From the NYT Sunday Magazine “Lawyers’s Crusade”

Once again James Traub delivers a knockout of an article in the “Lawyers’s Crusade“.

In which he examines the recent work of Pakistani activists lawyers who are driving for a real, transparent and more importantly independent judiciary.

Prominent among these figures is Aitzaz Ahsan a constitutional lawyer and federal legislative.

I found this passage ineresting;

“People who knew Pakistan well were taken aback by the lawyers’ movement. Stephen Cohen, the Pakistan scholar, admits that he “misjudged” the country’s commitment to constitutional principles. In his 2004 book on Pakistan, he wrote, ‘While Pakistan’s Islamists have enthusiastically cultivated international ties and contributed much to Islamist thinking . . . Pakistan is an ideological ghetto, especially as far as its liberals are concerned.’ But there truly was a liberal tradition in Pakistan, buried beneath six decades of dictatorship, corruption and religious extremism. I was struck by the deep sense of embarrassment, even shame, that many Pakistanis feel over their political and economic failures, and their sense of resentment about being viewed in the West as an Islamic autocracy. ‘We are and very much remain,’ Ahsan says, ‘a South Asian Muslim country, sharing aspirations and history with India — due process, habeas corpus, mandamus, certiorari. We are not a Middle Eastern Arab Muslim country’.“

Thoughts???

(here)