The Hulagu Khans of the legal community

Baghdad, in 1257, was one of the great centres of Islam. It had become a showpiece of the world and besides mosques, palaces and irrigation work it showcased the world’s first hospitals and also the marvel of the city, “The House of Wisdom” — the world’s largest library. It was at this time that Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, sent a message to the last Abbasid caliph, al Mustasim, to surrender and pay personal homage and a huge sum of gold as tribute or face demolition and destruction of the city. In February 1258, Baghdad was attacked and the destruction to the city was devastating. This resulted in the end of the Abbasid Caliphate and many historians believed that Islam itself never recovered from this trauma. River Tigris went red with blood but later went black with the ink as all the books from the House of Wisdom were thrown in it. The river stayed black for many days.

Fast forward to Lahore and our present day “Hulagu Khans of the legal community” who stormed Lahore’s Punjab Institute of Cardiology, demonstrating to us that 761 years since the Baghdad incident we have learnt nothing and despite being from a reasonably educated profession, can exhibit equally horrifying acts of cruelty — there was no Tigris to turn red and black but the soul of this nation blacked out that day.

Our heads bowed in shame because not even in the dysfunctional and failed states are hospitals attacked — yes bandits, looters and plunderers might do that but for the parhay likhay (educated) lawyers to do so only speaks of the extent of the moral degeneration of our society. What has gone wrong with us? There could be many evils in our society but the chief amongst them no doubt is intolerance. Moral degeneration is a follow-up to the intellectual degeneration as long before we morally degenerated, we had degenerated intellectually.

Reform of a society is not a business in which you have to break even and then make profits. Building a society requires intellectual investment and deep attention of the government and the state. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), a German philosopher whose philosophy centred on the basic question of the foundation of values and morality in society, stated that, “forgetting our intentions is the most frequent of all acts of stupidities”. We as a society have forgotten our good intent, the very purpose for which we decided to gain independence and live under a social contract as responsible citizens in a separate state.

The black coats in Lahore were not rioting for their own self-interests but for the interest of their institution, for the “taken for granted position of their institution” in society. The end mattered and not the means. The validation of their position in the society was more important to them and they couldn’t afford to be called losers. To seem black is alright because the colour of the suit the lawyers wore was black, but to “be black” and “act black” needed them to forget the honourable profession’s “good purpose and intent” that Nietzsche’s so aptly describes as stupid.

We cannot miss the political significance of this event and personally I cannot disassociate it from its “mother and feeder event” — the Lawyer’s Movement. Back in 2007, the participants and the leadership of that movement took it on themselves to make “substantial and lasting gains” for the society and the state. The removal of president Musharraf and the restoration of the chief justice of the Supreme Court were the stated aims of the movement but the byproduct was the undue “politicisation” of the state’s legal community, the torchbearers of our Quaid’s honourable profession.

Munir A Malik in his book, The Pakistan Lawyers Movement: An Unfinished Agenda, published in 2008, describes how the movement had four elements to its strategy. These were changing the mindset of the public, changing the mindset of the judges, changing the mindset of the political leadership and lastly changing the mindset of the military, bureaucratic, feudalist as well as the capitalist establishment. This self-assumed role of becoming the society’s mentor and becoming the “legal gurus” to change everyone’s mindset and mentality was not the job of the legal community. Even if it was it should have been discontinued after the culmination of the Lawyer’s Movement. But as the House of Wisdom was gutted in the Tigris River so was the soul of the legal community since its “political exposure” during the Lawyer’s Movement and now we find it attacking the subjects of the state instead of representing, serving and protecting them.

The Lawyer’s Movement resulted in the “politicisation of the Chief Justice” as well as the entire legal community which was beholden to various political parties that supported them and whose workers mingled with them in large numbers to show solidarity. That changed the status and character of the legal community in Pakistan forever. Their demonstrated street power to oust a well-grounded military dictator is a memory that the current discredited political leadership of the country can hardly forget. The lawyers today have their political backers and considering their past “road achievements” there are many political patrons with enough looted money to continue to avail their services to weaken the existing government.

The tamashas (political dramas) that we witness week after week are not nature’s doing. They are planned and organised events by the scandalised, disgraced and discredited political oligarchs and mafias that are doing everything possible to pull the rug from beneath the feet of a struggling government.

The legal community has announced a countrywide strike and is thus standing up to show its solidarity with the thugs and murderers of the innocent patients in Lahore’s hospital. The current trendsetters of getting away with anything in this country are still on the loose. Some of them are the “fuel-adders to the fire”. We actually don’t need a Hulagu Khan to disintegrate and destroy us. Our Hulagu Khans live in our midst and unless they are not held accountable and brought to justice they still have enough money and political loyalty to execute many Lahore-like events of shame and disgrace.

PS: Since our memory is short, here is a reminder of what justice has been served in the case of the 2014 Model Town attack.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 15^th, 2019.

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