Political memoirs or, worse, philosophical treatises by political leaders, are often books best avoided. Yet Anwar Ibrahim’s recent Rethinking Ourselves is nonetheless one the most erudite collection of essays out in this or any recent year.

Jailed by his opponents several times, few political leaders have experienced political persecution as egregious as Malaysia’s Prime Minister. Anwar used his time behind bars to think, reflect and, it would appear, especially to read. This book, while based on current politics, is very much the product of that time of reflection.

Rawls, Galbraith, Hobsbawm and Locke share the pages with José Rizal and ibn Khaldun.

The topics are those of the subtitle—“Justice, Reform and Ignorance in Postnormal Times”—but Anwar’s overarching theme is the role of society and government in times that are increasingly turbulent. Most books of this ilk come from politicians or pundits in countries that are either large or rich, and usually both. Malaysia, while middle-income, is neither: it and its leaders’ ability to affect change is very much constrained by circumstance. The perspectives of countries like Malaysia rarely have the opportunity for such an outing.

Most such books, furthermore, are written to further an agenda based on domestic politics: it seems unlikely that Anwar’s appeals to William Shakespeare and Frantz Fanon get much traction with the Malaysian electorate.

Indeed, one would have thought acknowledging Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych as a favourite read would be a certain vote loser in almost any democracy that comes to mind. In a single paragraph, Anwar will reference Aristotle, Gore Vidal and John Steinbeck. Rawls, Galbraith, Hobsbawm and Locke share the pages with José Rizal and ibn Khaldun; what other modern political leader would write a paragraph like:

Consider, for example, the trenchant criticism of Abdul Rahman Al-Kawakibi of the Ottoman Empire’s despotic role.Or Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi’s admiration of French democratic institutions, recently translated under the title An Imam in Paris. Or Taha Hussein’s lucid exposition on The Future of Culture in Egypt. And letters of a nineteenth-century Javanese Princess, Kartini, From Darkness to Light, or the Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream.

One does not, in other words, need to concur with Anwar’s line of thought in order to revel in the prose. But the essays are so measured, it is hard to find much to disagree with. Anwar voices the (by now) traditional (and quite valid) criticisms of Western foreign policy—he generally goes for “hypocrisy” as a catchall rather than “bad policy” (one can argue that these policies are less than optimal for those implementing them as well)—and his calls for something better are both reasonable and thoughtful. Nor does he spare his own country from criticism:

There is a false notion that slavery was only a Western machination, but in fact it existed even here in the Malay Archipelago in the not-too-distant past. While the chattel slavery of the Atlantic Slave Trade was indeed a grotesque extreme of the dehumanising nature slavery can take on, at the same time we need to subject ourselves to the same

The most interesting sections of the book may be those that deal with Islam. Anwar is, of course, Muslim, and Malaysia is a majority Muslim country. It is also a democracy which, while far from perfect (as Anwar knows from personal experience), has nevertheless shown considerable progress since independence in most measures of social, economic and political development.

He is at pains to discuss how Islam is compatible with (and indeed, he would argue, in some cases the progenitor of) liberal, just, rational society and governance. Once again, while calling out the West for shortsightedness and bigotry, he nevertheless calls a spade a spade:

And Islamophobia is a multiple direction expressway. It not only comes from the outside but also from within. Muslims also can, and do, actively contribute to Islamophobia and the exacerbation of the arc of ignorance through destructive acts of senseless terrorism …

He can on occasion however push a point a bit too far; Anwar also takes aim at

various ‘area studies’—African Studies, Asian Studies, Latin American Studies—and ‘disciplinary studies’ such as Islamic Studies, Chinese Studies, Indian Studies, and Oriental Studies. The cleaving of the world into Occident and Orient (West and East, civilised and uncivilised, advanced and backward) need not be subtle.

It is precisely these disciplines that are most under threat at American Universities. Doing away with them would surely be worse.

But some over-reach—relatively minor by any standard, least of all by those of other political treatises—can be forgiven. Were all political leaders as well-read and thoughtful as this one.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.