Muhammad Munir

Muhammad Munir (1895–1979) was chief justice of Pakistan from 1954 to 1960. After doing his master's from Government College Lahore, he joined Law College to earn his L.L.B. He started his career as a lawyer in Amritsar in 1921. He moved to Lahore in 1922.

He was appointed assistant advocate-general of Punjab in 1937, and first president of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in 1940. He was elevated to the Bench of Judicature at Lahore in 1942. He and Justice Din Muhammad represented the All India Muslim League on the Punjab Boundary Commission in 1947. The following year he was made the chairman of the Pakistan Pay Commission. In 1949, he was made the chief justice of the Lahore High Court.

In 1954, he was made the chief justice of the Federal Court, chief justice of Pakistan. Besides being the chief justice, he also remained the chairman of the Delimitation Commission from June 1956 to July 1958. He retired on May 2, 1960.

He represented Pakistan at the International Criminal Jurisdiction Committee in 1951 and was elected its vice-chairman. He and Justice M.R. Kayani were members of the Punjab Disturbances Court of Inquiry|Punjab Disturbances Court of Inquiry that was set up in 1953. Both of them asked the mullahs some tough questions about the rights of non-Muslims in an Islamic state and other issues. He is also the author of Principles and Digest of the Law of Evidence.

He invoked the doctrine of necessity, validating the dissolution of Pakistan's first constituent assembly. The assembly was dissolved on October 24, 1954, by Governor General Ghulam Muhammad, an alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University. He has been widely criticized for validating the dissolution, although some of the Pakistani politicians had called for its dissolution. Mr. Inamur Rehman writes in his book Public Opinion and Political Development in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1982) that prominent newspapers such as The Pakistan Times, Nawa-i-Waqt and Zamindar welcomed the dissolution.

Addressing a rally in Lahore on October 14, 1950, Maulana Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami, demanded the dissolution of the assembly, arguing that these "lamppost legislators" were incapable of drawing up an Islamic constitution. The Dawn newspaper on June 17, 1953, quoted Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a hero of the Pakistan movement, as saying that the constituent assembly did not possess any of the characteristics of a democratic parliament. He went to the extent of saying that the nation would overlook any unconstitutional action on the governor general's part if he exorcised the "fascist demon" and established representative institutions.

Justice Munir also wrote a thought-provoking book From Jinnah to Zia, arguing that Jinnah stood for a tolerant and secular state where Muslims and non-Muslims had equal rights. About the March 1947 religious riots in the district of Rawalpindi, he wrote that the Muslims were the aggressors.

See also

• List of Pakistanis
• Chief Justice of Pakistan
• Doctrine of necessity