Adil Najam
Today marks Dr. Abdus Salam’s death anniversary. (See new biography of Dr. Salam here).
It should be a moment of deep reflection for all of us. He would have been as great a man as he was even if he did not won the Nobel Award in physics. But we would have conveniently forgotten him. That he did win the Nobel Award is a source of cosmetic and hollow pride for many Pakistanis. Cosmetic and hollow because it is also a source of visible unease. Even when we acknowledge that he was a great scientist (after all, the Nobel Committee thought so), we are uncomfortable acknowledging that he was a great man whose significance goes beyond his science.
As a brutally honest editorial in today’s Daily Times points out, “we are scared of honoring Dr. Salam.” We must not be.
The Daily Times editorial says all that needs to be said; it is worth reading, worth thinking about, and worth quoting in full:
The tragedy of our treatment of Dr Abdus Salam
Dr Abdus Salam (1926-1996) died ten years ago. He was the first Pakistani to get a Nobel Prize in 1979. But he might be the last if we continue to allow our state to evolve in a way that frightens the rest of the world. Our collective psyche runs more to accepted ‘wisdom’ than to scientific inquiry; and even if we were to display an uncharacteristic outcropping of individual genius the world may be so frightened of it that it might not give us our deserts.
We are scared of honouring Dr Salam because of our constitution which we have amended to declare his community as ‘non-Muslim’. When Dr Salam died in 1996 he had to be buried in Pakistan because he refused to give up his Pakistani nationality and acquire another that respected him more. But the Pakistani state was afraid of touching his dead body. He was therefore buried in Rabwa, the home town of his Ahmedi community whose name is also unacceptable to us and has been changed to Chenab Nagar by a state proclamation. But that was not the end of the story. After he was buried, the pious, law-abiding and constitution-loving people of Jhang, which is nearby, went over to Chenab Nagar to see if all had been done according to the constitutional provisions regarding the Ahmedi community to which he belonged.
And what did the constitution say? It said that the Ahmedis are not Muslims, that they may not call themselves Muslims, nor say the kalima or use any of the symbols of Islam. The original amendments to the constitution were passed by Z A Bhutto, a ‘liberal socialist-democrat’, and subsequent tightening of the law was done by the great patriot General Zia-ul Haq. Thus both the civilians and the khakis had connived in the great betrayal of Dr Salam.
After the great scientist was buried in Chenab Nagar, his tombstone said “Abdus Salam the First Muslim Nobel Laureate”. Needless to say, the police arrived with a magistrate and rubbed off the ‘Muslim’ part of the katba. Now the tombstone says: Abdus Salam the First Nobel Laureate. The magistrate remained unfazed by what he had done but Dr Salam’s grave is actually the tombstone of a Muslim culture that Pakistan had inherited from the founder of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But ironies fly thick in Pakistan. In Jhang, for example, where Dr Salam grew up as a precocious child, the schools that he endowed with scholarships and grants now teach communal hatred rather than the love that he had in mind when he gave them his money.
Meanwhile, the Ahmedi community is under daily pressure and anyone with a twisted mind is free to persecute them.
Abdus Salam was born in Jhang in 1926. At the age of 14, he got the highest marks ever recorded for the Matriculation Examination in Punjab. The whole town turned out to welcome him. He won a scholarship to Government College, Lahore, and took his MA in 1946. In the same year he was awarded a scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he took a BA (honours) with a double First in mathematics and physics in 1949. In 1950 he received the Smith’s Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to physics. He also obtained a PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge; his thesis, published in 1951, contained fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics which had already gained him an international reputation.
In 1954 Dr Salam left his native country for a lectureship at Cambridge University. Before the Pakistani politicians apostatised him, he was a member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, a member of the Scientific Commission of Pakistan and Chief Scientific Adviser to the President from 1961 to 1974. Pakistan’s space research agency Suparco was created by him and it is only symbolic that a group of Shia workers of Suparco were put to death in Karachi in 2004 by sectarian terrorists. Like Dr Salam, a lot of gifted Shia doctors have had to leave Pakistan because of the state’s twisted policies.
Dr Abdus Salam got his Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979. It was a most embarrassing moment for General Zia who had “supplemented” the Second Amendment to the constitution with further comic disabilities against the Ahmedis. He had to welcome the great scientist and had to be seen with him on TV. Since the clerical part of his government was already bristling, he took care to clip those sections of Dr Salam’s speech where he had said the kalima or otherwise used an Islamic expression. It was Dr Salam’s good luck that one of the believers did not go to court under Zia’s own laws to get the country’s only Nobel laureate sent to prison for six months of rigorous imprisonment. Dr Salam then went to India where he was received with great fanfare. He had gone there to simply meet his primary school mathematics teacher who was still alive. When the two met, Dr Salam took off his Nobel medal and put it around the neck of his teacher.
Let us admit in a whisper that Pakistan did issue a stamp commemorating Dr Salam years ago lest the government come under pressure to remove it from circulation. It is also true that his alma mater, Government College Lahore, now a university, has named certain ancillary departments and academic sessions after him following a long period of obscurantist domination. But Pakistan needs to feel guilty about what it has done to the greatest scientist it ever produced in comparison to the lionisation of Dr AQ Khan who has brought ignominy and the label of “rogue state” to Pakistan by selling the country’s nuclear technology for personal gain. Can we redeem ourselves by doing something in Dr Salam’s memory on this 10th anniversary of his passing that would please his soul and cleanse ours?
Repost: This post was originally published at ATP on November 22, 2006, on Dr. Salam’s 10th death anniversary.
Dr. Abdus Salam truely is a nation’s hero and an example for all the budding scientists of Pakistan. It is indeed a shame how he was treated.
Bhutto and Zia I would say have been this country’s biggest and most influential terrorists, who culminated deep rooted hatred in the minds of people of Pakistan for their personal political gain. We are paying heavily for all their misdoings.
I’m neither honouring the person in question who made those claims (Mirza Ghulam Ahmed) nor am I advocating that you should do so.
I am however against the idea that only a ‘certified’ Muslim should be honoured. Especially, people like Dr. Salam who did so much for the country. I use the word ‘certified’ because these days it has become fashionable for people to go around trying to issue fatwas on who’s a Muslim and who’s not. Sunnis do it to Shias, certain Salafis do it to other Sunnis and so on and so forth. It leads to nowhere except enmity and ultimately, bloodshed. I think this mode of thinking needs to be scrapped and replaced with either dialogue or some sort of mutual acceptance.
When certain (and I do mean certain, not all) westerners do the same thing by not appreciating the role played by Muslim scientists, philosophers and other thinkers, in bringing about the Rennaissance, we are quick to criticise them. And we’re right to do that but we shouldn’t make the same mistake ourselves. This is a dangerous and simply tribalistic way of thinking that prevents us from recognising people who are humanity’s common heroes.
Isn’t it an insult to the Prophet(sallAllah u alayhi wasallam) that someone should believe in a Prophet after him?
When someone after the Prophet(sallAllah u alayhi wasallam) claims prophethood he is indeed insulting the Prophet(sallAlahu alayhi wasallam) And he is in essence saying that oh the message of the Prophet(sallAllah u alayhi wasallam) was not complete (not to mention the fact that this new claimant is a liar). So how can we honor someone like that?
@Uthman
Must agree with Asim here. Ibn Warraq and Firaun simply aren’t a good comparison. To begin with, neither are Pakistanis. We are under no obligation to honour some long-dead Egyptian or these runaways like Ibn Warraq. Yes, Ibn Warraq was born in Pakistan, but left for Britain and now considers himself British and a rather 3rd-rate scholar of Islam. Most of his rubbish criticisms, have been de-bunked by much better and much more knowledgeable people than him. The only audience he receives are from these self-styled “ex-Muslim” types and from these ignorant atheist/ agnostic types. You needn’t worry about him being “honoured” any time soon.
Secondly, neither can be referred to as as a virtuous or ‘great’ man. One was a certified enemy of God by his enslavement of the Israelites and wanton looting and killing of first-borns that he carried out. Building a few pyramids and other structures and the like will never excuse him from that. And the other spends his time spewing ignorant rubbish against Islam.
Dr. Abdus Salam did neither. He was a Physicist who made lasting additions to mankind’s knowledge (electro-weak theory) and someone who did Pakistan a great service by helping set up SUPARCO and even helped build up the much-vaunted Atomic Energy Commission
regardless of whether you consider Ahmedis Muslims or not, he was a Pakistani and all productive Pakistanis deserve to be honoured.
I think this “Uthman” character should be tried under teh Blasphemy law. According to him we should “dishonor” the Prophet’s father and the Prophet’s mother since both of them were non-Muslims. Naozubillah, how dare he disrespect and dishonor the Prophet’s parents with his blasphemous ideas.