In 1974, the world-renowned physicist decided to move to Europe after as a member of the Ahmadiyya Community he was declared a non-Muslim and discriminated.
by Massimo Introvigne
A sad anniversary. In 1974, fifty years ago, the greatest scientist in Pakistan’s history, Abdus Salam, left his native country, never to return to live there. He left Pakistan after a law was passed prohibiting members of his religious community, the Ahmadiyya, to refer to themselves as Muslims and introducing several forms of discrimination against them. Ahmadis believe that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was both “a disciple of the Holy Prophet (Muhammad) and a prophet himself.” This formula is not good enough for conservative Muslims for whom nobody can be called a prophet after Muhammad.
Salam firmly believed that, as an Ahmadi, he was a Muslim. He could not accept to live in a country that, while honoring him as a scientist—as late as 1998, Pakistan issued a commemorative stamp—slandered and vilified his religion.
Salam did not convert to the Ahmadi faith. He was born in an Ahmadi family from Punjab on January 29, 1926, and remained in the faith for all his life. He was exceptionally brilliant in science from an early age. He was allowed, exceptionally, to enter university at age 14 and later won a scholarship to complete his studies in the U.K., in Cambridge. By the time he earned his Ph.D. in 1950, he was already internationally famous. He could have obtained a teaching position in almost any university in the world, yet he loved his country and accepted the offer of Government College University in Lahore.
However, he was not safe in Pakistan as an Ahmadi. His life was threatened during the Lahore anti-Ahmadi riots of 1953. He moved to the U.K., where he taught at Cambridge before setting up a cutting-edge department of theoretical physics at Imperial College in London. In 1960, President Ayub Khan personally persuaded him to return to Pakistan, where he developed the country’s program of nuclear power plants (while he was full of doubts about his colleagues working towards a Pakistani atomic bomb and later condemned them).
For the 50th anniversary of his final departure from Pakistan in 1974, in an exclusive conversation with “Firstpost” the scientist’s son, Ahmad Salam, revealed some previously unknown details of what happened. According to Ahmad, then Prime Minister and former President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who befriended the scientist, told him that the anti-Ahmadi law was “temporary” and had been passed just to appease the Sunni radicals. “When Bhutto passed the act, he asked Salam to accept the legislation and promised to ‘reverse it soon.’ ‘Bhutto did say to my father, look, just accept it for now and I will be able to reverse it very shortly. My father didn’t believe it. He didn’t trust that he would be able to do this because once it was done, it was done. You can’t undo something like this very quickly.’”
So, Abdus Salam left Pakistan and divided his time between U.K. and the International Center for Theoretical Physics he had founded in Trieste, Italy, in 1964 and where he will serve as Director until 1993. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. He donated all the Nobel money to support physicists in developing countries.
His son reveals that Pakistan was virtually compelled to invite him to celebrate the Nobel Prize because he had also been invited by India. “What happened was that as soon as he was awarded the Nobel Prize, [Indian Prime Minister] Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi sent him a telegram saying, ‘Can you please come to India so we can celebrate your award.’” The scientist, in fact, had close ties with some Indian universities, including Aligarh Muslim University. “The Pakistan government heard about this and of course, they were then forced into sending him an invitation. My father being a very loyal Pakistani, told Mrs. Gandhi that he would go to Pakistan first and then come to India. So India had a very critical role in ensuring that my father could be received in Pakistan as a national hero and maybe if Mrs. Gandhi had not taken that approach to invite him Pakistan would have said fine we’re not doing this.”
Despite being a second-class citizen as an Ahmadi, Salam did visit Pakistan and refused the offers by India, Italy, and the UK to be made a citizen of these countries.
He remained a citizen of Pakistan until his death in Oxford in 1996. He had left instructions that he wanted to be buried in Pakistan, in the Ahmadi cemetery in Rabwah (now Chenab Nagar), Punjab.
Anti-Ahmadi hate persecuted him even after his death. His grave had an inscription “First Muslim Nobel Laureate,” but since Pakistani law forbids Ahmadis from calling themselves “Muslims” the word “Muslim” was removed. Pakistan might have put Salam’s face on a stamp but would not grant him his freedom of religion or human rights, not even in death.
