Abdus Salam: Pakistan’s unsung hero

He was the first Pakistani to win a Nobel prize in physics after he predicted the existence of the so-called ‘God particle’, but in his home country Abdus Salam’s achievements have been written from the record books, according to a report in the Daily Mail. Despite being a leading figure in Pakistan’s space and nuclear programme, Salam was shunned by Muslim fundamentalists when they took control of the country in the 1970s.
Although he was a Muslim, the physicist, who died in 1996, belonged to the Ahmadi sect, who believed Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was their spiritual leader.
As a result Salam along with Pakistanis from other religious minorities, such as Shia Muslims, Christians and Hindus were pushed into the wilderness and attacked by militants from the Sunni Muslim majority.
Salam received a string of international prizes and honours for his groundbreaking work in the world of subatomic physics.
In 1979, he was joint winner of the Nobel Prize for his research on the Standard Model of particle physics, which theorized that fundamental forces govern the overall dynamics of the universe. Salam and Steven Weinberg, with whom he shared the prize, independently anticipated the existence the ‘God particle’ which later became formally known as the Higgs boson after the British professor Peter Higgs who said the particle was responsible for endowing other particles with mass.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist who once worked with Salam, said the way his colleague had been treated was a tragedy. He added: “He went from someone who was revered in Pakistan, a national celebrity, to someone who could not set foot in Pakistan. If he came, he would be insulted and could be hurt or even killed.”
Physicists in Switzerland stoked worldwide excitement on Wednesday when they announced they have all but proven the Higgs boson particle’s existence.
This was done using the world’s largest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva. “This would be a great vindication of Salam’s work and the Standard Model as a whole,” said Khurshid Hasanain, chairman of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Salam wielded significant influence in Pakistan as the chief scientific adviser to the president, helping to set up the country’s space agency and institute for nuclear science and technology.
Salam also assisted in the early stages of Pakistan’s effort to build a nuclear bomb, which it eventually tested in 1998.
Salam’s life, along with the fate of the 3 million other Ahmadis in Pakistan, drastically changed in 1974 when parliament amended the constitution to declare that members of the sect were not considered Muslims under Pakistani law.
Salam resigned from his government post in protest and eventually moved to Europe to pursue his work. In Italy, he created a centre for theoretical physics to help physicists from the developing world. Although Pakistan’s then-president, General Zia ul-Haq, presented Salam with Pakistan’s highest civilian honour after he won the Nobel Prize, the general response in the country was muted. The physicist was celebrated more enthusiastically by other nations, including Pakistan’s archenemy, India.
Despite his achievements, Salam’s name appears in few textbooks and is rarely mentioned by Pakistani leaders or the media.
By contrast, fellow Pakistani physicist AQ Khan, who played a key role in developing the country’s nuclear bomb and later confessed to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is considered a national hero. Khan is a Muslim.
The president who honored Salam would later go on to intensify persecution of Ahmadis, for whom life in Pakistan has grown even more precarious. Taliban militants attacked two mosques packed with Ahmadis in Lahore in 2010, killing at least 80 people. “Many Ahmadis have received letters from fundamentalists since the 2010 attacks threatening to target them again, and the government isn’t doing anything,” said Qamar Suleiman, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community. For Salam, not even death saved him from being targeted. Hoodbhoy said his body was returned to Pakistan in 1996 after he died in Oxford, England, and was buried under a gravestone that read ‘First Muslim Nobel Laureate.’ A local magistrate ordered that the word ‘Muslim’ be erased.