- How to honour heroes
No one knew incompetence can be a blessing in disguise. A mistake made by our honourable legislators has actually saved us from shame that we would have earned had the Quaid-i-Azam University’s Prof Abdus Salam Center for Physics been renamed. Fortunately, the resolution tabled by former first son-in-law proposed to name the department of physics at the university, an absolutely different entity, as the al-Khazini Department. The deed, however, has exposed the intent. No matter how good this can serve as a facade to the real purpose behind the resolution, the incident has exhumed a long-buried issue of paramount importance. Mutilating his tombstone to ensure that facts are always correctly stated, disremembering his birth and death anniversaries like a norm, equating all his achievements to zero just because of something as personal as his faith, and skipping the word ‘just’ before ‘because’ in the preceding phrase as if it is the definitive right thing to do is an indelible chapter in The Book of Shame that we are still in the process of writing.
It is not for the first time that Captain (r) Safdar has insisted on abandoning the name of Pakistan’s first Nobel Laureate. He has been castigating the late professor for his religious ideology for long, the one who did not disown achkan, shalwar and turban at the time of receiving his Nobel Prize, the one who did not acquire dual nationality (unlike some honourable people!) as that would lead to another country sharing the prize with Pakistan. What appreciation do we demand from the world in the realm of science and technology when Salam’s countrymen have repeatedly failed him by putting a price on his head in lieu of valuing the genius mind that God had kept in it?
We have narrowed our vision to such an extent that not eyeing everything only through the lens of religion has become an impossibility. Dragging faith into all the domains is our national hobby and tagging every person with whom we disagree a blasphemer, our ultimate motive. In the given scenario, assassination of Salman Taseer and attempt of murder on Ahsan Iqbal should not be seen with dumbfounding aloofness; those who sow the seeds of evil shall reap the harvest in hell. Mumtaz Qadri, Abid Hussain and, woefully, Captain (r) Safdar have fostered the same mindset that has kept Pakistan from stepping on the road to prosperity.
The issue of Khatam-e-Nabuwat will never end until we realise a simple fact: an average citizen has no authority to run a case in his head and punish anyone for such a sin whose retribution’s burden has not been put on common man’s shoulders. Every mind’s capacity to think, analyse and reach a potent conclusion is unique and different and this is what makes individual jurisdiction vastly subjective, unwarranted and, therefore, highly unsuitable in this pertinence.
The extent of deplorability of the current state of affairs can be gauged through the amount of veneration designated to a dishonest head of an institution which leads to the official becoming morally corrupt
Salman Taseer, Ahsan Iqbal and others accused of blasphemy as well as Dr Abdus Salam are all offshoots of the same plant of hatred and bigotry the seed of which was sown way after the emergence of Pakistan. The resolution moved by Captain (r) Safdar identifies the rationale behind this motive as the foundation of Pakistan being based on two-nation theory. Is this even rational enough to be called a rationale? Even the Pakistan Resolution of 1940 called for independent states such that: “geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority…” Mark the word “majority”. Pakistan was always expected to be a Muslim-majority country and never an all-Muslim state. And when there are minorities living as denizens of a country, they tend to contribute positively if given apt opportunities. They, in return for their services rendered to the nation, should be honoured and celebrated. Dr Abdus Salam made one such contribution but was given next-to-no acknowledgement. Yes, al-Khazini’s achievements in the realm of physics should also be accredited but no scientist or theorist can ever be a replacement to another.
The extent of deplorability of the current state of affairs can be gauged through the amount of veneration designated to a dishonest head of an institution which leads to the official becoming morally corrupt. The Executive Director of the Higher Education Commission knew that his heavily plagiarised paper will never be scrutinised and cost him his job which encouraged him to mention the paper in his curriculum vitae. And this is exactly what happened; Dr Arshad Ali was fined a minor penalty despite the HEC’s plagiarism policy according to which: “If most of the paper (or key results) have been exactly copied from any published work of other people without giving reference to the original work, a major penalty of dismissal from service could be imposed.” A few weeks later, the lately retired chief of the commission Dr Mukhtar Ahmad was caught in crime of plagiarising two of his four books that he had proudly mentioned in his résumé presented before a search committee for his re-appointment. Such would be the confidence level of plagiarisers when real researchers will be undervalued and disgraced by their own people. And there is no shame in admitting that we, as a nation, deserve plagiarisers, not dedicated researchers who are sincere to their work and country.
We should be mentally prepared to see many more names like Mumtaz Qadri, Abid Hussain, Dr Arshad Ali and Dr Mukhtar Ahmad all over print and electronic media in the future and that would be all because of erasing one name from our history and science books and that is of Dr Abdus Salam, for the name which should have been a source of pride for us is actually a synonym of bigotry in Pakistan.