Who Was the First Woman to Lead any Muslim State

Benazir Bhutto became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state and was also Pakistan's first (and thus far, only) female prime minister. Born in the Pakistani Sindhi family in the house of former prime minister of Pakistan, Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on 21 June 1953, she was also the first woman in Pakistan to head a major political party.         At age 16 she left her homeland to study at Harvard's Radcliffe College. Bhutto was raised to speak both English and Urdu. Despite her family being Sindhi speakers, her Sindhi skills were almost non-existent.  After completing her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe she studied at England's Oxford University, where she was awarded a second degree in 1977. She married a wealthy landowner, Asif Ali Zardari, in Karachi on December 18, 1987. The couple had three children: son Bilawal and two daughters, Bakhtawar and Aseefa.         She was elected co-chairwoman of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) along with her mother, and when free elections were finally held in 1988, she herself became Prime Minister. At 35, she was one of the youngest chief executives in the world, and the first woman to serve as prime minister in an Islamic country.         Bhutto was killed when an assassin fired shots on December 27, 2007. Before that she was leaving PPP's last rally in the city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008. The attack also killed 28 others and wounded at least another 100. The following year, she was named one of seven winners of the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights