Benazir Bhutto penned two books in her lifetime. The first, called “Daughter of Destiny,” published in 1989, was an autobiography of a woman who knew on the day of her father's 1979 hanging that she was meant to lead Pakistan. The second, “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West,” is her vision of how best to confront rising extremism. Ironically, it was completed on the day of her death. She sent the final edits of the manuscript to her friend and collaborator Mark A. Siegel on the morning of her assassination Dec. 27. In the afterword, her husband and children say this: “There was a reason that Allah gave our wife and mother the time to finish this book. This book is about everything that those who killed her could never understand: democracy, tolerance, rationality, hope and, above all, the true message of Islam.” Bhutto explores all those topics in “Reconciliation,” beginning with her journey back from self-imposed exile to her homeland on Oct. 18, 2007. She said then in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the only thing that will defeat extremism is democracy. That was why she felt the call to stand against President Musharraf, a former army general who came to power through a military coup. Throughout the book, Bhutto sprinkles references to her government - she was prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996 - and perhaps somewhat arrogantly suggests that not just Pakistan, but the entire region might have taken a different course had she been allowed to remain in power. She blames the resurgence of the Taliban, for instance, on Musharraf's inability to influence Pakistan's northern tribal areas and suggests she might have been able to do otherwise. The first chapter puts the reader in Karachi with Bhutto as she lives through a suicide bomber's attempt to take her life just two days after her return. After that harrowing beginning, Bhutto assumes a role of scholar and historian, taking the reader through an abbreviated history of colonialism and dictatorships that plagued the Islamic world. Equally adept at quoting Western scholars such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee as well as verses from the Quran, Bhutto argues that Islam is misunderstood in the West. That, she says, has sprouted flawed policies. The most spirited chapter in the book is her lashing of Samuel Huntington's 1993 essay, “Clash of Civilizations,” which sparked debate on the inevitability of conflict of cultures. Bhutto reserves her most stinging remarks for “clash” believers, calling their thesis a self-fulfilling prophecy that disregards history and human nature. She says their ideas about Islam are misinformed. “I fear that this work has actually helped provoke the confrontation it predicts,” she writes. Bhutto's agenda seeps through the entire book but if you can get past the fact that it was written by a former prime minister trying to regain power, it can be enlightening. She makes her readers consider nonmilitary alternatives to combating militancy - and does so convincingly. Bhutto was, after all, an Oxford-educated debate champion, the daughter of an executed head of state and the first woman to lead a Muslim country. For that she was admired the world over, but most particularly by women in the developing world who have not been afforded the rights they deserve. But she remains Islam's ardent defender, explaining how cultures and states have taken the Quran out of context as a tool to repress women. And she has harsh words for Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian who abandoned her own religion and became its harshest critic. In the end, “Reconciliation” is most amazing not necessarily for what Bhutto argues but because of its author and the circumstances under which the book was written. Her life ended with tragedy but in her last book, she left the world with hope. __
