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By Mihar Dias July 2025
On the 10th of July 2025, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad quietly turned 100.
Damansara Mosque and well wishers celebrated with prayers and thanksgiving.
In a world where even monarchies and empires crumble, leaders fall, and revolutions eat their children, Mahathir — Malaysia’s most enduring, controversial, and unyielding statesman — remains standing, having outlived friends, foes, and the very ideas that once shook the earth.
Consider this: when Mahathir was born in 1925, television hadn’t arrived in Malaya. The world was still reeling from the Great War.
By the time he was 8, Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. At 16, Japanese forces stormed Malaya. He witnessed Indonesia’s birth as a nation in 1945, India’s independence in 1947, and the founding of Israel in 1948 — all before he turned 25.
When Albert Einstein died in 1955, Mahathir was a young doctor. He watched as Malaya claimed independence in 1957, as Sputnik 1 pierced the skies, as Marilyn Monroe’s lifeless body was found in 1962, and as JFK was gunned down a year later. He lived through man’s first steps on the moon in 1969, America’s defeat in Vietnam in 1975, and the fall of the Shah during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
He saw Elvis Presley’s sudden death, mourned John Lennon’s murder, and later witnessed the Berlin Wall crumble in 1989. He lived through the Tiananmen Square tragedy that same year and saw the Soviet Union dissolve in 1991 — a century’s worth of drama, ideology, blood, and ambition playing out before his eyes.
Few men alive today can claim to have been contemporaries of Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Jawaharlal Nehru, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Yasser Arafat, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Queen Elizabeth II. Mahathir can. He read about them, dined with some, opposed a few, and outlived most.
This is a man who has seen colonialism rise and collapse, communism seduce and fail, pop icons shine and die tragically, and world leaders fall one by one.
He watched Malaysia morph from a sleepy British colony to an Asian Tiger, fell from power, returned like a political Lazarus, and still casts a long, divisive shadow over the nation’s politics.
Whether you revere him as a visionary or blame him for the nation’s lingering wounds, one cannot deny this: Mahathir is history walking amongst us. A relic of a world long gone yet stubbornly, defiantly alive.
Happy 100th, . May Allah continue to grant you peace in this extraordinary journey through time.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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