At the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur on a recent Friday, a crowd of men angled for an close-up look at the silver-haired figure in a gray suit exiting an elevator.
They held their camera phones up high and perched on stairs to catch a better glimpse. Those who could get close enough stepped forward to kiss the man’s hand. A worshiper put his hand to his head in a salute.
The man commanding all this attention was Mahathir Mohamad, 99, who served more years as prime minister than anyone in Malaysia’s history.
Starting in 1981, he governed uninterrupted for 22 years, engineering an economic transformation that reshaped the country from one dependent on tin, rubber and palm oil into one of the world’s major high-tech exporters.
Then in 2018, after a 15-year break, he was elected again at 92, setting a record as the world’s oldest prime minister.
But he remains a deeply polarizing figure, reviled by many for clamping down hard on his political opponents — most notoriously, Anwar Ibrahim, the current prime minister — and for his incendiary comments about Jews and race in Malaysia.
