By Pamela Constable,
a Post staff writer who has reported periodically from Pakistan since 1998
Tuesday, February 12, 2008

RECONCILIATION

Islam, Democracy, and the West

By Benazir Bhutto

Harper. 328 pp. $27.95

There are some things only the dead can get away with saying, and some deaths speak more powerfully than anything the living can write. This book, finished just before its author was assassinated in Pakistan in December, sends out an urgent warning to her fellow Muslims and to Western democratic powers -- a warning one hopes may now find greater resonance with both audiences.

Benazir Bhutto, the elegant former Pakistani prime minister, hoped to return democratic rule to her native country and knew she stood a good chance of being killed in the process. She was rushing to complete "Reconciliation" when she was slain at a political rally, her death transforming this manifesto into a cry from the grave to save her faith, her homeland and East-West relations from looming catastrophe.

Her book argues that Islam is not incompatible with democracy, but that its credo of tolerance and freedom has been hijacked by purveyors of terror. The real "clash of civilizations" lies within Islam, she asserted, and the West should seek to bolster its moderate center as the best means of countering the radical extremes.

A poised public figure given to flowery speeches and cagey ambiguity, Bhutto wrote the book with uncharacteristic bluntness, suggesting an awareness that both she and her country had little time left. Pointing fingers and naming names -- especially those of several chiefs of Pakistan's powerful intelligence service -- she blamed a combination of autocratic rulers, manipulative religious leaders and meddling Western governments for sabotaging democracy's chances in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world, and for pushing Islam in ever more radical directions.

"Islam was sent as a message of liberation. The challenge for modern-day Muslims is to rescue this message from the fanatics, the bigots, and the forces of dictatorship," she wrote. Describing Pakistan as "ground zero" in the battle for the soul of Islam, she warned that unless religious extremism there is curbed, the consequences of having "the only nuclear-armed Muslim nation fall into chaos would be catastrophic."

At the same time, she called on international forces, especially the United States, to play a more constructive and consistent role in the Muslim world and to learn from their Cold War errors. She wrote with disgust that Pakistani dictators always "play the West like a fiddle," while fueling Islamic militancy through repression or opportunism. By arming radical Afghan Islamic militias against the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, she charged, Washington helped create an Islamic "Frankenstein" that today threatens to destroy the region in a surge of anti-Western hysteria and suicide bombings.

Throughout the book, Bhutto sought to bolster her case that Islam is not antithetical to democracy, with academic and historic references: dozens of verses from the Koran, meandering asides on long-ago military coups and copious quotations from scholarly articles, particularly those that challenged Samuel Huntington's idea of a coming "clash of civilizations."

But far more interesting are the personal glimpses of Bhutto as she saw herself: some airbrushed by self-justification, others chilling in hindsight. She evoked the carefree student hardened by the 1979 execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and burdened by the mantle of his legacy for the next three decades. "On the day my father was arrested, I changed from a girl to a woman," she wrote in an especially gripping passage. "On the day he was murdered, I understood that my life was to be Pakistan."

In an equally striking image, she conveyed what it was to be a populist leader coming home from exile, addicted to the roar of adoring crowds despite her fears of assassination. When her husband begged her to take cover behind bulletproof glass, "I said no," she wrote. ". . . I felt safe in the enormous sea of love and support."

Although "Reconciliation" invokes lofty values and strives for an analytical tone, it reveals Bhutto's deep bitterness toward the military establishment that hanged her father and thwarted her at every turn. The book also glosses over her own controversial history during two terms in office, dismissing myriad corruption charges as part of the military's plot, failing to mention her initial support for the Afghan Taliban regime, and painting all attacks on her top-down political dynasty as assaults on democracy in general.

Most ominously and sensationally, she recounted the suicide bomb attack that almost killed her last October, pointing out details that led her to suspect official collusion -- street lamps mysteriously going dark, promised security measures missing -- some of which were repeated in the bombing that took her life 10 weeks later. The echo of her father's last days, during which he penned a memoir called "If I Am Assassinated," is almost too ironic to bear.

Despite its flaws of self-indulgence and omission, this book contains a larger truth. Islam does need to find its place as a moderate guiding force for millions of followers in the modern world, instead of being stolen by jihadists and written off as the religion of suicide bombers. The West does need to build bridges to Muslims around the world and counter fears of hegemonic crusade, instead of girding for a cataclysmic clash of civilizations.

Had she lived to lead her country again, it is doubtful that Bhutto would have been able to unite its fractured populace or curb the rising tide of Islamic militancy. She was too divisive and secular a figure, and too tainted by her past failures. Even her posthumous polemic offers only a few minor prescriptions for long-term policies at a time when Pakistan's stability is being violently challenged on a daily basis.

Perhaps, however, Bhutto's destiny was not to rule Pakistan, but to die for the cause of its unfulfilled, fast-dimming promise as a Muslim democracy.