Chapter One
The Path Back
As I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azam
International Airport in Karachi on October 18, 2007, I
was overcome with emotion. Like most women in politics,
I am especially sensitive to maintaining my composure,
to never showing my feelings. A display of emotion by a
woman in politics or government can be misconstrued as a
manifestation of weakness, reinforcing stereotypes and
caricatures. But as my foot touched the ground of my
beloved Pakistan for the first time after eight lonely
and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears
from pouring from my eyes and I lifted my hands in
reverence, in thanks, and in prayer. I stood on the soil
of Pakistan in awe. I felt that a huge burden, a
terrible weight, had been lifted from my shoulders. It
was a sense of liberation. I was home at long last. I
knew why. I knew what I had to do.
I had departed three hours earlier from my home in
exile, Dubai. My husband, Asif, was to stay behind in
Dubai with our two daughters, Bakhtawar and Aseefa. Asif
and I had made a very calculated, difficult decision. We
understood the dangers and the risks of my return, and
we wanted to make sure that no matter what happened, our
daughters and our son, Bilawal (at college at Oxford),
would have a parent to take care of them. It was a
discussion that few husbands and wives ever have to
have, thankfully. But Asif and I had become accustomed
to a life of sacrificing our personal happiness and any
sense of normalcy and privacy. Long ago I had made my
choice. The people of Pakistan have always come first.
The people of Pakistan will always come first. My
children understood it and not only accepted it but
encouraged me. As we said good-bye, I turned to the
group of assembled supporters and press and said what
was in my heart: “This is the beginning of a long
journey for Pakistan back to democracy, and I hope my
going back is a catalyst for change. We must believe
that miracles can happen.”
The stakes could not have been higher. Pakistan under
military dictatorship had become the epicenter of an
international terrorist movement that had two primary
aims. First, the extremists’ aim to reconstitute the
concept of the caliphate, a political state encompassing
the great Ummah (Muslim community) populations of the
world, uniting the Middle East, the Persian Gulf states,
South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, and parts of
Africa. And second, the militants’ aim to provoke a
clash of civilizations between the West and an
interpretation of Islam that rejects pluralism and
modernity. The goal-the great hope of the militants-is a
collision, an explosion between the values of the West
and what the extremists claim to be the values of Islam.
Within the Muslim world there has been and continues to
be an internal rift, an often violent confrontation
among sects, ideologies, and interpretations of the
message of Islam. This destructive tension has set
brother against brother, a deadly fratricide that has
tortured intra-Islamic relations for 1,300 years. This
sectarian conflict stifled the brilliance of the Muslim
renaissance that took place during the Dark Ages of
Europe, when the great universities, scientists,
doctors, and artists were all Muslim. Today that
intra-Muslim sectarian violence is most visibly manifest
in a senseless, self-defeating sectarian civil war that
is tearing modern Iraq apart at its fragile seams and
exercising its brutality in other parts of the world,
especially in parts of Pakistan.
And as the Muslim world-where sectarianism is
rampant-simmers internally, extremists have manipulated
Islamic dogma to justify and rationalize a so-called
jihad against the West. The attacks on September 11,
2001, heralded the vanguard of the caliphate-inspired
dream of bloody confrontation; the Crusades in reverse.
And as images of the twin towers burning and then
imploding were on every television set in the world, the
attack was received in two disparate ways in the Muslim
world. Much, if not most, of the Muslim world reacted
with horror, embarrassment, and shame when it became
clear that this greatest terrorist attack in history had
been carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah and
jihad. Yet there was also another reaction, a troubling
and disquieting one: Some people danced in the streets
of Palestine. Sweets were exchanged by others in
Pakistan and Bangladesh. Condemnations were few in the
world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia. The hijackers
of September 11 seemed to touch a nerve of Muslim
impotence. The burning and then collapsing towers
represented, to some, resurgent Muslim power, a perverse
Muslim payback for the domination of the West. To others
it was a religious epiphany. And to still others it
combined political, cultural, and religious
assertiveness. A Pew comparative study of Muslims’
attitudes after the attacks found that people in many
Muslim countries “think it is good that Americans now
know what it is like to be vulnerable.”
One billion Muslims around the world seemed united in
their outrage at the war in Iraq, damning the deaths of
Muslims caused by U.S. military intervention without
U.N. approval. But there has been little if any similar
outrage against the sectarian civil war, which has led
to far more casualties. Obviously (and embarrassingly),
Muslim leaders, masses, and even intellectuals are quite
comfortable criticizing outsiders for the harm inflicted
on fellow Muslims, but there is deadly silence when they
are confronted with Muslim-on-Muslim violence. That kind
of criticism is not so politically convenient and
certainly not politically correct. Even regarding
Darfur, where there is an actual genocide being
committed against a Muslim population, there has been a
remarkable absence of protests, few objections, and no
massive coverage on Arab or South Asian television.
We are all familiar with the data that pour forth from
Western survey research centers and show an increasing
contempt for and hostility to the West, and particularly
the United States, in Muslim communities from Turkey to
Pakistan. The war in Iraq is cited as a reason. The
situation in Palestine is given as another reason.
So-called decadent Western values are often part of the
explanation. It is so much easier to blame others for
our problems than to accept responsibility ourselves.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Reconciliation
by Benazir Bhutto
Copyright © 2008 by Benazir Bhutto .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2008
Benazir Bhutto
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-164943-1
