Benazir Bhutto fell victim to the murderous misogyny of Islamofascism.

About 32 years ago, I met Benazir Bhutto at Oxford. We didn’t hit it off straight away. I made a fatuous but innocent remark about how our two fathers — hers Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan, mine Paul Johnson, historian and journalist — represented the pen and the sword. “My father doesn’t represent the sword,” she retorted, eyes flashing and nostrils flaring. “He brought peace and democracy to Pakistan!” He also helped to make Pakistan a nuclear power, but never mind. Soon afterwards he was overthrown by a military coup, tried, and executed. Though he did not live by the sword, he certainly died by it.

Benazir already had a degree from Harvard and had built a powerful electoral machine to ensure that she became president of the Oxford Union, the student debating society whose notoriety as a platform for the pretentious belied its reputation as a school of statesmanship. At all events, Benazir was the first Asian woman to run the Oxford Union, and what she lacked in oratory she made up for in force of personality.

Now she, too, has died, almost certainly at the hands of Islamist assassins. The murder of Benazir Bhutto leaves Pakistan on the brink of chaos. Those who warn that 2008 could see Pakistan collapse into a “failed state” forget that Pakistan has already failed once. It was the separation of East and West Pakistan in 1971, leading to war with India and the independence of Bangladesh, which brought Benazir’s father to power. This is an artificial country that has never known stability since its creation more than 60 years ago.

Yet the future of the Muslim world may depend on the direction taken by Pakistan, with its burgeoning population of up to 170 million (nobody knows the true number). Most Pakistanis want the benefits of belonging to the West and cling to the notion that democracy in Pakistan is fundamentally sound, despite the fact that the country has been ruled by military dictators for much of its short history.

Resentment of American influence is widespread, despite more than $10 billion in U.S. aid since September 11. Even before the present crisis, President Musharraf was struggling to keep the lid on this seething cauldron of a country.

I cannot pretend that Benazir Bhutto, brave as she was, would necessarily have known how to handle the situation if she had won the election. Her previous terms of office between 1988 and 1990 and 1993 and 1996 were not exactly advertisements for democracy and the rule of law, although Pakistan then faced nothing like today’s jihadist threat.

At least her 19-year-old son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, now in his first year at Oxford, does not pretend that he can succeed where she failed.

Having inherited the poisoned chalice from her mother, Bilawal has wisely chosen to remain in Oxford until he completes his degree in 2010. The university is taking advice about how to guarantee his security: there is no shortage of potential assassins among more than a million people of Pakistani descent in Britain.

Yes, things have changed beyond recognition since I studied alongside Benazir at Oxford in the mid-1970s. But the fact that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is at Oxford has not changed, and that gives me hope. True: my alma mater now finds room on its teaching staff for the likes of Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and apologist for Sharia law, and Tom Paulin, who once suggested that Israeli settlers from Brooklyn deserved to be shot.

But Oxford still represents the best of the West, and it is gratifying that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is majoring in history. He will come to know, and I hope to love, the Judaeo-Christian civilization that many of his fellow countrymen would dearly obliterate.

The immediate future of Pakistan does not, however, depend on this youth, but on President Musharraf. He is inevitably shouldering much of the blame for Benazir’s murder: to say that her security was quite inadequate seems an understatement. Yet it is dangerous to encourage conspiracy theories that accuse him of complicity in her death, as Hillary Clinton has done.

It is also premature to write him off. Mr. Musharraf has renounced his post as commander in chief, but as long as he commands the loyalty of the army — the one institution in Pakistan that enjoys general respect — he is indispensable to America and Britain, the only two Western powers that count in Pakistan.

Benazir’s epitaph might be her words in an interview on CBS television back in 1986, when she was living in exile in London: “Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.” She was speaking of General Zia-ul-Haq, the dictator who had hanged her father and under whose rule Pakistan came under the influence of radical Muslim clerics. But it was her own father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who renamed Pakistan an “Islamic Republic.” Once unleashed, jihad is more powerful than any dictator.

In the end, the Islamists did her in. A woman prime minister, especially a Western-educated woman like Benazir, was an anathema to them. Never has the murderous misogyny of Islamofascism been more vividly demonstrated than in her assassination.

If Muslim women, not only in Pakistan but everywhere, now see the fate that awaits them if the jihadists gain power, then Benazir Bhutto will not have died in vain.