Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West By Benazir Bhutto,
Simon & Schuster, Rs 795

This book was written in Benazir Bhutto’s final hours. She brought along the manuscript when she arrived in Pakistan after eight years in exile in October 2007, and she worked on the final version of it on the day she was killed. It is difficult to read the book without keeping in mind its unusual associations, especially since the passionate exhortations of the author living through another tumultuous time of her life does not allow the reader such liberties. But one wishes that the publishers could have escaped their grip, for the text suffers for the want of proper editing. It makes the author sound repetitive and even tiresome in places.

There were two ‘reconciliations’ Bhutto was working on during the time the book was being written. The more immediate one was with Pervez Musharraf, army chief and president who had suddenly become too hot a potato for the West to handle. The reconciliation was prompted by the General’s Western allies, who thought they still had a chance of retaining their best man at the helm if the popular resistance against him could be quelled by bringing in a popular leader as prime minister. Bhutto acted on cue. But she hadn’t fathomed the intensity of the public’s disgust with the General and the political risks she was taking by allying with him. A bomb attack later, she was railing against Musharraf with the same passion with which she had once countered Zia-ul-Haq. But the facts had to be laid straight for posterity. Which is what she has done here. She is honest about the parleys with the General which began in August 2006, and the crucial meeting with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, that set the ball rolling. Throughout the dialogue, she says, she kept London and Washington “briefed” (for their “voices in support of democracy were essential”), never seeming to lose her own agency in forging the change. Yet could she have been so completely oblivious of the grand design in which she was playing her part?

The other ‘reconciliation’, which forms the subject of the book, is two-fold. One, the West has to reconcile itself to the fact that its notion of Islam as being intrinsically opposed to democracy is wrong. And two, the Islamic world has to reconcile itself to the fact that the challenge posed from within it by extremists is more threatening to its integrity than the challenge from without. To prove her point, Bhutto quotes exhaustively from the Quran to show its democratic disposition. She also argues that a robust Islamic way of life has got complicated because of misinterpretations of the holy book and the machinations of the powerful. At the same time, she cannot help bemoaning how “the past is used too frequently to define modern Muslims, especially when evaluating their receptivity to democracy”.

She is not happy with all the changes in Islamic society though. “Islam is now being used for purely political purposes by a group of people who are angry with the West.” Zia is among such people. She traces Pakistan’s slide into violence to the singularly wicked gameplan of this General, who promoted the Pakistan army’s association with and dependence on the Islamists, and helped raise the mujahedin who have now turned against the Pakistani state. In tracing this trajectory, she mentions Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan, but not its politics regarding Kashmir (even that during her own time in office) which deepened the state’s links with extremists.

Despite her obvious sympathies, Bhutto is acutely aware of how the West has complicated the advent of democracy in the Islamic world. She deals with the history of the Islamic nations to show that more than Islam, devious rulers, socio-economic backwardness and a greedy, meddlesome West have corrupted the democratic experiment. It is a buoyant, hopeful leader who confronts past errors, admits to mistakes and seeks a way into the future. Her intention is to apply the lessons learnt in order to “shape and mould a realistic framework to reconcile the peoples, values and institutions of the West and the Islamic world”.

There is much realism in her argument that holding elections alone does not imply democracy. And that instead of concentrating on ‘secular’ governance (which is a “rhetorical trap” set by extremists to discredit democracy), the governments in Islamic countries should concentrate on the other elements that guarantee a democratic society — freedom to travel and to work, education for both sexes, greater rights for women, independence of the judiciary, economic growth and a healthy civil society. But the childish exuberance that is evident in her “out of the box” thoughts seems to get the better of this realism.

She proposes the creation of a Muslim Investment Fund out of the contributions from oil-producing Muslim states to spur economic growth in the Muslim world. But in doing so, she presupposes a homogeneity of political interests among the Islamic states that is hardly realistic. She suggests that the developed world should have a new programme, similar to the Marshall Plan, for the Islamic world. “When ordinary people in a country identify assistance [sic] improving their lives and the lives of their children, they bond with the source of that aid.” The attitude towards America would have been different in Islamic countries had things been as simple as that. She goes on to say that aid programmes should be direct and “personalized”, and holds up the example of the way in which al Qaida has cornered the goodwill of the people in Afghanistan. For example, by using a picture of Osama bin Laden looking down from the wall where nans were being distributed. Exactly whose picture she wishes to replace that with is not clear.

Bhutto believes that democracy needs “help” and makes no bones about where it should come from — North Americans, Europeans, Chinese and Japanese, who should “invest” in the Islamic world not out of a sense of “charity” but out of “wise pragmatism” in order to prevent a “clash of civilizations” which she herself dismisses as an unfounded fear. And she believes that a vibrant student exchange programme (that only a select few belonging to her class would be able to access) could allay fears about the West in the Islamic world.

In her sermons, Bhutto makes herself vulnerable to the same charges of elitism that she had to face when alive. There can be no doubt about the efficacy of her argument on the need to address the misconceptions and mistrust that are heightening tensions in the world, or about the West being culpable for Musharraf’s extra life in office. But one wonders if she herself could have lived out her grand ideals or reconciled with the West on the terms she lays down. Perhaps her husband will be more realistic.