Benazir Bhutto Born: First Woman to Lead a Muslim Nation

Benazir Bhutto became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim-majority nation when she won Pakistan's general election in November 1988, shattering a barrier that had seemed insurmountable in South Asian politics. Born on June 21, 1953, in Karachi, she was the eldest daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister who was overthrown in a military coup by General Zia ul-Haq in 1977 and hanged in 1979. Benazir was educated at Harvard and Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford Union. She returned to Pakistan after her father's execution and spent years under house arrest and in exile before the death of Zia in a plane crash in 1988 opened the path to democratic elections. Her first term as prime minister, from 1988 to 1990, was cut short when President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her government on corruption charges. She served a second term from 1993 to 1996, which ended the same way, with her government dismissed by President Farooq Leghari on similar allegations. Both terms were marked by tension between her civilian government and the powerful military establishment, which viewed her with suspicion for her democratic ambitions and her willingness to negotiate with India. She went into self-imposed exile in 1999 after a military coup installed General Pervez Musharraf. She returned to Pakistan in October 2007 to campaign for a third term. On December 27, 2007, she was assassinated in a gun and bomb attack after a political rally in Rawalpindi. The assassination, attributed to the Pakistani Taliban but complicated by allegations of state complicity, was one of the most destabilizing political events in modern Pakistani history. She was 54.