Lawyers used to be called advocates, and while a good many were from well-known families and had great knowledge and experience, society at large saw it as an inferior profession.
However, two pioneers changed this and opened the way for hundreds to go into the legal profession and to feel proud of it. They are Ahmad Zaki Yamani and Abdel Rahman Mansouri. Mansouri recalls that his mother, upon hearing that he had received his license to practice law was not at all pleased and kept repeating, “Have you closed off all other roads?”
At the time Mansouri held a high position in the Foreign Ministry. He belonged to the educated elite and was a shining example to the rest of the country. His mother echoed most of society’s thinking at the time.
Unfortunately, she did not live to see the social changes that made the legal profession one of the most respected, or to see that her son had sowed the seeds of that change.
To be a lawyer became the dream of many with a degree in Shariah and law, so respectable that one could become a president, prime minister, a minister or a judge and still at the end of that job could return to practicing law, head held high.
Those who behave dishonorably should not be seen to lower the stature of the legal profession itself, for in every profession there are exceptions. Neither should the portrayal of lawyers in the Arabic cinema diminish the profession’s value in the eyes of the world.
Arab News Features 19 February 2003