At the Crossroads of History, Politics, Literature, and Hope: On the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

I remain in politics, in spite of losing several members of my family, because, at heart, I am an optimist who believes that everything will turn out well in the end.
Benazir Bhutto


Benazir Bhutto, like every politician that rises to a position of influence and power, was a complex person. A life in politics seldom, if ever, leads to sainthood. That’s because those who choose to tread this path are constantly obliged, every single day, to choose the lesser of two evils, sometimes making the wrong choice. And Benazir Bhutto’s story certainly reflects this reality.

I’d been observing Benazir Bhutto’s trajectory for several years prior to her assassination. Yet what first drew my attention to the Pakistani leader was not her involvement in the affairs of state of her country, but rather the instances in which her life intersected with literature. And what makes her death particularly poignant is that, on a couple of well-noted occasions, Benazir Bhutto proved to be a staunch defender of a writer’s freedom of expression.

Nearly twenty years ago, shortly after she first assumed the position of Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, bowed to the pressure of a handful conservative Muslims in his parliament by banning the distribution of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in his nation. Following this example, the governments of Bangladesh, Egypt, South Africa, and Pakistan also banned the novel.

But the ban wasn’t enough for the more conservative Pakistani parliamentarians: they demanded that their Prime Minister do everything within her means to prevent Random House from releasing The Satanic Verses in the United States.

Benazir Bhutto, a graduate of Harvard’s Radcliff College, knew perfectly well that such a request would constitute a blatant attack on the First Amendment, and disregarding the consequences of her refusal, she never contacted the publishers. In frustration, the Pakistani politicians turned to neighboring Iran, and it was at their behest that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death.

Yet Benazir Bhutto remained firm in her convictions. Throughout the entire ordeal, and in spite of incurring the wrath of Muslim extremists, she defended Rushdie’s right to publish his work in nations where freedom of speech is respected.

And recently, in June of 2007, when the Queen of England knighted Salman Rushdie for his considerable contributions to British literature, Mohammed Ejaz ul-Hag, Minister of Religious Affairs in President Pervez Musharraf’s cabinet, expressed his outrage over the honor and made a thinly veiled call for Rushdie’s death. This time, Benazir Bhutto spoke out courageously against the threat, calling Ejaz ul-Hag’s statement “a disservice both to the image of Islam and the standing of Pakistan.” And what makes her stance all the more remarkable is that Salman Rushdie had been an outspoken critic of her governance of Pakistan.

But my personal admiration for Benazir Bhutto’s ability to traverse the borders between politics, history, and fiction started during an interview I conducted with the Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez over ten years ago. While discussing Julia’s most highly regarded novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, the story of the Mirabal sisters, murdered by Rafael Trujillo in 1961 because they dared to openly oppose his dictatorship, I asked which of the sisters had been the most difficult to portray. Without hesitation, Alvarez responded that it was Minerva, the undisputed leader of the group.

“Minerva wasn’t evolving well as a fictional character. From the onset she was too strong, too determined, and too fixed in her beliefs; she became a character without hubris, without a single weakness or flaw. And it’s virtually impossible for any novelist to make such a character believable.”

Finding herself stuck, a friend suggested that Alvarez read Daughter of the East, Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, first published in 1989.

“In that book, Bhutto describes how she became an agoraphobic while under house arrest,” Alvarez told me. “At that point I began to see that something very similar had happened to Minerva after her release from prison and during her house arrest. She, like Benazir Bhutto, became afraid of leaving the safety of the home and of being in a crowd. At that point, thanks to Benazir Bhutto’s account, Minerva Mirabal, as a character, became far more human, far less mythic, and thus possible for me to flesh out.”

And today, in the realm of history, like Minerva Mirabal before her, Benazir Bhutto was murdered because she believed in free, open societies in which citizens have a voice, in which they are able to elect their leaders, and in which men and women have equal rights. What’s more, the stories of these two brave women, Benazir Bhutto and Minerva Mirabal, represent a bold and fertile cross-pollination of cultures, history, and politics that should inspire all of us to keep hope alive for the sake of a just and free world.