Pakistan: A Shezan a day, keeps the mullah-cult away
The photos and videos of black-suited lawyers high-fiving, kissing and garlanding a killer in the courthouse last year are still flashing wherever extremism and militancy in Pakistan are discussed.
Some of my friends and acquaintances have decided to turn the latest bit of the anti-Ahmadiyya hate campaign in Pakistan on its head. They are educated people who believe they know how to deal with another kind of 'educated' class.
When a small but noisy association of bigoted lawyers banned products made by a minority-owned business from courthouses in the capital of Pakistan, the absurdity of the action was immediately clear to most observers, except to the lawyers themselves.
The action taken by a supposed ‘educated group’ of lawyers was purely on the basis of the product-owner’s faith, an idea borrowed from the dark ages. Some of the leaders of the lawyers' group are also, it seems, borrowed from the dark ages. They, despite being 'educated,' belong to the most extremist religious factions in Pakistan, such as Khatma-e Nubuwwat Majlis and Sunni Itehadi groups, allegedly in partnership with the Jama'at-ud Dawa terrorist group.
Shezan, the product under the lawyers’ wrath is loved by million; and with so many childhood memories of the growing-up years attached to the popular fruit drinks, many have decried this so-called educated class’ jihalat, or stupidity.
My friends are using the ‘banned’ product's logo to eliminate hate; and the tagline of their effort reads, appropriately, “Stop Hatred, Drink Shezan.” And, in the process, I hope they just might succeed in driving away some religious extremism.
But on a serious note, when about one hundred lawyers of the Lahore Bar Association, resolved to ban the Ahmadi-owned Shezan drinks and other food products from the court complexes, the news traveled instantaneously to the civilized world making Pakistani lawyers – once again - poster children exemplifying conduct unbecoming of legal professionals.
This is the lot considered to be educated and expected to be open-minded; a combination that can entitle one to be called enlightened. I guess not. Not in the today's Pakistani lawyers’ case who once earned fame for unsettling a dictator.
The creditability earned by the Lawyers' Movement (also sometimes known as ‘black coats’) for restoration of the Pakistani judiciary and their help in weakening of the General Musharraf’s grip on power in their 2007 and 2008 struggle was quickly squandered away when, as many have pronounced, the success started to get to their ‘big egoistic heads’.
After the judiciary was apparently restored, black coasts were routinely seen attacking policemen, breaking through police barricades, abusing court and domestic staff, forcibly freeing criminals, and worst yet, standing in to protect religiously-influenced killers.
With this recent act of thuggery by the same lawyers - coming at the heels of their infamous display of love for killer Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered a popular progressive-minded governor of the Punjab Province of Pakistan - the entire legal profession of Pakistan is now further casted under the suspicion of unprofessionalism.
The dilemma about to be faced by Pakistani legal ‘professionals’ is somehow still not very evident to their own rank and file. It has recently started to get amplified where the ill-decisions of Pakistani judges, lack of quality in the Pakistani judicial process, and corruption in their practice of law - even at the lowest level - is now becoming a part of the discussions in many law school class rooms around the world and making its way into legal curriculums.
There are bad governments that are discussed as part of the political science curriculums in schools around the world; there are bad armies that are honed-in on in military school discussions; and now, I am afraid, the Pakistani judiciary is about to join the ‘bad’ lot as a subject matter in world schools.
Shame on those who defile the name of their profession and its elders.
And, kudos to Naeem Sabir, Atif Ahmad, Kashif Chaudhry, M. Rafi and Saira N. for growing up on Shezan.
-- Mission Self-destruct | Profession of Law in Pakistan
-- Ahmadiyya Times | Editorial
February 13, 2012
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