For Anwar Ibrahim, the 25-year path to becoming Malaysia’s prime minister was at times “torture.”
His ascent initially seemed as if it would be swift when he was named deputy prime minister in the early 1990s, supporting his onetime mentor, Mahathir Mohamad. But when that relationship soured, Anwar found himself sacked, beaten, and ultimately imprisoned for nearly a decade on bogus charges of corruption and sodomy. (It is a criminal offense to be gay in the Muslim-majority country.)
