“This would be a great vindication of Salam’s work and the Standard Model as a whole,” Khurshid Hasanain, chairman of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University was quoted as saying in media dispatches. This very Quaid-i-Azam University cancelled plans for Salam to lecture about his Nobel-winning theory when Islamist student activists threatened to break the physicist’s legs.
Abdus Salam was no hero to Pakistanis and he was denied even a decent burial just because he was an Ahmadiya. West educated liberal Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as the helmsman of Pakistan in the seventies declared Ahmadiyas as non-Muslims. Result is that the late Salam’s name doesn’t figure even in the school text books as the government and the religious orthodoxy has walked the extra mile to deny his contribution to Pakistan’s space and nuclear programmes.
He left Pakistan in 1974 and lived in the west. He could not set foot on the soil of the country of his birth. The very fundamentalists who wanted him shunned have no qualms to hail the N-Bomb for Pakistan which his learning had made possible.
The situation in Pakistan lends credence to the observation that when one shuts one’s mind to the illuminating rays of knowledge, which is science, one becomes dogmatic and religious.
