Sherry Rehman, an official of Benazir Bhutto's PPP reviews Bhutto's book - "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West"

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The human mind is hard-wired to make linkages, but for those who leave their mark on history, every experience is an opportunity to take issue with fate. These are the pioneers of human agency, who suffuse their lives and actions with a compelling agenda of hope. In that light, "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West" is a magisterial account of Benazir Bhutto's encounter with all of the above.

Yet it is no ordinary book, because it was written by an iconic leader and politician who grappled with complex yet fundamental truths that shape our daily realities in a fast-changing world. Clearly, the shadow of history sits heavy on this leader's mind, while the yearning for change, both in the Muslim world and, of course, her beloved Pakistan, suffuses the pages with a passion that no adroit marshalling of facts or logic can ever do.

As the author of this testament from her grave, quite literally, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto has made a powerful argument for many things, like she always did, but two stand out as key to her theme.

One, that Islam needs to be understood for what it is, not what it has been made into by those who seek brahmanic power over its roots, its meaning, its exposition. In doing so, she goes back to the primary texts, like all fastidious scholars, to cite chapter and verse to bolster her argument. Her project here is to explain Islam in lay-woman's terms, to make its humanity and tolerance accessible to those who doubt its relationship with democracy and modernity.

These are not new themes for academics, both in the west and in the Muslim world, but they are indeed new for the depth they are explored in by a mainstream political leader. This itself is a marker or index of the significance of such a project for a woman who had returned to save Pakistan.

You can tell by its pages that she was a woman in a hurry, that she planned to save Pakistan from the fires of extremism and dictatorship, poverty and ignorance that had driven this country to the brink of a new abyss.

She links the Muslim world's failures to modernise uniformly, with loss of the knowledge edge that Muslim civilisation suffered by the 14th and 15th centuries. The lockdown on the printed word by the Ottoman and Mughal empires while Europe used it to power a new information revolution is rightly cited as a turning point in the regression of a once flowering cultural civilisation, leading the world in philosophy, mathematics and rational discourse. The end of innovation and the use of rational applications of religion in response to the challenges of modernity are what afflict the Muslim worlds's backwardness today, and MBB cites several studies in support of this thesis.

At no point, though does she tar all Muslim countries with one brush, separating them carefully by trajectory of development and colonial encounter and geographical location. And, more importantly, at no point does she exonerate any Muslim country from taking responsibility for their own experiences once free from colonial rule, nor does she see rapacious profit transfers to the west by extractive imperial powers as a reason to avoid a call to critical introspection.

Her second most powerful argument is about the west's ambiguous relationship with democracy outside its own shores. MBB minces no words when she says that the western powers, after the two world wars, have helped to wreak havoc in the non-developed world by trumping democracy in favour of their own narrow policy objectives. Again, she glosses over no detail in an encyclopaedic tour of developing countries' debilitating encounters with the western trade and security juggernauts. Calling the patronage of dictators a "strategic and moral inconsistency" by western governments, she seems haunted by her own countries' history in this fatal equation.

I call it fatal because that is how MBB sees it: her own personal and now tragic narrative is inextricably bound to the history and political vicissitudes of Pakistan. From one dictator to another, she sees them hitching the country onto disastrous courses. From General Zia's Afghan jihad policy to General Musharraf's coy Taliban policy, she sees the American patronage of dictators to be a ruinous course both for the United States's strategic interest and Pakistan's survival goals. Calling it "more platitude than policy" MBB dismisses this western policy of supporting strategic strongmen at the expense of democracy as both counterproductive and myopic.

And here is how Benazir Bhutto is different from any other leader in Pakistan. She has identified the twin challenges of democracy and dictatorship as the real and present danger to Pakistan's survival. She urges the west not to use its power to support dictators, and she looks for real solutions to the post September 11 clash of civilisations that only extremists and radicals from all cultures and religion seek. This book is really a profound manifesto of her beliefs, and her very real and urgent search for practical answers. She says "My premise from the beginning has been that extremism thrives under dictatorship and is fuelled by poverty, hunger and hopelessness."

She looks to the Islamic community to jump-start development, education, community development and gender empowerment projects. She looks to out-of-the box solutions, using several international examples to set up a Muslim Investment Fund to empower the growth and enlightenment so badly needed in the Muslim world. Always thinking like a head of government, she says in the last chapter, "targeted economic development can help reduce poverty and violence in Muslim-majority areas. Alleviating poverty is a fundamental responsibility of all Muslims. It would be far more Islamic to declare a jihad on poverty, illiteracy, hunger and poor governance. That is what I am proposing.

If she plumbed the Muslim world, she had not stopped hoping for support from other sources, including the resource-rich west. "Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracies can come from other democracies." Economic reconstruction can help the Muslim street around, so she wanted a Marshall Plan for the developing Muslim world, not a process of throwing money at the problem.

Because she believed so strongly in the power of human agency, she repeatedly embraces hope, turning our tired gaze to the light, rejecting violence, rejecting saying no. Much has been made in the global press of her reportedly holding Hamza bin Laden responsible for any future attacks on her, but anyone reading the fourth chapter will see that she is referring to information she was given by the Musharraf regime about the four groups who were out to murder her. She never said that she suspected those groups of an immediate plan to kill her. Her exact words in the book were: "When I returned I did not know whether I would live or die. I was told by the Musharraf regime and a foreign Muslim government that four suicide bomber squads would attempt to kill me." What she did suspect was a shadowy group in the security apparatus of Pakistan, with links to the jihadists of the 1980s Ziaist, Afghan resistance vintage. She describes how she repeatedly asked for security and police protection from the regime, but how she never got even her due as twice-elected prime minister under real threat, let alone a citizen of Pakistan who was asking for her fundamental right.

Despite knowing that she was casting herself in the path of all those who opposed her formula for building bridges she came back to the killing fields to challenge her opponents. She recalls how she said a poignant goodbye to her anxious children, saying: "Remember God gives life, and God takes life. I will be safe until my time is up."

She came back to drive out the fear of both dictatorship and extremism from our hearts. In trying to save her country, in trying to reconcile the world, she gave her own life. So MBB, you are not just alive and speaking of issues that are critical to Pakistan, you are alive in this philosophy of peace and reconciliation.

The writer is central information secretary of the PPP. Email: sherryrehman@gmail.com