Asia's Cauldron by Robert D. Kaplan Page B

was “constructive protection,” a kind of affirmative action for Malays, in order to graduallybring 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 relationsbetween 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,