Pakistan's Bhutto Plays the Gender Card

Nov. 11, 2007— -- While Hillary Clinton denies every charge that she is using her gender to give her an advantage over her male opponents, another aspiring world leader embraces it.

Pakistan's opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is fighting to take charge of a Muslim country now run by a military ruler. And she's playing the gender card for all its worth.

So far, though, it doesn't appear to be working.

Bhutto was warned last month that if she returned to Pakistan after an 8-year exile, her life would be in danger. She went, anyway.

"I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me, because Islam forbids attacks on women," she said. "And Muslims know that if they attack a woman, they will burn in hell."

Hellfire apparently did not discourage two suicide bombers from attacking the motorcade that met her arrival. Bhutto survived, but 139 others were killed, and hundreds more injured.

She used the gender card again on Friday, when her house was surrounded by policemen, barbed wire and armed vehicles, in an effort to keep her from holding an anti-government rally. Bhutto called out to her captors, "Do not raise hands on women. You are Muslims. This is un-Islamic." Her spokeswoman, Sherry Rehman, pointed to the show of force and lamented to reporters, "All this, for one unarmed woman."

But does Bhutto really believe being a woman will protect her from political violence?

"It's hard not to think of it as just wishful thinking," said Elora Shehabuddin, assistant professor at Rice University, who studies women, gender and politics. "I think she's hoping she'll be spared direct attacks because she's a woman. But for the people who commit these attacks, the fact that she's allied herself with one group or another is more important."

"I'm sure she's using [the gender card] as a political tool," Imam Yahya Hendi, Georgetown University's Muslim chaplain asserted. "And people on the other side who don't like her will use it as a political weapon against her."

Both Shehabuddin and Hendi said there's nothing in Islam that especially protects or targets a female leader.

"Islam does not have a position against women's leadership," Hendi said. He added that Islam treats men and women as equals, and points to the Muslim creation story as proof — men and women were made at the same time out of the same handful of dust. But he adds, "Can [Bhutto's] opponents use her gender against her? Yes, they can."

According to Hendi and Shehabuddin, Bhutto should be protected by a more fundamental Muslim creed. "In Islam," Shehabuddin said, "there are prohibitions against attacking innocent civilians — men, women or children."

Bhutto's gender didn't block her from serving as Pakistan's prime minister twice before, from 1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996.

"People elected her then because of her ideas, but also because of her relationship to her father," Hendi explained. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, served as Pakistan's president and prime minister before being hanged by political opponents in 1979.

For Benazir, Hendi said, "The issue of gender was not even a part of the equation." And, he added, she was herself ousted and tried for corruption twice, an ordeal she was not spared because she was a woman.

Did Bhutto play the gender card while in office? Her record on women's issues was not good.

She promised women voters she would repeal some of the country's most anti-women laws — like the ones about rape, that usually saw cases end with women charged as adulterers — but she never had the political will or influence to do it.

"As with most women who get to power," Shehabuddin said, "she had to play the boys game, and didn't have the power to change the laws, even if her heart was in the right place."

If Bhutto does have enemies among Islamic fundamentalists, though, it wouldn't be the first instance in which they justified attacking Muslims, whom they have determined to be infidels.

But Shehabuddin said gender is probably not the top reason they would decide she qualified to be in that category. "Dealing with the West" in a favorable way, she said, "probably trumps that."