Bhutto and the Future of Islam - Fareed Zakaria

Perhaps Fareed Zakaria should stick to his first love - wine tasting. There were two errors in the first two paragraphs that reflected on his poor research. And, like most western reviewers of Benazir Bhutto in office he has been "charitable." Read on:



Picture the moment. It is Dec. 2, 1988. A beautiful woman, 35 years old, walks into the presidential palace in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, flanked by liveried and turbaned honor guards. She is wearing a green silk tunic and a white gauzy shawl that barely covers her hair. She speaks flawless Urdu and English, her English perfected as an undergraduate at Radcliffe and then as a student at Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford Union. She is intelligent, erudite and intensely charismatic. And she is about to take the oath of office to become the first woman in history to lead a modern Muslim country.

Norbert Schiller/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Benazir Bhutto taking the oath of office as prime minister of Pakistan, 1988.

The idea of Benazir Bhutto has always been more powerful than the reality. Bhutto, who was assassinated last December while campaigning in Rawalpindi, seemed to many of her admirers in the West to be the consummate liberal. But she was also the descendant of one of the oldest and most thoroughly feudal families in the Sind province. The size of her family’s landholdings had stunned the British general Charles Napier, who conquered the province for Queen Victoria in 1843. She inherited the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party from her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, and ran it like a personal fiefdom. She was president-for-life, allowed no internal party elections and in her will bequeathed her party to her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, who has spent most of his life outside Pakistan.