Benazir Bhutto whom she was a champion of democracy and women's rights. Bhutto was born on 21 June 1953 in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Her father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani, of Iranian Kurdish parentage. Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State. The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh. They were Sunni Muslims, although Nusrat had been born into a Shia Muslim family before converting to Sunnism on her marriage. The couple had married in September 1951, and
Benazir Bhutto political leaders who had been able to "assume the iconic status of a political martyr in the West while simultaneously evoking strong sentiments in the Muslim world." He therefore contrasted her with contemporaries like Iraq's Saddam Hussein who were popular domestically but hated in the West, and those like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak who curried favour with Western governments while alienating their domestic audience. Comparisons were often made between Bhutto and the Filipino political leader Corazon Aquino who also spent time in exile. Within the Islamic world, Bhutto was often regarded as "a genuine Muslim political leader" and recognised as the