by Banazir Bhutto, 2008, HarperCollins Publishers, New York

Banazir Bhutto finished this book shortly before she died in an attack on her car in Pakistan.  The book is an overview of the problems facing the Muslim world and its relationship with the West.  While placing the bulk of blame for the current sad state of democracies in the Muslim world on internal factions, she also cites many policy missteps on the part of the West that have contributed to this situation.

Despite the current poor relations between most of the Muslim world and the West, Bhutto shows that democracy and Islam are not incompatible.  She has a strong belief that democratic governments and processes are the only hope to stave off extremism and terrorism.

Bhutto focused mostly on political structure, however, and did not seem to contemplate some of the cultural differences between the West and Islam countries.  There are many aspects of Western culture that could make Western democracy difficult for many fundamentalist Muslims to accept.  In the United States, for instance, we have a stronger focus on the individual rather than the community.  The capitalist economic model we have embraced in our Western democratic model may not appeal to many Muslims who may be rooted in a more family or tribal-centric model.  Lastly, our popular culture seems to celebrate many vices that seem to be incompatible with the teachings of Islam: alcohol, drugs, nudity, etc.

Bhutto was educated at Harvard and references many of her experiences as a student there as being liberating.   I am not sure the poorest Pakistanis can relate to these kinds of experiences.  Perhaps some kind of modified, non-Western brand of democracy could developed to provide the relief from dictatorship and extremism that is so badly needed in the Islamic world.  To ignore the cultural issues and focus solely on political solutions may not be the answer.

I found the reading of this book to be extremely tiresome.  It reminded me of a term paper in college.  She definitely was passionate about what she believed, but it there seemed to be some difficulty in translating this passion to paper.

The loss of  Bhutto to Pakistan is substantial.  Given the state of affairs in that country, however, it is difficult to predict that she would have been successful in translating her beliefs and ideas into lasting change.