Everyone wants a piece of Anwar Ibrahim lately. As a `savior` of Islam, as a voice of reason in the aftermath of 9/11, as a future opposition leader to inject respectability into PAS, indeed, as the key person to revive civil society in Malaysia. The media has not had enough of Anwar either.

TV networks, the International Herald Tribune , and even malaysiakini , have all sought, and some successfully gained an interview with Anwar Ibrahim; with Far Eastern Economic Review getting an op-ed from him, written while he was enroute to Munich for his operation.

What Anwar has to say, however, may not be as important as what he has read during those six long years in prison. Leaders and scholars detained for a prolonged period of time have been known to use the solitude to hit the books. Some have taken to writing too.

While both processes are therapeutic, they also introduced what Martin Luther King - who too was imprisoned during the civil rights movement in the United States - called `tension of the mind` in his Letters from Birmingham .

Regardless of what the political detainees do, they establish their relevance immediately or posthumously. During his trial, Anwar did pen a few short pieces, although the extent to which he has chronicled his own thoughts while in prison, is still not known. Whatever it is, Anwar should put his thoughts down, lest they fade into distant memory.

Imprisoned scribes

In the case of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist scholar jailed by Mussolini for seven years, his magnus opus was The Prisoner`s Notebook . Originally written in Italian, it was first produced in loose leaflets, then gradually smuggled out of the prison cells to be published in 1933.

It was not until 1970 that the Italian edition was rendered into English, to world acclaim. Gramsci`s concept of hegemony, party politics, and organic intellectuals have since stood the test of time.

Malcom X also read voraciously in prison. Not a single day went by without a book being devoured, leading to his eventual embrace of Islam, and subsequent understanding of African slavery.

Nelson Mandela, on the other hand, pursued a correspondence course on history while incarcerated at the infamous Robben Island. On his release, Mandela wrote The Long Walk To Freedom .

Closer to home, Pramoedya Ananta Toer ( pix ), who was put behind bars by President Suharto for more than 15 years, on the flimsy ground of being a communist involved in the massacre of 1965, orally narrated four books to his fellow inmates which led to The Buru Quartet .

While physical confinement may indeed be lonely and brutal, the human spirit is known to have risen above the banal. Senator John McCain of Arizona, for instance, was a prisoner of war for six years.

Yet the experience made him stronger and sterner, by far the most respected senator across the partisan divide in congress. Indeed, Gandhi, Jawarlal Nehru and a host of other South Asian leaders came out of prison more in touch with their non-violent philosophy.

Despite years of chronic back pain, it seems Anwar is one of the rare few to have emerged from his imprisonment intellectually unscathed, if not reinforced.

Voracious reader

Yet, what did Anwar read? Aside from the Quran, a personal copy which he was entitled to keep, Anwar confessed to having read the entire collection of William Shakespeare four times.

That Anwar had to resort to reading them over and again probably attests to his limited reading privilege while serving his sentence. After all, Anwar is known as a voracious reader.

In 1986, Dewan Masyarakat , a Malay magazine, even had him named Tokoh Buku (literally the Best Reader); this at a time when a Unesco studies confirmed that on average Malaysians only read 1 page a year.

The reading culture of Malaysia may have since changed. With the growth of an affluent society, more Malaysians now possess the financial means - not necessarily the habit - to purchase a wider range of books to suit their interest.

Come what may, Anwar does have a large collections of books, some of which have been imported from abroad, others bought from a rare book store in Bangsar that has since gone under (so much for Malaysians` reading habit).

Of course, Anwar not only reads, but he writes as well. Menangani Perubahan (Effecting Change), a Malay compilation of his thoughts, produced in the early days when he was a key member of Umno, is arguably one of the best books by Malay politician.

The Asian Renaissance , while weaker in execution and editorial discipline, nonetheless allowed Anwar to make his views on human rights and democracy clearly known.

To get a better sense of Anwar`s Islamic views with other Islamic scholars', Faces of Islam a book rendered from a TV program of the same name, once hosted by Dr Ziauddin Sardar, also provides a crucial glimpse.

Understanding western literature

Whatever Anwar may have read or produced, he has to harness his taste carefully, without which he may not be able to fully play the role of bridging the divide between the Muslim world and the West.

Since his release Anwar has spoken enthusiastically about reviving his international network of scholars and policy experts to tackle the chasm separating Islamic and Western civilization. This is a noble idea, one which nevertheless requires informed understanding of both world views. Yet, Anwar`s understanding of Western civilisation may need more work.

Back in the 1980s, for instance, Anwar was known to have quoted the late Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind , very favorably. Bloom, then a professor in University of Chicago, was an icon of neo-conservatism. In fact, Bloom came under the influence of Leo Strauss (18991973).

Strauss taught his disciples a belief in absolutes, contempt for relativism, and joy in abstract propositions. He also approved of Plato's noble lies , where the ruling elite in order to achieve a higher good, which the public cannot immediately grasp are obligated to hide the truth.

Yet, according to Arthur Schlesinger, a key New York intellectual, The Closing of the American Mind was a book notable for the total exclusion of the two finest American minds, Emerson and William James, both of whom advocated the importance of discovering American roots based on natural and practical ideas.

If anything else, it was a vulgarised version of Strauss, which Bloom sought to promote, by emphasising the importance of the great books written by ancient Greek philosophers, but neglecting others from different cultures and civilisations.

Nevertheless, if Anwar kept himself abreast of all the Shakespearean works, he will understand, perhaps internalise, some of the tensions and convictions apparent in the more heroic characters.

Invariably, Anwar would also understand the frailty of human nature, indeed the fair weather friends in government which he once kept, who nevertheless abandoned him at the first sign of trouble.

However, it takes more than a composite understanding of Hamlet, Coriolanus, MacBeth and Julius Caesar, all of them tragic plays, for Anwar to don the mantle of a peace maker or public intellectual across the civilisational divide.

As a rule of thumb, Anwar must also surround himself with policy advisors and aides that could be in the same intellectual universe as he is, without which the reform or inter-civilisational dialogue that Anwar so often speaks of would be reduced to his voice only.

PHAR KIM BENG is author of the Eye Eye You column in malaysiakini . He graduated from the International Islamic University in 1994 as a Muslim revert, having previously been a Buddhist. He has travelled around the world studying at the University of Notre Dame, where he understood the beauty of Catholic scholarship, the University of Cambridge, where he learned the importance of British education, and later the University of Tokyo, where he learned his survival Japanese.