Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, second edition by Barry Wain (review)

Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003, is nothing if not assertive. Booted from his party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), in 1969 for having goaded then prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman to resign in “the most notorious letter in Malaysian politics” (p. 24) and (in)famous for his subsequent rants both while in office after his rehabilitation in UMNO and after retirement, Mahathir has never been reticent. Not content with just a political platform, he has proceeded from a provocative column in the Straits Times as an undergraduate in the 1940s; to several books, including the highly influential The Malay Dilemma (1970) and, more recently, an autobiography of more than 800 pages; to a characteristically cantankerous blog (on which he posted his own review of the first edition of the book under consideration here). As Barry Wain described, acolytes have pushed the study of Mahathir’s thoughts, too, including at a purpose-built institute at the Universiti Utara Malaysia. Yet, overexposed as he might seem, Mahathir remains something of an enigma. With Malaysian Maverick, Barry Wain set out to clear away the cobwebs in which so much of Mahathir and his record are shrouded.

Malaysian Maverick is not an “academic” book. There is no theory of leadership guiding Wain’s analysis (or, it seems, Mahathir’s actions); institutional constraints are taken as a given rather than systematically explored; Mahathir is assumed sui generis rather than examined as an exemplar of some specific “type”. This is not interpretive political or intellectual biography of the sort essayed — with the same subject — by Khoo Boo Teik in his excellent 1995 Paradoxes of Mahathirism. Indeed, Malaysian Maverick may at times frustrate more scholarly readers in its preference for exhumation and description over deep or critical analysis. Yet the volume stands on its merits, as whodunit of political intrigue, as a paean to truly laudable accomplishments, and as an exposé of the inner workings of a political machine. It is for those reasons that the book has been so widely read and hotly debated thus far, and that Wain issued a new edition.

Mahathir set his sights on politics early on, alongside an early career as a medical doctor. Labelled an “ultra” or “Malay chauvinist” for both his support of policies to promote Malays’ communal uplift and his vitriolic attacks on Chinese-majority Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (especially during Singapore’s fraught, brief merger into Malaysia in the 1960s), Mahathir saw himself as an iconoclast, but not an extremist. What emerges through Wain’s very readable narrative is the remarkable extent to which Malaysian politics today — institutions, policies, norms, pathologies — is the product of Mahathir: his vision, his machinations, his lust for national glory.

As Wain explained in detail in his preface to this new edition, the first edition of Malaysian Maverick nearly failed to make it to Malaysia. While Mahathir himself did not call for a ban, he did threaten a libel suit, even as others clamoured for investigations into the corrupt practices disclosed in the book. The first edition was released globally in late 2009; it was only five months later, in April 2010, that Malaysian Maverick was cleared for sale in Malaysia — by which time untold numbers of Malaysians (including Mahathir himself) had procured copies in Singapore or elsewhere. Mahathir seems not to have revised his interpretation of events in his memory-based A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (2011) in light of what Wain wrote, the latter notes; Wain, on the other hand, wove references to Mahathir’s autobiography into the second edition of Malaysian Maverick, “to update the story and fully represent [Mahathir’s] point of view” (p. xxviii) — apparently the main change from the previous edition, although Wain did not specify the scope of his revisions. Otherwise, the text draws on several interviews with Mahathir and others with his...