Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi on Friday at the age of 54, restored democracy to her country in 1988 after 11 years of military dictatorship.

Her glamorous good looks and fluent English led to a sustained love affair with Western politicians and journalists, many of whom had known her at either Harvard or Oxford. For those with the standard Western prejudices against the Islamic world, she had the added assets of a pronounceable name and a tolerant religious outlook. She did not organize anti-American rallies or issue fatwas against best-selling authors (despite Salman Rushdie’s lampooning of her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel “Shame”).

She was seen to greatest effect on the campaign trail, where she was renowned for her hectoring speeches and raucous motorcades. In Pakistan, she was often far less popular than the foreign press made out. To her opponents, she was more English than Pakistani, more Western than Eastern. Her Urdu, although fluent, was ungrammatical, while her Sindhi, her family’s mother tongue, was almost nonexistent. Benazir Bhutto was born on June 21 1953, the eldest child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was prime minister of Pakistan (initially West Pakistan) between 1970 and 1977. Before Pakistan’s first land reforms in 1958, the Bhutto family was among the largest landowners in Sindh province. She and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, had two sons, Bilawal and Bakhtawar, and a daughter, Asifa.