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Karim Raslan is a forty-year-old Cambridge University-educated lawyer, columnist and author.
He is a founding partner of Raslan Loong, one of Malaysia's leading corporate law firms, which has six partners and twenty-five associates. Raslan Loong specializes in banking, corporate finance, capital markets, insolvency, restructuring and information technology work. The firm has acted for countless leading multinational clients including Credit Suisse First Boston, Citicorp, ABN Amro and AIG.
For the past five years, Karim has spent most of his time in Indonesia, keenly observing the complex mix of culture, politics, religion and society in the world’s most populous Muslim country. He has established himself as a respected commentator and his views on Indonesian politics are often sought by the media as well as key political and business figures in the region.
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In April 2005, he played a prominent role in the Asia-Africa Summit which was held in Jakarta and attended by over 50 heads of state. Karim chaired a session at the business arm of the summit where President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria was a panel member.
Karim is also a well-known analyst of Thai politics.
His syndicated column "Writers Journal" - which has over 1.5 million readers across the Asia-Pacific - is published weekly by The Business Times (Singapore), The Star (Malaysia) and Sin Chew Jit Poh (Malaysia). It is also published on an ad-hoc basis in The Jakarta Post, Kedaulatan Rakyat and Suara Merdeka in Indonesia; The Nation (Bangkok); Philippine Daily Inquirer; South China Morning Post and Ming Pao (Hong Kong), and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Karim is on the International Council of the Asia Society, which is based New York. He has spoken at several high-level conferences (including the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York, the annual retreat of the Pacific Center for International Policy at University of Southern California and the International General Meeting of the Pacific Basin Economic Council). He has also lectured at leading academic institutions in the US and Britain including Stanford University, Georgetown University, Princeton University and the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. The lecture circuit has also taken him to top universities in Singapore, Thailand, Australia and Malaysia.
He has been quoted extensively in the international media - including Le Monde, Les Echos, NRC Handelsblatt, The Straits Times, The Financial Times, TIME, NEWSWEEK, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Australian and The Boston Globe. He also contributes opinion pieces on Asia-Pacific and Islamic Affairs for both regional and international newspapers and magazines like the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, The International Herald Tribune, Philippines Daily Inquire); for TV (CNN, CNBC, C-SPAN), and for radio (NPR).
Karim was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University, New York from November 2001 to February 2002, when he worked on a project entitled "Freedom of Expression in Islamic Societies".
He is also the author of Ceritalah: Malaysia in Transition - which was described by Nobel Laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul as "educated and elegant" - Heroes and Other Stories and Journeys Through Southeast Asia: Ceritalah 2.
Ceritalah 2 was translated into Bahasa Malaysia and was published in Mandarin in 2004. Karim is currently working on his debut novel Desire, the first volume of an anticipated quartet discerning the lives of a Malay-Muslim family from the 1930s to the present day. His short stories have been published in leading British literary journals like Granta and Wasafiri and anthologized by Penguin. Granta also included his work in its highly praised collection What We Think of America.
His father, Raslan Abdullah, was one of Malaysia's most highly respected and prominent professionals-cum-financiers, founding both the nation's largest accounting practice, Hanafiah Raslan Mohamad, as well as one of its leading banking groups, now named Bumiputra Commerce Berhad.
Karim now divides his time between homes in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Ubud, Bali in Indonesia.
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