Who gets to define Benazir Bhutto?
What comes to mind when you hear the name Benazir Bhutto? For people unfamiliar with her life, it might be her most commonly attributed epithet ‘Pakistan’s first and only female prime minister’ and those loosely familiar with her economic values might think of her more as Pakistan’s Thatcher. Some will have first heard Bhutto’s name after her assassination. Those familiar with the Pakistani political scene might associate her with the subsequent rule of her husband Zardari or her son who continues to dabble in and out of politics without a fraction of his mother’s gravitas. Pakistani people who lived during her rule might remember her for her flagrant wealth and egregious corruption, whereas older Pakistanis might still associate her name with the legacy and rule of her socialist father. Grievances with her rule and moral standing included, the life and legacy of Benazir Bhutto is not dissimilar to a Game of Thrones storyline. Her dynastic outlook, her homeric rise and fall, the scandals, the setbacks, the assassinations — every component of her life seems more fitting of a sensational Greek tragedy than of a late 20th Century democratically elected prime minister. And yet, her legacy is muddled and people clash on what her impact really was. In this article we’ll explore some defining themes from her life, so you can decide whether they actually define her.
Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
I, as much as anyone, don’t like the idea of defining a powerful woman by the actions of men around her, but in order to understand why Benazir made so many of the decisions she did, we have to understand the role Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (from hereon, referred to as either Zulfikar or Z.A. Bhutto) played in her formative years. Born pre-partition into a generational wealthy family in what is now Sindh - but educated in the West - Zulfikar quickly rose through the ranks of politics, and continued working in government after the 1958 coup d’etat by General Ayub Khan - the first successful coup in Pakistan. Pro-China because of his affinity for socialism, when Z.A. Bhutto became foreign minister in 1963, his instincts lay with harnessing a closer relationship with the Mao regime. Particularly after the Sino-Soviet split, he became a vocal advocate of China at the UN and helped General Ayub strike up military and trade agreements between the nations. It was his tendency to see India as a bigger adversity to Pakistan than China that both annoyed US President Lyndon B. Johnson and eventually caused a rift between him and Ayub.
Z.A. Bhutto eventually established his own uncompromisingly left-wing party — the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which ironically has since become synonymous with the Bhutto family name instead of any concept of meritocracy. A charismatic orator and an astute political operator, Zulfikar delivered rousing political speeches to large crowds and rallied left-wing parties to form a coalition against the by now unpopular Ayub — a strategy Benazir would deploy repeatedly years later. “Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. All power to the people” he declared. He became President in 1972 and Prime Minister in 1973, quickly implementing sweeping nationalisation of industry and progressive workers’ rights reform. Regardless of the success of his socialistic ventures, Zulfikar Bhutto’s administration was remarkable because it was the first since the establishment of Pakistan to acknowledge the humanity and the need of Pakistan’s poor. And his commitment to socialist principles became a touchy matter for PPP officials when Benazir later took the party down the route of the trendy liberal economics of her day.
His devotion to the fight for workers’ justice did not mean that Zulfikar was always faithful to his ostensibly humanitarian values. You cannot mention the rule of Zulfikar Bhutto without also mentioning his role in Operation Searchlight — a 1971 military operation led by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to suppress members of the Bengali nationalist movement which resulted in widespread violence across East Pakistan and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Tikka Khan, the general that masterminded the operation later earned himself the title ‘Butcher of Bengal’ for his ruthlessness and indiscriminate brutality towards people in the Bengal. In 1971 the only thing standing in Zulfikar Bhutto’s way of becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan was Sheikh Mujib, leader of the largest party in East Pakistan, and so Bhutto unapologetically supported the Operation Searchlight, crudely labelling the Bangladeshi separation movement ‘the nightmare of fascism.’ Bhutto’s involvement with these atrocities was not looked upon favourably on the international stage or indeed by the Pakistani President at the time, Yahya Khan, who upon later reflections declared that it was Zulfikar Bhutto’s ‘high ambitions and rigid stance’ that led to the rebellions in East Pakistan. The 18 year old Benazir, however, took a much more favourable view towards her father’s position, going with him to New York to make Pakistan’s case to the UN security council. Zulfikar’s renown as a promising leader had been corrupted everywhere outside of Pakistan, and yet Bhutto would continue to passionately defend her father to her friends in the US and in London, naively lobbying for her faculty at Oxford to award her father with an honorary degree.
What ultimately led to Zulfikar Bhutto’s downfall was actually his appointment and subsequent treatment of General Zia-ul-Haq as the Chief of Army Staff (the leader of the Pakistan Armed Forces). Bhutto replaced General Tikka Khan with Zia-ul-Haq in 1976, despite Zia being the most junior of the lieutenant-generals, in a bid to prevent an hostile army leadership that might be inclined to seize power in a coup as General Ayub Khan had done 20 years earlier. Servile, uncharismatic, and unimposing, it seemed unlikely that the unremarkable General Zia would pose a threat to Zulfikar Bhutto the way more senior authoritative figures like Lieutenant-Generals Muhammad Sharif or Aftab Ahmed would have. Even Benazir was surprised when she first met Zia, later describing him as a ‘short, nervous, ineffectual-looking man’ who looked more like ‘an English cartoon villain than an inspiring military leader’. And the lack of regard for Zia was not covert. Biographer Brooke Allen describes Zulfikar’s ‘cruel, even sadistic streak’ towards Zia, calling him ‘Zia Ul-Muck’ and ‘Cobra eyes’ at parties. It was all the more shocking then, when in the early hours of 5 July 1977, Zia had Bhutto and his cabinet members arrested, overthrew the government, and declared marshal law in a coup amusingly named ‘Operation Fair Play.’ A cat and mouse chase ensued between Zia and Zulfikar and Benazir, both of whom would be repeatedly jailed and Zulfikar executed two years into Zia’s eleven year reign.
The arbitrary imprisonments, solitary confinements and sham trials over these eleven years must have stayed with Benazir over the course of her life. Bhutto had much to say about the reign of her father and the subsequent troubles with Zia that occurred during her formative years. But when it comes to defining Benazir Bhutto, it is important to remember that today people remember Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as Benazir Bhutto’s father, rather than remembering Benazir Bhutto as a mere continuation of Zulfikar’s legacy. It seems that, although Benazir built her platform on her father’s name and referred back to it throughout her life, she was too momentous, too consequential, and too novel to be simply Z.A. Bhutto II. This is most apparent when you consider this dynamic in relation to Benazir’s own children, particularly her eldest son Bilawal, who lurks in the shadow of his mother as he tries and fails to build his own political brand.
Her political and economic outlook
The most appropriate way to judge a former country leader would normally be their politics — for example Zulfikar Bhutto could pretty comprehensively be summed up as a socialist and a Pakistani nationalist. The trouble with trying to do the same with Benazir is so little was materially achieved during her five years of power, nor did she particularly care for the details. In an interview with biographer Allen Brooke, one of Benazir’s close friends Catherine Drucker describes her as, ‘bright but not a policy wonk type.’ To Benazir, ‘policy was something that underlings thought up…she saw the role of leader, I think, as being charismatic, as pulling together alliances in a personal way.’ Her actions and comments suggest she viewed her role almost as a leader with divine right to rule, perhaps guided by her fondness of Sufi mysticism and her belief of the exceptional status of her ancestral line.
This is not to say she ran her campaigns without agendas. She angered and frustrated senior PPP members, including her member of her family and close friends of her father, by rebranding herself and the PPP to keep up in a brave new neoliberal world. In an era when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan reigned supreme, Benazir found herself updating the socialist principles on which her father founded the PPP to the point where the name ‘Pakistani People’s Party’ lost all non-satirical meaning. There had been an optimism from the public when she was first elected, after 11 years of General Zia. But that optimism was not to last, not only had Zia’s unfettered borrowing at high interest rates left the treasury little money for Bhutto to play with, but she faced obstructions in the way of senior military figures and president Ishaq Khan. But her political synergy with her father fractured when it came to bona fide intentions with public spending. The little that tangibly changed during Benazir’s first term included somewhat success in privatising the industries Zulfikar Bhutto had nationalised and removal of the (very high) ceilings her father had put on land ownership.
Defence of Benazir Bhutto’s rule often cites her attempts at improving women’s right in her second term, when she created the Ministry of Women’s development, a bank which aimed to promote female entrepreneurship, and family courts with female judges. But this ignores her inability to remove the Hudood Ordinances enacted by Zia, which overwhelmingly discriminated against women religious minorities and resulted in female rape victims being imprisoned. Ironically, the unpopular Hudood Ordinances were only removed by another military dictator — President Musharraf — in 2006.
The vim she lacked in domestic policy, she did not make up for in her foreign outlook (aside from smuggling a CD with nuclear information into North Korea in 1993!). She had built up a network of friends and allies in the UK and US, including Peter Galbraith, who would lobby successive US governments to support Benazir in her weakest moments. On paper, she was certainly a sympathetic subject to much of the West, having wooed a lot of them with her autobiography ‘Daughter of the East,’ but this meant little to US administrations that were more comfortable dealing with stable military dictators. Not only were they irked by Pakistani efforts to become a nuclear superpower but were completely unwilling to involve themselves in the question of Kashmir, curbing much of what Benazir would have liked to achieve.
Her (husband’s) corruption — It’s not uncommon for politicians to misuse their positions for financial gain and redirect public funds into their own accounts, but rarely is it so protrusive that it earns them a nickname. This was not the case for Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir’s husband, who earned himself the label ‘Mr Ten Percent’ for his flagrant and frequent pillages on the Pakistani treasury. The epithet ‘Mr Ten Percent’ is actually quite forgiving in that it suggests Zardari’s tendency to yield off government contracts was limited to a tenth of their value. Zardari isn’t only known for being Bhutto’s husband, of course — he became Prime Minister after her death. But for most people, his name will forever be associated with mansions in London and Dubai and bank accounts in Switzerland over any substantial memory of his term as Prime Minister.
But Zardari’s profiteering ventures would have come to little success had he lacked the backing of his wife. Benazir’s supporters who might have remembered her father’s drive for justice for the working classes would have quickly become disillusioned with the idea that Benazir had the same commitment to any values. Extortion and bribery allegations ran rampant during both her first and particularly during second term. Both she and Zardari had been charged for corruption and conspiracy after her second term and though she was able to flee to Dubai, Zardari remained imprisoned for three years until Bhutto was elected for a second term and freed him.
What’s more, she not only ensured her unpopular husband was acquitted of all charges, but in the first year of her second term, appointed him investment minister, chief of the Intelligence Bureau, director-general of the Federal Investigation Agency, and chair of the new Environment Protection Council. She also gave various cabinet positions to her mother and family friends, to the extent that opposition leaders, not unreasonably, dubbed the PPP the BFP (Bhutto Family Party). This lengthy list of new titles allowed for ever more corruption and malfeasance to take place under Zardari’s watch.
By just 1996 — with Benazir having been in power for a total of five years — the couple’s total takings from corrupt practices totalled an estimated $1.5 bn, or almost $3 bn in today’s money. The same year, Pakistan was ranked the second most corrupt country in the world — quite a feat in an era where corrupt regimes thrived in the developing world. But whilst the public sector was being squeezed for spending and the middle classes waere being squeezed for taxes, Bhutto and Zardari paid no tax in 1993 and 1994.Had Bhutto’s government overseen any serious improvement in any partof the country, the couple’s misappropriation of public resources might have been palatable but the rampant inflation, higher tax burdens and rising poverty rates made it all the more scandalous.
The couple’s nefarious activities nevertheless made for thrilling investigative documentaries. One of the higher profile cases entailed French Aviation manufacturer Dassault paying Zardari and an accomplice $200 mn for the sale of $4 bn of fighter jets. There was another quite laughable incident where Zardari profusely denied ownership of the 20-bedroom luxury Rockwood Estate in Surrey, citing the homelessness issue in Pakistan as a reason why he would never buy such an extravagant property. However, when in 2004 an English court forced him to sell it and return the proceeds to the Pakistani government on the basis that it had been bought through corruptly obtained money, Zardari angrily demanded he receive the proceeds because it was his property.
The level of blame afforded to Zardari in the couple’s corrupt ventures sometimes shields Bhutto from the full extent of criticism. And though he may have been the one to strike the underhand deals — and despite the fact that the two would have likely divorced were it not for Bhutto’s insatiable political ambitions — it would be simply wrong to absolve Bhutto of any wrongdoing. Even calling her complicit seems insufficient. At best, she knowingly leveraged her power to make Zardari’s corrupt enterprises as effective as possible, and at worst she aggressively embraced and intensified a culture of profiteering and self-service in a sector where bribery was already the norm. Given how little she attempted to alleviate the economic struggles faced by the Pakistani people and, by the mid ’90s, how the power she held seemed useful only for making money on the sly, it is little surprise that she is rarely mentioned in both Pakistani or international media without acknowledgement of her flaws. I can’t help but think that, had she not been killed in 2007, Bhutto would have become an intensely-hated figure, even more so than someone like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Margaret Thatcher in the north of England.
Her brother’s death
It’s easy to look back at Bhutto after her death at her focus on her remarkability as a leader, albeit a corrupt one. But there are murky patches in her saga, the most outrageous of them being her brother Murtaza’s death. Benazir had four siblings, two brothers — Shahnawaz and Murtaza — and one sister, Sanam, who remains out of the public eye. It just so happens that the quiet Sanam survives all her siblings.
The brothers were both in exile when their father was executed by Zia. In 1977, Shahnawaz was studying in Switzerland and Murtaza was midway through a PhD programme, but both chose to put their studies on hold when their father was dethroned and arrested, focusing their efforts instead on the international campaign to free Zulfikar. But the supporters were few and far between — bar the appeals of a few heads of state: Valery D’Estaing of France, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Yasser Arafat of the PLO and Hafez al-Assad of Syria — there was little meaningful backing. Zia, abetted by the fact that US presidents Ford and Carter both found it easier to deal with him than his socialist predecessor, went ahead with the execution of Zulfikar Bhutto.
While Benazir remained in a cat-and-mouse chase with Zia in Pakistan, the brothers had other plans. In a world where a poster of Che Guevara adorned the bedroom walls of socialist youth around the globe, the Bhutto brothers found themselves leaving their ivory tower in Europe and setting up a rebel outfit ‘Al Zulfikar’ in Damascus, and later Kabul, to oust Zia’s military government. Descriptions of Al-Zulfikar range from ‘left wing terrorist group’ to ‘armed guerrilla movement’ but nevertheless, violence was a defining principle. Incensed by their father’s execution and hostile treatment of his supporters by Zia, the brothers no longer saw the passive resistance approach by Benazir and their mother in Pakistan as a pragmatic response.
Al Zulfikar was not an entirely successful rebel organisation, but they did manage to carry out what was then the longest plane hijacking in history. On 2nd March 1981, three members of Al-Zulfikar hijacked a PIA flight heading to Peshawar and redirected it to land in Kabul, where it sat on the tarmac for seven days while Al-Zulfikar demanded the release of political prisoners being held in jails in Pakistan. It was then flown to Damascus where some passengers were released and one, Major Tariq Rahim, was shot dead in a case of mistaken identity. The victim ironically had been a supporter of Zulfikar Bhutto. Murtaza later denied commissioning the hijacking, despite endorsing the hijackers at Kabul airport. The affair had rattled Benazir who felt the her brothers’ involvement in terrorism weakened her cause. Perhaps that was true, but in the aftermath of the hijacking, membership of Al-Zulfikar rocketed.
Their radical convictions aside, the brothers did not give up their cushy habits. Money still flowed in from their family lands as well as assistance from wealthy supporters, allowing them to continue wearing expensive fabrics and buying property in vogue places. In 1985, Shahnawaz was living with his wife and daughter in a flat in Nice and it is here that we come to the first death of a Bhutto sibling.
In July of that year, the entire family — all four siblings, their mother, and the brothers’ wives (who happen to be sisters) — arrived in Cannes for the first family reunion since Zulfikar’s death. During the few days they spent together, it became apparent that Shahnawaz and his wife, Rehana, had a disfunctional relationship and had had a falling out. On the morning of the 18th, Rehana arrived at Murtaza’s flat, claiming there was something wrong with her husband and when they arrived back, his body was face-down on the floor of the living room, dead from poison intake.
Whether the death of Shahnawaz, 26, was a result of suicide, being killed by his wife, or an engineered hit from an enemy we may never know. The Bhutto family and the French police certainly were suspicious of Rehana, who was in California by the time she had been convicted in absentia of not coming to the aid of a dying man. I’m sure some true crime podcast somewhere will relish the sensational mystery that surrounds Shahnawaz’ death, but in the case of the Bhutto brothers, his is the less dramatic.
In 1993 Murtaza decided to contest elections and his new wife Ghinwa and daughter Fatima went to Pakistan to campaign on his behalf (he contested in absentia knowing that the many legal cases against him by Zia would mean immediate arrest upon arrival). He won one seat in the Bhutto’s home region of Larkana — a less than a 5% success rate given he had contested in twenty-four — but it was enough. He set out to Pakistan in a presidential plane lent to him by Syria’s Hafiz al-Assad (Bashar Al-Assad’s father) but the Pakistani government humiliatingly denied the plane air clearance, so in the end Murtaza had to fly commercially from Dubai to Karachi. He was arrested as expected when he landed in Karachi and jailed for eight months in solitary confinement. Politically motivated though his charges were, the criminal charges of terrorism and treason (punishable by death) were not entirely unreasonable — having said that, you’d be hard-pressed in a country like Pakistan to find a politician who doesn’t have swathes of the population under the impression that they’d committed an odious amount of treasonous activity.
Luckily for Murtaza, he was episodically allowed to leave jail to be sworn in to the Sindh Assembly and fulfil his parliamentary duties. But the relationship between Murtaza and Benazir only spiralled from there. Murtaza had become a thorny issue for Benazir, not only because he had the edge of being a man in a patriarchal country (though her many interviews with US and UK media would suggest this was her main misgiving), but the fact that Murtaza had not been tainted by corruption and seemed far more sincere in his claim as Zulfikar’s socialist successor. Their mother, Nusrat, who had by now developed a difficult relationship with Benazir, lent her support to Murtaza, and had no remorse making pointed comments about Benazir to the New York Times and BBC in interviews like this one. Benazir removing her mother as party chair in order to name herself chairperson for life didn’t exactly ease the tension or loosen allegations of her dictatorial tendencies.
The feud was not only conducted using media outlets as intermediaries but became more direct, with Murtaza hanging a portrait of Zardari in the guest bathroom of the Bhutto family home and allegedly having his guards aim automatic weapons towards Zardari in passing vehicles. Benazir equally had police prevent Nusrat, Murtaza, and their supporters perform public prayers near Zulfikar’s tomb on what would have been his 66th birthday; police opened fire on the crowd leading to the death of one supporter and leaving numerous injured.
Life for a standard political dissident under Benazir’s rule was grim, with extrajudicial killings, torture and custodial rape the norm. So it was only a matter of time before in a September evening in 1996, Murtaza found himself and his entourage being fired at by snipers hidden in the trees on his way home to his Clifton house. Seven people, including Murtaza, were killed from the encounter. Within the hour, the street had been hosed down and the surviving supporters and witnesses were arrested and taken into police custody, where two later died.
Responsibility for the murder was flung between parties. Murtaza’s team laid the blame at Zardari’s door while Benazir blamed it on a conspiracy against the Bhutto family and accused President Farooq Leghari of involvement. The tribunal into the death conceded that it was unlikely that such a high-profile extrajudicial killing by the police would have been able to take place without approval from a higher authority, but ultimately absolved Zardari of direct involvement due to a lack of evidence.
So how responsible was Benazir for the death of her brother? In most people’s minds, Zardari’s involvement in the murder is almost a certainty. It’s also unlikely that Zardari would have commissioned the killing of Benazir’s brother without her knowledge, though not impossible. She was, after all, the only reason he was near such power and wealth. Perhaps we should be asking how much did Benazir stand to gain by the death of Murtaza? Though Murtaza was undoubtedly a huge threat to her political longevity, particularly with his provision of an alternative to the traditional Pakistani conservative or military political spheres that Benazir had not been able to provide, the idea of having a family member assassinated for political gain is so shocking and egregious that any benefit she might have gained from Murtaza’s absence would immediately be wiped out by the damage to her reputation that would occur from even the suspicion that she was involved. It was enough for President Leghari to trigger the Eight Amendment and have Bhutto dismissed as Prime Minister for a second time.
It seems to me that she would have had to have been extremely naïve or extremely hubristic to assume she would be able to have Murtaza killed and survive herself politically. Or perhaps with the tools of corruption she had lent to her husband, he had dug her into a hole so deep that she lost sense of reality. Regardless of whether Murtaza’s assassination had her personal blessing, Benazir’s approval and sanctioning of her husband’s corrupt practices became her hamartia — this was her last time in power.
Her death
By 2007, Benazir was no stranger to assassination attempts. She’d had almost a decade’s break living in exiled safety in London and Dubai, safe from both corruption charges and Pakistan’s latest military dictator, Musharraf — though it has to be mentioned that compared to Zia, the Musharraf regime’s domestic policy was relatively benign.
By mid-2007, Bhutto and Musharraf had agreed on a transition plan to restore electoral democracy in Pakistan with the help of US and UK ministers. In return for removing any criminal charges against former Prime Ministers, Bhutto would support Musharraf’s candidacy as civilian president. Almost a decade of campaigning against the military regime from exile had restored much of Bhutto’s popularity but it took a hit once again from the association with the military ruler she had been advocating against.
In the early hours of 19th October 2007, Benazir was on her way to a political rally to celebrate her return to Pakistan when two bombs attacked her motorcade, killing at least 150 people and injuring at least 500 — though Bhutto survived unharmed. Musharraf’s regime concluded that the Al-Qaeda group and elements of the Pakistani Taliban had been behind the attack, but Bhutto sent a letter to Musharraf naming four senior Pakistani military officials and politicians she believed were behind the attack. Despite the initial attack, Musharraf refused Bhutto’s request for the US or UK to handle her security detail.
As Bhutto left a political rally on 27th December, less than a month away from the elections, she had stood up to wave at the crowds through the bullet proof vehicle’s sunroof when three bullets were shot towards her and a suicide bomb detonated near the vehicle. It is unclear whether she died from bullets hitting her, shrapnel from the bomb, or from a injuries to her head from impact with the car roof, but she was pronounced dead about an hour after being rushed to hospital.
Her death was one of the most significant is Pakistan’s history; the losses from the political unrest following Bhutto’s death amounted to an estimated 8% of Pakistan’s GDP, and Karachi alone lost an estimated $1 bn of economic activity in the four days after her death.
So who killed Benazir Bhutto? To this day it remains unclear. Al Qaeda almost immediately claimed credit for the assassination but few people paid heed (they have a tendency to claim responsibility for any and every attack). The Pakistani authorities and CIA both regarded the Pakistani Taliban as the most likely orchestrators of the attack and one of the UN investigators said he believed it was likely an attack by the Pakistani Taliban, assisted by rogue elements of the Pakistani intelligence services. Blame on Musharraf tends to range from at minimum not arranging for adequate security, and at most direct intervention to botch her security arrangements. Zardari, ever the profligate power-hungry caricature, is to this day a popular suspect. Much in a ‘George Bush did 9/11' conspiracy way, it is perhaps the most sensational — and popular — theory amongst the general public that Zardari was responsible for his wife’s death. He did, after all, gain the most from her assassination — becoming Prime Minister when the PPP won the elections in 2008. As deplorable as he is, there is no evidence to link him to the assassination.
To some extent, her assassination sanitised her image. Her corrupt practices and inarguable incompetence as leader are more often than not blamed on her husband and instead we look back with rose-tinted perception of a stateswoman with flaws who was unfortunately gone too soon. Perhaps the fact that she returned to Pakistan hoping to oust a military dictator instead of living comfortably in Dubai has somewhat restored her reputation as a courageous advocate for democratic values.
Not a reputation that entirely holds up when you consider she is buried in a mausoleum she had commissioned where she asked the architects to use the tombs of Ataturk and Ayatolla Khomeini as inspiration.
In many ways her own self-importance and mystic belief in her destiny to rule were not unreasonable. She had amassed a huge following of loyal supporters from the day her father had been deposed, and managed to maintain a large section of that support despite being a woman and despite making some unfortunate decisions. Behind Jinnah, she is probably the most memorable leader for the Pakistani people, and the most recognisable to the outside world. Whether people look back on her fondly or with anger, she commanded authority and esteem in a way few leaders have since been able to replicate. Despite her glaring failings, she became a bridge between the Islamic world and the West. Her legacy is complex but remarkable and for that she is easy to mourn. And in leaving such a distinguished identity behind in her departure, she will receive the longstanding reverence she always believed she deserved.
