Mahathir had little exposure to the West in his formative years. His only experience was with colonial rulers and British professors in Singapore. At that time, British academics tended to be aloof and imperious, only reinforcing Mahathir's negative views. He does not care to hide his anti-Western prejudices. In his farewell speech at his party's general assembly, he unleashed his venom, labeling Anglo-Saxons as "greedy and war-like".

The old man's racial hang-ups are not important in themselves, but when he expresses them in his capacity as leader, it impacts negatively on Malaysia. Mahathir has been especially insufferable since being proven right in defying the IMF. In his warped mind this incident confirmed the evil intentions of the West, especially of the United States.

The United States is Malaysia's biggest trading partner. Any shrewd businessman knows that you humor your best customer, yet Malaysian leaders take perverse pleasure in tweaking America.

Amazingly, despite the obvious importance of the United States to Malaysia, no local university offers a programme in US studies. At the last Umno general assembly, Najib Razak (whom Mahathir openly favours to be the next deputy prime minister) suggested that Malaysian universities should have Schools of Occidental Studies, not for the purpose of legitimate academic pursuit but, in his words, "so we could better understand our enemy". And this character has the gumption to believe that he is the right man to lead Malaysia!

Malaysia shares much in common with the United States. Our Islamic faith shares a common heritage with Christianity and Judaism. Malaysia received its alphabet from the West, and demographically is more like America than the ethnically homogenous East Asian countries that Mahathir so fancies. Mahathir's anti-Western sentiment saddens me for another reason - he and Malaysia could have been an effective bridge between the Islamic world and the West.

The casual foreign observer of the United States easily confuses the aberrant with the norm. America with its inkblot messiness is a Rorschach test; what is viewed as "America" reveals more about the observer than the observed. Some travel to Washington, DC and see only potholes and pornography shops, others the Smithsonian and the National Institutes of Health.

Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has even less exposure to the West and to capitalism. I therefore expect him to continue Mahathir's pattern of seeing the blight rather than the best of the West.

Co-opting political Islam

Mahathir is without doubt the most pious Malaysian leader. His predecessor, the Tunku, gambled at the racetrack, entertained with dancing girls, and openly admitted to drinking whisky. Yet few criticised him. When they did, he pled disarmingly, "Those are my weaknesses!" By contrast, we see Mahathir - who does not even smoke and quotes liberally the Quran and Hadith - reviled by the Islamists!

They mock him for his illiteracy in Arabic, the language of Islam. To the Islamists, the more he expounds on certain Islamic issues, the more ridiculous he looks. It is a little as if someone illiterate in English tried to expound on the subtleties of Shakespeare's characters.

When Mahathir enticed Anwar Ibrahim, the Muslim Youth Movement leader, into the government, many regarded the stroke as a brilliant coup. Alas, the result was not the union of two complementary movements. The two men were merely irrepressible ideologues bent on political gain. Exploitative relationships, political or personal, rarely endure.

Mahathir's intent was to blunt the growing Islamist movement by co-opting its most charismatic leader. Anwar saw it as his divine mission to rescue Umno from its infidel ways, and in the process secure for himself a comfortable government job. The surprise is that their relationship lasted so long.

Mahathir's mistake was not in failing to separate religion from politics, as all his wise predecessors did, but in arrogantly believing that he could control and tame the Islamist beast, instead of keeping it at bay. He offered bribes to the Islamists - though not overtly as to offend their religiosity. He gave lush government jobs to those willing to toe the party line. He vastly expanded the religious establishment, which is nothing more than a massive public works project for otherwise unemployable Islamic studies graduates.

The more Mahathir feeds the Islamist monster, the more demanding it gets. Now it dictates what it wants, and it wants Mahathir. Interestingly, the greater Muslim world holds Mahathir in high esteem.

When Mahathir recently terminated funding for Islamic schools in an attempt to curtail the influence of the Islamists, he played right into their hands. A more enlightened strategy would have been to increase the funding, but tie it to modernising the curriculum. By doing so, he would be not abandoning those precious young minds, but preparing them better for the real world, a strategy that would have endeared him to students, parents and teachers.

Mahathir's expansion of the religious schools and establishment had another unintended and undesirable effect. It diverted scarce Malay talent into the non-productive pursuit of religious studies, leaving even fewer to pursue the sciences.

The task facing the government is to shrink the Islamic establishment and modernise Islamic schools, so that they become less like seminaries and more like US Catholic schools and colleges, producing their share of scientists and professionals. Such schools would increase Malay competitiveness, in turn enhancing race relations.

It might well take someone with the religious pedigree of Abdullah to accomplish this task, just as it took a Nixon to go to China.

Pah Lah: A preview

Abdullah has boasted that taking over from Mahathir would be "a piece of cake". He is either overestimating his talent or too naive to recognise the challenges. Time will tell, but he has given us ample preview.

He bravely talks of the "New Malay Dilemma" - weaning Malays off special privileges - but seems blissfully unaware of the difficulties that would entail. The hordes of "Pernas entrepreneurs" and rent seekers who are accustomed to juicy government favours will not take kindly to any decrease in government munificence. The same goes for the generation hooked on special privileges.

A "preview" of Abdullah's management ability can be had in the one department under his jurisdiction - the police, which is consistently ranked low in public esteem. For example, the police's muzzling of the media frequently backfires, as when malaysiakini was raided in January. The government's already tenuous credibility that the information technology sector would be spared censorship has been damaged.

On his appointment as home minister in 1999, Abdullah was asked about the notorious Internal Security Act (ISA). He raised his right hand and solemnly said, "This hand has never signed an order for the ISA." That reassured many. Well, that was then - today, that hand is soiled.

Recently the Economist printed some mildly uncomplimentary comments on Mahathir. Someone must have brought that fact to Abdullah's attention, for he immediately orchestrated a protest against the publication, no doubt to impress his boss. Abdullah must not have read the original piece. If he had, he would have noticed that the Economist made even more disparaging remarks about him!

As a former bureaucrat, Abdullah has an undying faith in the civil service. But today that institution has changed from past years. The decline is clear to anyone reading the daily headlines or, more practically, trying to renew a driver's licence. The civil service is insular, promotes strictly from within, and tends to recruit liberal arts graduates from local universities with limited English fluency and abysmal quantitative skills.

Malaysians endearingly refer to Abdullah as "Pak Lah" (Uncle Abdullah). But in a Malay village, someone is called "Pak" when he is no longer in the loop - when he is included in the conversation merely out of courtesy. If "Pak 'Lah" is truly an expression of respect, why does no one call Dr Mahathir, "Pak Mahathir" or "Pak 'Thir"? Anyone who dared do so would get a cold searing glare as his reply.

To his credit, Abdullah has not succumbed to the subtle yet intense pressure from Mahathir to name a deputy. If he can break tradition and bypass the next tier of Umno leaders weaned on money politics, then he will be doing himself and Malaysia a great service. He would need to cast his net deep and wide. But in truth, I do not see him going against tradition.

Mahathir's departure should, in theory, encourage greater pluralism, but it also risks greater chaos. Malaysians have yet to learn to disagree agreeably, a skill requiring patience and practice that Malaysians never had opportunity to develop under Mahathir. Already the warlords in Umno are emboldened, anticipating his departure. Umno risks degenerating into an Afghanistan, with Abdullah Badawi its Hamed Karzai, minus the sartorial elegance.

In 1969, the fear of Umno losing power triggered the nation's worse race riot. I do not anticipate similar hostilities today because the demographics and race dynamics have changed significantly. However, the Islamic party's winning of more seats nationally than Umno would certainly fracture Malays severely and precipitate a calamity of even greater proportions.

Abdullah's admirable qualities are his honesty and humility - scarce commodities in politicians anywhere. So when he declares that he will maintain Mahathir's policies, I believe him. But I do hope that he is merely saying that now out of deference to "Pak Thir", and will see things differently when he is his own man. If he does not, than expect Malaysia to merely coast along.

Part 1 appeared yesterday

The above article first appeared in Woodrow Wilson Center Asia Program's Special Report on Malaysia.

Endnotes

1) James MacGregor Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness . (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

2) Mahathir Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma (Singapore: Donald Moore for Asia Pacific Press, 1970).

3) 'Looking back to English', The New Straits Times (Malaysia), May 7, 2002.

4) Mahathir Mohamad, 'Malays forget easily' (speech to Umno General Assembly, June 21, 2001), www.pmo.gov.my.

5) 'Malaysia's biggest borrowers', www.freemalaysia.com/borrowers_chart.htm

6) Robert J Barro, 'Malaysia could do no worse than this', Businessweek , Nov 2, 1998.

7) Donald R Snodgrass, Zainal Aznam Yusof, and Ishak Shari, Managing Economic Growth Amid Ethnic Diversity: Malaysia 1970-1990 (Cambridge: Harvard Studies in International Development, Harvard University Press, 2000).

8) Mahathir Mohamad, 'Our future threat', speech to the Umno General Assembly, June 19, 2003) www.pmo.gov.my.

9) Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, 'The new Malay dilemma' (speech on Harvard Business School Alumni Club on 'Managing Malaysia in the New Global Economy', Kuala Lumpur, Feb 21, 2002) www.pmo.gov.my.

10) Steven Gan, 'The day they took our computers', Malaysiakini , Jan 28, 2003.

11) 'The changing of the guard', The Economist , April 3, 2003