Law Faculty Open Discussion held at DU
Faculty of Law, University of Dhaka organised the inaugural edition of ‘Law Faculty Open Discussion’ on May 8, 2017. The session was inaugurated by Professor Dr. Nasrin Ahmed, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Dhaka while Professor Dr. Rahmat Ullah, Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Dhaka chaired the session. The speaker of the session was Dr. Salimullah Khan, Professor of General Education at ULAB. More than hundred participants ranging from faculty members from different universities, university students and young professionals attended the discussion.
In her inaugural speech, Dr. Nasrin Ahmed lauded the efforts of Law Faculty for taking the initiative to host such an event. She reiterated that an educated person should be enlightened with knowledge from multiple disciplines; be it law, politics, philosophy or science. She urged the organizers to host more such discussion in the future.
Dr. Rahmat Ullah then addressed the participants saying that an interdisciplinary approach is indeed necessary to share and complement the vast knowledge of the world. He also remarked that law was nothing unrelated to the society and thus, law students being social engineers, needed to expose themselves more to the field of social science.
The moderator of the event, Syed Masud Reza, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Dhaka stated that, although this kind of discussion mostly related to students studying law, but it would also help students from other disciplines.
Afterwards, Dr. Salimullah Khan delivered his speech on the topic ‘Niccolo Machiavelli on State and Civil Society’. At the onset, Dr. Khan stated that his discussion would largely be based on Machiavelli’s treatise, The Prince and Anotnio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In his elaborate discussion, Dr. Khan extensively dissected Machiavelli’s treatise starting from how Machiavelli’s words transformed the political landscape of Italy in the 16th century and how he meant to educate the Italian mass on politics. He believed that modern politics was born from this treatise.
He commented that Machiavelli was a multifarious genius whose vision, as Anotnio Gramsci understood, was a unified and independent Italy during the Renaissance era. Dr. Khan talked about Machiavelli’s idea of secularism and his intention of separating the state from society and religion.
While drawing similarities between Machiavelli's protagonist, Prince and Marx's Manifesto, he observed that although both sought "popular" revolutions, in one case it had to be "national" whereas in the other, it had to be rather "beyond national" because of the class question taking precedence in the second case. He thus concluded that if Machiavelli could be the Marx of the 16th century, then Marx could also be called the Machiavelli of the 19th century.
At the end, Dr. Khan emphasised that to develop political consciousness, citizens should remain active and not become subaltern. He lamented over the fact that Muslims nowadays are subalterns in the UN and thus, unable to seek recourse for violation of their rights.
Law Faculty intends to host more such forums in near future to build a society based on rule of law and equality from the multidisciplinary knowledge gathered from these discussions.
The event covered by Ali Mashraf , the student of law at University of Dhaka
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