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Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West
How will Benazir Bhutto be remembered? Discussing Reconciliation on Radio 4’s Start the Week, the presenter Andrew
Marr got so excited by her legacy and achievement that he said, “At the risk of straying across lines of neutrality, I think the more people that read this book, the better.” The book comes garlanded with acclaim from the likes of Senator Edward Kennedy and Madeleine Albright. But does the praise lavished on Benazir since her assassination bear any relation to what she actually did during her life?
Let me tell you about the former Pakistani prime minister, Mohammed Mohammed, an ugly man with a thick beard.
During his first term in office he failed to pass a single piece of legislation, and when he returned to government he and his family became extremely rich from kickbacks on official contracts. He bugged and harassed independent journalists. In the mid1990s, his paramilitary death squads eliminated activists from the rival MQM in Karachi and he was implicated in the murder of his own brother, as well as the deaths of three family retainers in his mother’s entourage. He funded a proxy war against India in Kashmir using Arab jihadis, and backed the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan; indeed, if he had not given cash, fuel, training and military spare parts to the Taliban, it would not have been able to rise to power.
Mohammed Mohammed never, of course, existed: I am talking here about Benazir Bhutto. She was brave, glamorous, feisty and articulate – and the midwife of the Taliban. To a western audience (which she always handled impeccably, flattering reporters with access) she came across as a secular democrat and a committed campaigner for women’s rights. On David Frost’s sofa, Benazir could change from cute to solemn in a moment. As the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country, she offered huge symbolic hope. Since her death, she has been praised extensively: a television anchor even wrote an article about introducing Benazir to the joys of buying lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. Ironically, it was left to the socialite Jemima Khan to puncture the balloon. Khan concluded from her own years of living in Pakistan – as the wife of Imran Khan, Benazir’s political rival – that Benazir was ‘as ruthless and conniving as they come a Kleptocrat in a Hermès headscarf’.
Reconciliation is an odd book. It seems to have been put together by a variety of people. Parts of it are readable and well argued, and deserve to be remembered as Benazir’s last testament, a statement of the ideals she aspired to but did not always fulfil. Other bits are tendentious and irrelevant. The first chapter is vintage Benazir, written in the same tone as her autobiography, Daughter of the East. She describes her return to Pakistan from exile at the end of last year, and her triumphal homecoming procession: ‘I must confess I felt safe in the enormous sea of love and support that surrounded me,’she wrote.
It was obvious to anyone in Pakistan at the time that she would be targeted as an American stooge, but she went ahead with the procession. A suicide bomber struck, leaving nearly 200 people dead, but Benazir survived. She made much in the book of the fact that the dictator General Pervez Musharraf did not provide her with sufficient security, asserting: ‘Had the jammers worked, the bombs could not have gone off.’ But suicide bombers use toggle switches, which are not blocked by jammers. Either way, another terrorist killed Benazir only weeks later on December 27, 2007.
Using verses from the Koran, she has made a careful and reasonable case for seeing the ideology of Al-Qaeda as a profound distortion of original Islam, and has presented an alternative argument for believing in a reformist, pluralistic and modern Islamic society, and seeing it as closer to the real wishes of most of the world’s Muslims.
At this point, the tone of the book changes again, and the reader is treated to a brisk and baffling examination of the history o
Published: February 18, 2008
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