Following the last news of today’s German TV, a group of Al Qaeda was quoted taking responsibility for Bhutto’s death. If the news is authentic, then Bhutto has been assassinated by Islamic terrorist suicide bombers of al Qaeda who cannot tolerate any woman being a symbol of gender equality in an Islamic society.
Islamists have largely proved to be the carriers of death and self destruction in the name Allah. What concerns Pakistan, Islamic terrorist suicide bombers are being brainwashed in a number of Pakistani Madresseh (Koran schools).
Once such brainwashed Islamists in power, they would brutally kill any woman who does not match to their cliché from Islamic women, as it was the case of two Iranian women, Zahra Kazemi and, recently, Dr. Zahra Bani Ya’ghoob in IRI’s prisons, who were killed under torture by Islamic authorities of Iran . A “bad veiled” woman can be harassed and legally punished by the Morality Police of the IRI in Iran; it goes without saying that Islamists with the same misogynistic norms and belief system in Pakistan would not accept a woman as a PM of a Muslim country.
We tend to forget that large areas of Pakistan and chunks of its population are in the sway of fundamentalist Islam. This killing is consistent with the ideology of such groups – either agree with their backward vision of the world, discriminating as it is against women and exclusionary as it is of non-fundamentalist Muslims or prepare to die. That ideology needs to be pulled up by the roots and chucked. Until that is done, there is little hope for reconciliation or progress in Pakistan . Since Zia-ul Haq’s coup in 1979, Shari’a (Islamic laws) was integrated in both social and judicial life of the country. Pakistani army is since charged with a series of mysterious killings of secular opposition in Pakistan. The army and intelligence community are the ones who want to keep the country away from secularism and democracy. They have been responsible for much of the covert activity that is responsible for terrorism.
While the death of Bhutto is sad, it dose not spell the end of terror. Political assassinations (including of females) are not unique to Pakistan and most innocent people in the Islamic world suffer from it.
What is unique, however, is how this tragedy is being portrayed by some as evidence that Muslim countries cannot learn democracy and are doomed to their backward traditions. It is sad how these eastern traditionalists along with the western pessimists or demagogues contain a spectrum from the Islamic to Christian fundamentalists and are only too eager to use a nation’s tragedy to air their prejudices and bigotry. It seems that these people are all too quick to jump onto the anti-democratic bandwagon.
