Word: bhutto
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...Bhutto treats the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as personal affront, one that "twisted the values of a great and noble religion and potentially set the hopes and dreams of a better life for Muslims back a generation." Muslims, she says, "became [al-Qaeda's] victims too." For the first half of the book, she attempts to reclaim the religion from the fundamentalists who would use it for political advantage, explaining how the original concept of jihad, meaning a personal struggle "to follow the right path," had been appropriated for the purposes of inspiring resistance to the 1979 Soviet...
...critical thinking - is a yearning for a return to the progressive origins of her religion. Were she alive at the time of publication, this alone would have seen her charged with blasphemy in fundamentalist circles, but if ever the Koran's message of tolerance bears repeating, it is now. Bhutto's criticism of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory is also pertinent. Huntington posited, in a 1993 essay in the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs, that conflict between Islam and the West was inevitable. Bhutto, drawing on the works of several authors, argues that Huntington...
...Bhutto's solutions seem simplistic. She calls, platitudinously, for an end to dictatorship in Pakistan, as well as greater economic investment, better education and a "reconciliation corps" of cultural ambassadors modeled after the American Peace Corps program. While no one will deny the importance of such moves, they fail to tackle the fundamental schism of which she writes. Successful ambassadors of moderate Islam can be found all over the world, yet few seem able to stand up to extremism with any kind of vigor...
...Bhutto's revisionist account of her political life - echoing the style of her earlier memoir, Daughter of the East - airbrushes out other unpleasantries that call for a deeper examination. Significant charges of corruption are dismissed as politically motivated, and her government's early support of the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan is forgotten. Her insistence that 3 million supporters thronged the streets of Karachi to greet her return from exile strains credibility, especially as most journalists and observers have put that number, by the most generous estimates, at 300,000. Most egregious however, are her overwrought descriptions of the terrible...
...Those passages, at least, are over quickly, and now that Bhutto has herself been slain by extremists, one hopes that she can be remembered for her honest effort to understand and influence the future direction of her religion, if not for her honest governance. As her posthumous words show, the tragedy of Bhutto's death is not so much in the loss of a great leader for Pakistan - her record as Prime Minister is hardly to be emulated - but in the silencing of a passionate advocate of moderate, contemporary Islam...