Abdus Salam’s Face Blackened: Pakistan Mistreats Its Religious Minorities
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
07 Nov 2020
WHEN our
prime minister lectures Europe about Islamophobia, the world snickers. Forced
conversions? Lynching by enraged mobs? Having to curse another religion’s
founder prior to applying for a Pakistani passport? Discrimination is built
into our laws: Pakistan’s Constitution explicitly excludes non-Muslims from
full citizenship. For multiple reasons every human rights listing puts Pakistan
close to the bottom.
Prof Abdus Salam’s face
blackened
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Very
recently a group of abuse-yelling young men in Gujranwala chose to video-record
themselves while spraying black paint onto a poster of Prof Abdus Salam. An
Ahmadi and Pakistan’s sole science Nobel Prize winner who died 25 years ago,
Salam is the only Pakistani who has seriously impacted the world of science.
That the posted video went viral with tens of thousands of views — and that it
received high approval — speaks of raw mediaeval hatreds boiling over from time
to time with or without an excuse.
The video
is that of ordinary people — at least those in Punjab — and was not officially
ordered. But what of governments? Do national leaders acknowledge that
scientific merit must be disentangled from matters of faith? And how has the
military establishment seen things? These questions are important not just because
of some particular individual but because government, industry and academia
function properly only if there are layered meritocracies built upon
recognition of individual ability and competence. Salam’s case is a litmus
test.
Gen Ayub
Khan could not have cared less about Salam being an Ahmadi and appointed him as
scientific adviser; Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto thought similarly even as he
surrendered his principles for political gain in 1974; Zia ul Haq was
ideologically charged and very wary of Ahmadis but was also politically savvy
and so awarded Salam the Nishan-i-Imtiaz in 1980.
Then things
started changing. Benazir Bhutto stayed totally clear of Salam and so did Mian
Nawaz Sharif. During his first tenure as prime minister, while speaking at
Government College Lahore in 1992, Nawaz Sharif read out a long list of
distinguished alumni and faculty but conspicuously omitted Salam’s name.
Quite
miraculously, Nawaz Sharif eventually recognised Salam’s importance as a
scientist. While touring CERN (European Nuclear Research Centre) in 2016 to
cement the Pak-CERN collaboration, one hears he was much impressed to learn
that major parts of CERN’s research — including the successful search for the
Higgs boson — revolved around certain discoveries of Abdus Salam and Steven
Weinberg. He was also taken for a drive on Rue de Salam, a road in Geneva named
after Salam.
It was but
natural that someone should then have asked Pakistan’s prime minister a basic
question: why did Salam’s home country have no significant institution named
after him? The natural candidate was the National Centre for Physics located on
the campus of Quaid-i-Azam University, a public university. NCP was conceived
in the 1980s jointly by Salam and his former PhD student Riazuddin (1930-2013),
a respected theoretical physicist who also became NCP’s founding director.
Though hopelessly underfunded, it started off in 1999 on borrowed premises on
the QAU campus.
NCP’s
original goal was to become a mini ICTP (International Centre for Theoretical
Physics). Founded by Salam in the Italian city of Trieste, the ICTP (now
renamed Abdus Salam-ICTP) has hosted thousands of researchers from around the
world to work in a cordial and intellectually vibrant atmosphere on
cutting-edge scientific problems. It is an established model for international
cooperation and the openness of scientific inquiry.
Days after
Salam’s 20th death anniversary, the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif moved to
change NCP’s name. He failed. To remind readers of how that happened, I will
repeat some details from my Dawn article of 2018.
On Dec 29,
2016, the president of Pakistan, on the summary advice of the prime minister of
Pakistan, put his signature upon a document titled, Proposal to Rename NCP at
QAU as Professor Abdus Salam Centre for Physics. Earlier, the summary had been
vetted on Dec 26, 2016, by the minister of state for education and professional
training. It was then sent to QAU for necessary action as per proper procedure.
The
official order for renaming NCP — duly signed by the Pakistani state’s highest
executives, both the president and the prime minister — was received at QAU and
conveyed onward to NCP. It was ignored. For a modern state to have subordinate
officials deliberately and openly defying lawful authority is rare but this is precisely
what happened. Direct orders from the sitting prime minister and president went
into the wastebasket and NCP’s name remained unchanged. Religious prejudice was
just too deep.
I think
what the political leadership did not fully understand was how much the
character of NCP had changed. Now funded by the Strategic Plans Division of the
Pakistan Army, NCP is a parking lot for retired officers from high security
institutions. Living the good life in plush residences at the foot of the
Margalla Hills, they are answerable only to themselves and not to any
government. In a fortress bristling with barbed wire and armed guards, no
high-thinking physicist pondering on the nature of the universe is likely to be
found there.
Once again
Salam had been cheated of the respect he deserves for his scientific work. He
may be the starkest example but is not alone. Pakistan does not own any son of
the soil who happens to be a non-Muslim. Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011) was
born in Multan, earned his MSc degree from Government College Lahore in 1946
and went on to earn the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1968 for his work in
protein synthesis via nucleotides. In 1983 another Lahori, Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar (1910-1995), became a Nobel Laureate in physics after his
definitive work on the death of stars. Nasa’s satellite, named Chandra, is
presently searching the skies for black holes and other astronomical objects.
Prejudice
poisons the well of knowledge, making its water too toxic for science and
inquiry to grow. As with Salam, nothing in Lahore acknowledges the existence of
either Khorana or Chandrasekhar. Nevertheless they must still be considered
fortunate. At least they have been spared the abuse and vilification that the
long-dead Salam must continue to endure.
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Pervez Hoodbhoy is an Islamabad-based physicist
and writer.
Original Headline: Salam’s face blackened
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-sectarianism/abdus-salam’s-face-blackened-pakistan/d/123406
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