A genius, a lordship Murshed by name
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Nurul Momen in remembrance on the occasion of his birth anniversary
To be a genius, a person has to have exalted intellectual power; instinctive, extraordinary, creative, and imaginative faculty. Late Chief Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed was undoubtedly one.
And if lordship means, in the dictionary sense, to have a lord's personality, then Murshed was undoubtedly one for the fact that his qualities of head and heart were such as to make the people around him regard him as a person towering far above others.
It is said nothing succeeds like success about a man when he is considered most successful in his life. That means when a man is as successful as he ever was expected to be all adverse speculations about him are set at rest, as nobody having any practical sense dares to comment, in any prejudicial manner, upon his success which is taken for granted. And more so after his death, as success stays finally at the height he achieves at his death and there remains nothing to detract from it after his death.
The success Chief Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed achieved during his life, scintillated till the time of his death. Therefore, it is no wonder that people now find such unsurpassing qualities in him, like they do in the retrospective in all such successful persons. It may be said, in other words, if Chief Justice Murshed were less successful, people who did not know him intimately would have regarded him as possessing less of those qualities, which they found he was endowed with by the measure of the big success he had to his credit.
But any person, who knew him intimately when he was young, could easily foretell this future for him to come, almost with the exactitude as it finally came. If he had achieved a success less than what he had, that person would have considered it was a sad deviation from the normal expectation of his achievement.
And I am one who knew Murshed from the days we had been together in Calcutta reading law and attending post-graduate classes and practicing in the Calcutta High Court almost for a decade. We became very close, specially for the fact that our ideas and thoughts were mostly common and agreeable to each other.
If I ever differed from Murshed on anything more than anything else, it was on the style of writing English. He chose to write in a literary style punctuated by dashes here and there to give it a classical flavour. His judgments therefore, read as those of Justice Ashutosh Mukerjee which are taken as brilliant judgments written in a classical style. My style on the contrary was and is still today a very uninvolved and common place one, undisturbed by any thought of making it literary, for the fear that it would be so foreign to my nature that I would be lost in it. If I were a judge of any court my style of writing the judgments would have been perhaps like that of Justice Denning whose judgments happened to be written in a very much terse and matter of fact way.
Any way, I found Murshed a genius par excellence. So when I left my practice after 10 years at Calcutta High Court to join the Dhaka University, I left Murshed, my friend and colleague, with full confidence that he would one day adorn the Bench, though so much as to hope it for a Muslim in pre-partition days was hoping against hope.
With Pakistan coming into being, Murshed transferred his practice to Dhaka. I got a little scared about him, in the way I got for myself. I joined the Dhaka University before partition after a sort of a miracle that happened in my case to shift my ambition to work in another field; the field of literature. My first writing ever, a play 'Rupantar' published in an Ananda Bazar Puja special, where only the writings of doyens of literature of long standing used to be accepted, created such a furore that I became famous overnight. And naturally I found a lectureship in the Dhaka University to be respectable enough to accept in lieu of the legal practice at the Calcutta High Court, and convenient enough to get myself going with my literary efforts undisturbed.
But immediately after I joined the Dhaka University, Pakistan was created. New writers who were non-entities in the then Bengal got so prominent here overnight and such lots of literary papers started coming out from every nook and corner of the country supplying writings so thick that I was at the beginning about to get lost in the crowd, in the field of literature. And I think Murshed's case was the same in the beginning.
The eminence he had already achieved for himself in the Calcutta High Court got short of fizzled out, and he had to start anew to establish himself in a zone far away from his home and centre of activities. But thanks to his genius, he managed to put his best foot foremost and go forward in a way all Murshed did in the past and would do in the future.
In short, he had the guts, the patience, the sympathy for the clients and their causes, the intelligence made sharper by relevant studies of law and the spirit of taking boldly the advantage of any rightful opportunity offering itself. These are the qualities of any lawyer to shine. And these qualities Murshed had not only aplenty for himself but also enough to spare for this juniors.
Anybody in the past who had these qualities had shone, and anybody in the future who would have them like he had would shine. That lesson above any other thing he had left as a legacy for young lawyers to go by. Even without the holding the highest judicial post, Murshed would have lived on his writings merely for the vigour of his own style and penetrating thoughts, had he ever wielded his pen with that end in view.
It does not matter if he had not; still some of his classical judgments likely to be constantly referred to, as pointed out by Justice Abdur Rahman Chowdhury, will be treated 'as a rich legacy', for those who believe in truth and justice.
And if reasoning of the judgments is to show not only that "justice is done but must appear to be done", then those judgments become as powerfully universal, that any person from whom they proceed is undoubtedly a genius and a lordship thought he may accidentally be a Murshed by name.
Late Nurul Momen was a Professor of the University of Dhaka
To be a genius, a person has to have exalted intellectual power; instinctive, extraordinary, creative, and imaginative faculty. Late Chief Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed was undoubtedly one.
And if lordship means, in the dictionary sense, to have a lord's personality, then Murshed was undoubtedly one for the fact that his qualities of head and heart were such as to make the people around him regard him as a person towering far above others.
It is said nothing succeeds like success about a man when he is considered most successful in his life. That means when a man is as successful as he ever was expected to be all adverse speculations about him are set at rest, as nobody having any practical sense dares to comment, in any prejudicial manner, upon his success which is taken for granted. And more so after his death, as success stays finally at the height he achieves at his death and there remains nothing to detract from it after his death.
The success Chief Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed achieved during his life, scintillated till the time of his death. Therefore, it is no wonder that people now find such unsurpassing qualities in him, like they do in the retrospective in all such successful persons. It may be said, in other words, if Chief Justice Murshed were less successful, people who did not know him intimately would have regarded him as possessing less of those qualities, which they found he was endowed with by the measure of the big success he had to his credit.
But any person, who knew him intimately when he was young, could easily foretell this future for him to come, almost with the exactitude as it finally came. If he had achieved a success less than what he had, that person would have considered it was a sad deviation from the normal expectation of his achievement.
And I am one who knew Murshed from the days we had been together in Calcutta reading law and attending post-graduate classes and practicing in the Calcutta High Court almost for a decade. We became very close, specially for the fact that our ideas and thoughts were mostly common and agreeable to each other.
If I ever differed from Murshed on anything more than anything else, it was on the style of writing English. He chose to write in a literary style punctuated by dashes here and there to give it a classical flavour. His judgments therefore, read as those of Justice Ashutosh Mukerjee which are taken as brilliant judgments written in a classical style. My style on the contrary was and is still today a very uninvolved and common place one, undisturbed by any thought of making it literary, for the fear that it would be so foreign to my nature that I would be lost in it. If I were a judge of any court my style of writing the judgments would have been perhaps like that of Justice Denning whose judgments happened to be written in a very much terse and matter of fact way.
Any way, I found Murshed a genius par excellence. So when I left my practice after 10 years at Calcutta High Court to join the Dhaka University, I left Murshed, my friend and colleague, with full confidence that he would one day adorn the Bench, though so much as to hope it for a Muslim in pre-partition days was hoping against hope.
With Pakistan coming into being, Murshed transferred his practice to Dhaka. I got a little scared about him, in the way I got for myself. I joined the Dhaka University before partition after a sort of a miracle that happened in my case to shift my ambition to work in another field; the field of literature. My first writing ever, a play 'Rupantar' published in an Ananda Bazar Puja special, where only the writings of doyens of literature of long standing used to be accepted, created such a furore that I became famous overnight. And naturally I found a lectureship in the Dhaka University to be respectable enough to accept in lieu of the legal practice at the Calcutta High Court, and convenient enough to get myself going with my literary efforts undisturbed.
But immediately after I joined the Dhaka University, Pakistan was created. New writers who were non-entities in the then Bengal got so prominent here overnight and such lots of literary papers started coming out from every nook and corner of the country supplying writings so thick that I was at the beginning about to get lost in the crowd, in the field of literature. And I think Murshed's case was the same in the beginning.
The eminence he had already achieved for himself in the Calcutta High Court got short of fizzled out, and he had to start anew to establish himself in a zone far away from his home and centre of activities. But thanks to his genius, he managed to put his best foot foremost and go forward in a way all Murshed did in the past and would do in the future.
In short, he had the guts, the patience, the sympathy for the clients and their causes, the intelligence made sharper by relevant studies of law and the spirit of taking boldly the advantage of any rightful opportunity offering itself. These are the qualities of any lawyer to shine. And these qualities Murshed had not only aplenty for himself but also enough to spare for this juniors.
Anybody in the past who had these qualities had shone, and anybody in the future who would have them like he had would shine. That lesson above any other thing he had left as a legacy for young lawyers to go by. Even without the holding the highest judicial post, Murshed would have lived on his writings merely for the vigour of his own style and penetrating thoughts, had he ever wielded his pen with that end in view.
It does not matter if he had not; still some of his classical judgments likely to be constantly referred to, as pointed out by Justice Abdur Rahman Chowdhury, will be treated 'as a rich legacy', for those who believe in truth and justice.
And if reasoning of the judgments is to show not only that "justice is done but must appear to be done", then those judgments become as powerfully universal, that any person from whom they proceed is undoubtedly a genius and a lordship thought he may accidentally be a Murshed by name.
Late Nurul Momen was a Professor of the University of Dhaka