spanking-new capital city he built, Putrajaya, adjacent to Kuala Lumpur, with its Persian-cum-Mughal-cum-Malay architecture, and with its rich, turquoise colors and fairy-tale domes, is far more pleasing to the eye than Pakistan’s own built-from-scratch capital of Islamabad, with its bombastic Stalinist-cum-Mughal structures. The difference between Putrajaya and Islamabad demonstrates in aesthetic terms the difference between Malaysia and Pakistan: between a healthy Muslim-dominated society and an unhealthy purely Muslim one. The eighty-eight-story Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, built by the Malaysian petroleum giant and designed by the late Argentinean-American architect César Pelli, were for a time the tallest buildings in the world, shaped from the top down like Islamic stars—something insisted upon by Mahathir, ever the micromanager. The towers’ shiny steel and glass and spectacle of winking multicolored lights at night bespeak ambition and inspiration on an epic scale.

  Mahathir’s energy is summed up by the fact that he despised golf, the quintessential game of world leaders, considering it a waste of time. His negatives were profound: he allowed a cult of personality to form around him, he created a system that was long on obedience and short on integrity, despite efforts to hold civil servants to account, and he destroyed political rivals like Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim by campaigns of character assassination. His attacks on ethnic Chinese in the 1960s and on World Jewry during the 1997–1998 Asian economic crisis reeked of prejudice and anti-Semitism. He stoked ethnic rivalries, rather than assuaged them. This was rank political calculation on his part: he knew that such attacks would go down well among his constituents. Aware that the Israeli occupation of Palestine was seemingly existential among Malay Muslims, he was a deliberate sensationalist who played the global media for local effect.

  Mahathir could be mean and petty, as well as fantastically insecure. After taking power, he confiscated a stunning hilltop mansion, the Carcosa Seri Negara, built in 1904, that served as the British High Commission. The mansion had especial meaning for the British, as it was from this house that Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer had directed the pathbreaking counterinsurgency campaign against communist guerrillas in the 1950s that has lived on in British military lore. But Mahathir did not want white people literally looking down on us from on high, and so he just took the building away.

  The Western media wants heroes it can applaud or villains it can vilify. The real world is different. There is no unity of goodness. A great leader can come with hi
deous faults. That is the lesson of Mahathir. Mahathir put Muslim-dominated Malaysia on the map, giving the somewhat artificially conceived state a national identity, especially within the Muslim world, and as a consequence he pushed back at the West. Malaysia’s very dynamism under his rule constituted a part of the epic story behind the West’s relative decline.

  The style of Mahathir’s rule demonstrated that, in the words of the Australian scholar Harold Crouch, “the sharp dichotomy between ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ does not seem to apply.” And this distinctly mixed or “ambiguous” regime has led to a “degree of coherence that has provided the foundation for a remarkably stable political order,” despite Malaysia’s deep ethnic and civilizational cleavages, and recent political unrest. Mahathir’s regime, reflecting a category all its own, became at once “more repressive and more responsive” to people’s needs. It solved problems even as it clamped down on dissent. The electoral system grossly favored the government at the expense of the opposition, even as elections were vigorously contested and members of the regime faced stiff fights to keep their seats. Mahathir reduced poverty by half during his tenure. But because of “crosscutting communal cleavages” that threatened stability, the evolution of a modern middle-class structure, liberating in its own right, did not result in full democracy. The regime’s dilemma was that the new middle class remained firmly divided along ethnic lines.25 Again, there was no unity of goodness.

  There have been military emergency laws, detentions without trial, and press and trade union restrictions. Nevertheless, as Crouch wrote in 1996, “in a society in which the possibility of violence is ever-present, both the Malay and non-Malay elites, as well as much of the population, tend to value stability more than further democratization.”26 (What argues against interracial violence are the political divisions within ethnic Malay society: between secular and less secular elements.) For beyond the communal splits, there is the unsettling memory of Muslim Malay society being divided among nine sultanates, not to mention the former colonial Straits Settlements of Malacca and Penang and the eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo: a politically unstable setup that hampered the Malay independence movement against the British and finds expression in today’s highly federalized system.