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 there. Relations between Bhutto and Pakistan's civil service also deteriorated, causing paralysis of many state affairs; Bhutto spoke of it as "Zia's bureaucracy" and her perceived anti-Punjabi stance impacted many civil servants, of whom 80% were Punjabi. In April 1989, opposition parties organised a parliamentary no-confidence vote in Bhutto's leadership, but it was defeated by 12 votes. Bhutto claimed that many National Assembly voters had been bribed to vote against her, with $10 million having been supplied for this by a Saudi Salafi cleric, Osama bin Laden, who sought to overthrow her government and replace it with an Islamic theocracy.