[Benazir Bhutto walks with her children (from left) Bilawal, 10, Bakhtawar, 9, and Asifa, 6, in the UK in 1999, Reuters, by Ian Hodgson.]

Former Prime Minister of Pakistan and first Muslim woman PM Benazir Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi at a rally in Liaquat Garden today, also the site of the assassination of the first democratically elected PM of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, in 1951.

I didn’t like her politically, but I am saddened at the passing of a precious human life in yet another act of senseless violence and mourning the fact that guns and bombs have become the accepted way to settle scores or get rid of people one disagrees with in Pakistan, in our Ummah, and in much of the rest of the world.

Adil Najam says it best at All Things Pakistan:

“At a human level this is a tragedy like no other. Only a few days ago I was mentioning to someone that the single most tragic person in all of Pakistan – maybe all the world – is Nusrat Bhutto. Benazir’s mother. Think about it. Her husband, killed. One son poisoned. Another son assasinated. One daughter dead possibly of drug overdose. Another daughter rises to be Prime Minister twice, but jailed, exiled, and finally gunned down.

Today, in shock, I can think only of Benazir Bhutto the human being. Tomorrow, maybe, I will think of politics.”

Inna lillahey -

I wrote that and the phone rang. It was my sister in Lahore, whom I had just spoken to an hour ago about the assassination. She called to tell me that my Dado (paternal grandmother) is dead.

She had a stroke nine years ago and has been paralyzed, out of her senses, and bedridden since then – this is an end to her mortal suffering. May God grant her peace in the grave and heaven in the afterlife, ameen.

I’m thinking about that house in Lahore right now, where my Dado – no – her body lies. All the people I look at as “adults” – my parents, my paternal aunts – are at another home waiting for the roads to open after Benazir’s assassination. So the people who witnessed her passing and surround her body now are my sisters and their four young children. With a new generation gathered around us, we are the adults now.

My Dado was the last of my grandparents to pass away…and in her passing, it feels like a torch has been handed on to us. The next deaths we will deal with will likely be those in our parents’ generation.

My six-year-old niece was the only child old enough to realize on some level that something had happened. She sidled up to her mother to offer her comfort saying, “It’s OK, Mama, my goldfish died and went to heaven. Now your Dado is in heaven with my goldfish too. Someday we’ll all be together in heaven with my goldfish and Dado.”

Insha-Allah, my love, insha-Allah.

Dadojaan, I’ll be praying and reading al-Ghazali’s poem, “Lord, I Obey Willingly” for you today. I love you and wish I could have kissed you one last time…I wish I was there to hold your hand when you breathed your last and passed over the threshold into the unknown that awaits us all.

May you find yourself freed from your paralyzed body, running in fields of gold, beautiful and young, peaceful and free in the protection of our Lord, meri jaan, ameen.

And may we meet again in a place beautiful beyond our imagination.

Inna lillahey wa inna illeyhey rajioun – We belong to God and to Him is our return.