Pakistan has a very baffling relationship with the rule of law. Red traffic lights are a nuisance, double and triple parking is tolerated so long as a little bit of the road is left for cars to wind through, its simpler and quicker to bribe one’s way out of any difficulty — to name only a few visible examples. Yet everyone has their eyes turned to the higher courts awaiting their judgments.

Many freedom fighters who enabled the birth of Pakistan had a background in law: Allama Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, Abdur Rab Nishtar, Qazi Isa, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, I.I. Chundrigar, Fazlul Huq, and Khwaja Nazimuddin. Even Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan had an honorary law degree and served as a judge.

The failed 1857 armed uprising against British rule transformed into a sustained strategy of resistance, enabled by familiarity with British law acquired by an Oxbridge education, which also allowed a comparison between British law at home and colonial law in India.

So what is the law? And why does it matter so much? Humans, in fact all of nature, have always followed rules. Rules are enforced privately, such as by parents, office policies or rules of art. Laws are applied publicly to regulate and control the behaviour of people to maintain the authority of the state. A law regulates by fear of consequences.

Whether man-made or Divine, laws must strive to address the collective needs of citizens

The underlying principles of law are ethics and morality. Divine laws, as prescribed by religions, are considered to be eternal. Man-made laws may differ from culture to culture and are subject to change. Ensuring the rule of law in Pakistan necessitates revisiting laws inherited or adopted, to ensure they address the needs of its citizens.

In America, Judge Potter Stewart’s oft quoted words, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do.” Ethics is literally the science of morals. Ethics or akhlaqiyaat is used widely as a guiding principle for human behaviour: medical ethics, journalistic ethics, ethics of research, business ethics and copyright ethics, amongst many more.

Law manages the balance between human rights and obligations. Equality and human rights are fiercely protected human concepts while nature, according to physicist Marcelo Gleiser, “recognises no equality at any level of its order”, termed by author Boyd Rice as “nature’s eternal Fascism.”

Colonisers created laws for their own countries based on human rights, but created different and sweeping laws (or sometimes their absence) to control colonised people in another kind of fascism. The many protests of freedom movements centred around this duality.

In post-independence nations, the elite of those countries, as well as neo-colonialists, appropriated these laws to maintain their power and authority. As J. Edgar Hoover put it, “Justice is incidental to law and order.”

Most divine laws, such as Dharma or the Ten Commandments, are codes of conduct between people. The Quran widens the scope by appointing humans as collective representatives or khalifas of Allah, to maintain the balance in everything created by Allah. The Quran, rather than defining right and wrong in the modern sense of the words, uses the terms adl (the right compensation) and ihsan (excellence and perfection in the most beautiful way) as guiding principles. Since Allah created all things in balance, humans are tasked with maintaining this balance, using the gift of rationality and the burden of accountability.

The word shari’a literally means the fountainhead that quenches the thirst of living beings or the way to goodness. The ideal human has akhlaq-e-hasana (praiseworthy morals and manners). Through defining “rights” (huquq), temporal laws intend to establish peace, tranquillity and safety, a secure homeland, adequate shelter, financial success, thriving commerce, and lack of oppression. The law is above the state. There is no immunity to people in high offices. The accused is innocent until proven guilty, with the burden of proof on the accuser. No citizen can be ordered to commit a sin, a crime or an offence.

Unlike the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who determined humans have a “natural proclivity...to hurt each other”, the Quran states that humans have a natural intuitive (fitrah) liking for the path of righteousness, from which, it must be added, they are far too often misled.

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist.
She may be reached at
durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 20th, 2023