Even Joseph Heller, creator of the absurd illogic of Catch-22, would have been impressed by the convoluted reasoning. A retired Supreme Court justice, offering his opinion on the suitability of judges belonging to the Qadiani faith – an offshoot of Islam that believes in the teachings of Ahmed of Qadian and which has been disparaged as blasphemy by the hardline Sunni orthodoxy – argued that they could not be good judges because they could not be trusted to enforce the Constitution. And why would the Qadianis be unable to enforce Pakistan´s (considerably convoluted and reshaped) Constitution? Because, since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto changed the document to declare them non-Muslims, the judge reasoned, Qadianis could not be trusted to uphold such a provision.
When Rafiq Tarar offered such opinions as his personal "Catch-22" for Qadianis in Pakistan´s Khabrain daily last year, he had already established a reputation as a crusty, conservative Muslim, who, in the 1940s and 1950s, had served in the fundamentalist Majlis-e-Ahrar organisation, a group so fanatical that they dubbed Pakistan´s Western-educated and secular founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, "Kafir-e-Azam" (Unbeliever of the Nation) – in place of his traditional honorific, "Quaid-e-Azam" (Great Leader of the Nation).
Today, Rafiq Tarar is President of Pakistan, the result of one of the most peculiar decisions of Nawaz Sharif´s second premiership, and is eager to describe himself as a "liberal Muslim" willing to treat women and minorities fairly. That is a claim few Pakistani human rights activists are willing to believe. "Before his elevation to the presidency, the former judge was not simply known for his orthodox views but was also seen as an activist reactionary," lawyer Asma Jehangir told The Herald magazine. Indeed, Tarar´s ascendancy to the presidency on the last day of 1997 was almost halted after he delivered a veiled insult clearly aimed at recently-ousted Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, saying that the latter was a "judicial terrorist".
But the more puzzling problem for Islamabad´s political elite boiled down to a simple question: Why Tarar? The new president appalled many politicos with his homegrown Punjabi style; some of them reported derisively that his family dried their washing from the roof of the presidential estate. Others were confused that a political unknown, regarded only as a lover of Sikh jokes and a favourite of Nawaz Sharif´s father Mian Mohammed Sharif (or Abbaji, as he is known), could rise so high. What had happened to the presidential aspirations of Senate Chairman Wasim Sajjad, Finance Minister Sartaj Aziz and NWFP political veteran Fida Mohammed Khan?