There is a passage in the introduction to Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography which best sums up her extraordinary public and private affairs. “Pakistan is no ordinary country. And mine has been no ordinary life”, writes Benazir. “My father and two brothers were killed. My mother, husband and I were all imprisoned. I have spent long years in exile. Despite the difficulties and sorrows, however I feel blessed that I could break the bastions of tradition by becoming Islam’s first elected woman prime minister. That election was the tipping point in the debate raging in the Muslim world on the role of women in Islam."”.

I remember that the election of Benazir Bhutto in 1988 was a cultural shock to the Arab world. Around that time Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi initiated a heavy debate with the religious establishment, debating a Hadith, one of Mohammed’s sayings, which states “God curses the people who chose a woman as their leader.” Following methods of judgement approved by Muslim lawyers for centuries, Mernissi showed that the Hadith in question was not reliable, as one of the messengers had bore false witness in a personal affair. As a result his word is not acceptable. Despite this religious clarification, the question of a woman’s capacity to govern is still being discussed. Unfortunately, the debate has never overcome the barrier of prejudice, and so no Arab woman has ever been able to run for president or prime minister. Even today women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive a car, based on truly ridiculous customary rules. The right to vote is a very recent victory for women in Kuwait.

This therefore begs the question: how did Benazir Bhutto manage to come to power at the age of 35, while Muslim women have been left behind? How did the mentality of society change? I think that an analysis of the cultural model as a reference is key in understanding both the progress and the retrogression of women’s rights in Muslim society. The successful political case of Benazir Bhutto shows that Pakistani people do not take notes from the Wahhabist Saudi model like the Afghani Taliban do, but instead follow the English or Indian path. Benazir had huge admiration for both Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has managed to export its model of society beyond its borders. The war in Afghanistan against the Soviets allowed integralist Arabs to militarily train themselves, mainly thanks to funds from Saudi Arabia. Consider Osama Bin Laden’s birthplace, or 17 out of the 19 suicide bombers on 11th September 2001. Many Arab intellectuals such as Alaa Al Aswany from Egypt, author of the successful novel The Yacoubian Building, point the finger at Saudi Arabians for the diffusion of Islamic integralism in their countries. In Algeria, suspected Saudi pressure is much debated in the enactment of the 1984 Family Code. This law, still in force, condemns underage Algerian women to being under male protection. It would be a mistake to put all the onus of ‘Arabic malaise’ on the Saudi model, states a book by Lebanese intellectual Samir Kassir, assassinated in 2005. However we need to admit that the state of cultural health is still in deep crisis.

The first challenge for Muslims today is to reconcile Islam with modernity, faith with science and traditions with universal human rights. Compared to other Islamic countries, Pakistan has managed to overcome part of this challenge to reach to important milestones. Firstly, it is the only Muslim country that has the atomic bomb, and thus in the club of the world’s most powerful nations. Secondly, the first woman to be elected as president was Pakistani and her name was Benazir Bhutto.

Amara Lakhous is an Algerian writer and anthropologist. He lives in Rome and is author of the book ‘Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio’ (Edizioni e/o 2006, winner of the Flaiano International Prize 2006 for literature).

Translated by Helen Waghorn