In the
first part of the series
, we spoke about Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate Prof. Abdus Salam. We learned about the man of science who took pride in being a Muslim but how his country did not consider him one. From his story, we also understood how science lost to politics and religion in Pakistan.
While calling it the “biggest tragedy”, Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy insisted that the country prioritised religion over science. “Everything is joined up with religion and that I think has been Pakistan’s tragedy and of course, I wish more people thought in these terms, whenever you join up science with a religion, any religion, that is fatal for science,” he told Firstpost.
The second part of the series will be a deep dive into the life of Salam. The man, who was recognised & celebrated by the world but sidelined by his own country because of his sect. In a thought-provoking conversation with Firstpost, the Nobel laureate’s son, Ahmad Salam gave an insight into the man behind all the accolades and shared what it was like growing up with Salam.
Salam: A prodigy moulded by his father
Salam was born in 1926 in the Pakistani city of Jhang, where resources were extremely limited. While narrating his father’s journey from Jhang to Cambridge, Ahmad noted that it was Salam’s father who moulded the young prodigy into something extraordinary.
“You have to understand his relationship with his father and the huge influence his father had on him as a young man to excel and to be the best at everything. He may not succeed, but he was always expected to give it a try,” Ahmad told Firstpost.
However, he mentioned that a series of incidents throughout Salam’s early life indicated that his journey was “predetermined and predestined”. Ahmad revealed that the scholarship that helped Salam study at Cambridge was actually set up to provide the opportunity to the sons of poor peasants with farmland. However, Salam’s father did not own land. Looking at the potential of the young scientist, Ahmad said that it was Salam’s uncle who gave his land to the young prodigy’s father so that Salam could qualify for the scholarship.
“The main benefit of the fund was to provide education opportunities for the sons of peasant farmers and the person who had won the scholarship could not accept it at that time,” Ahmad recalled, mentioning that his father was eventually awarded the scholarship.
The partition and the idea of Pakistan
Now an interesting thing one has to remember is that Salam was growing up at a time when a violent partition led to the birth of two separate nations – India and Pakistan. Ahmad mentioned that while his father was initially excited by the idea of a new nation, he inevitably felt “intellectually isolated” in his own country. “Well of course in those days the concept of the home for the Muslims was an exciting idea but inevitably it meant that in the new country, there were no educational establishments, no educational heritage, no educational courage and there were no intellectuals,” Ahmad averred.
“Coming back to this newly created country was exciting on a personal level because he was coming back home, coming back to his family, but from an educational level it was very damaging because there was nothing in the country that he could associate with.”
“He felt a great isolation feeling and there was nobody he could speak with, no professors, no intellectuals and of course that for him was a tremendously difficult time,” he added, recalling how Salam felt after coming back to Pakistan from Cambridge.
How India forced Pakistan to ultimately acknowledge Salam’s Nobel win
In 1979 Salam created history by becoming Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate. He won the prestigious award in Physics along with Prof Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for their work in formulating the electroweak theory, which explains the unity of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism.
What made Salam’s win even more historic was the fact that he was the first Muslim to win the award. However, his own country did not consider him a Muslim. Salam was an Ahmadi, a sect that believed that the Messiah Ghulam Ahmad lived after Islam’s prophet Muhammad.
Salam won the award in the post-Bhutto era (ex-Pak PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s regime) when the minority group was not only considered Muslims but were treated as second-class citizens. Hence, Salam’s win was not that thrilling for Pakistan. However, Ahmad mentioned that his father’s victory was only acknowledged in Pakistan after India decided to honour the legendary scientist.
“Pakistan was dragged into celebrating the win by Mrs Gandhi [Former Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi]. What happened was that as soon as he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Mrs Gandhi sent him a telegram saying ‘Can you please come to India so we can celebrate your award’,” Ahmad recalled, noting his father’s strong ties with the former Indian PM and Indian universities like Aligarh Muslim University, where he had been honoured in the past.
“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,” he furthered.
When asked if he had resentment over how Pakistan treated him, Ahmad made it clear that his father never resented the country, but was “saddened” by the sorry affairs. “He was made effectively a second-class citizen in the 1970s. He had already been relegated in the eyes of the Pakistan community and because of his beliefs, his ability to vote had been taken away from him, his human rights in Pakistan had been taken away,” Ahmad asserted.
However, what is worth noting is that despite all the disrespect, Salam continued to remain loyal to his own country and refused to take Indian, Italian and British citizenship. When asked why he didn’t give up his nationality, Ahmad insisted that it was a small minority of the population who disrespected him and not the whole country.
“It was only a small minority of the mullahs and the politicians who were causing this issue. So why should he condemn the other 200 million people? It’s because of a handful of ignorant mullahs and ignorant politicians who were using their personal beliefs for their own personal gain,” he averred.
Bhutto, Zia, and the corrupt system of Pakistan
Ahmad mentioned that Salam and Bhutto worked closely before he introduced the draconian law that declared the Ahmadiyya community as “non-muslim”. Ahmad elucidated his father’s contribution as the Chief Scientific Advisor to Pakistan from 1960 to 1974, before the law was passed. During his tenure Salam not only helped Pakistan develop a nuclear power plant but also contributed to the development of agrarian science in the country since Pakistan was an agricultural economy.
What was noteworthy was the fact that 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,” Ahmad recalled.
The son of the Pakistani Nobel laureate also broke the misconception that Salam left Pakistan after he resigned from the advisory post. “He never left Pakistan,” Ahmad averred, noting how both Bhutto and Zia wrote to him privately for advice. “They asked him for advice. They never publicly acknowledged him. But privately, they absolutely recognised that he was an incredible intellectual. So the utter hypocrisy that they showed was by saying, fine, we know you will not work with us formally. But we also know we can exploit your love for the country.,” he told Firstpost, insisting that his father “never turned his back to Pakistan”.
When asked why Salam accepted the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (one of the highest civilian awards in Pakistan) under the Zia regime, Ahmad called it a “pragmatic decision”. “If your country offers you the highest civilian award possible, then it would be an act of disloyalty in my father’s eyes, not to accept it. My father also took the view that it was better to be inside the camp and try to change and educate people from within than be on the outside throwing stones into the camp,” he explained.
Growing up with Salam
When asked what was it like growing up with a Nobel prize-winning scientist, Ahmad mentioned that the award “didn’t make any difference” in regards to how they were brought up. “The pressure of being excellent at school and excelling was there with me and my siblings from day one. I was 19, I was at university when my father won the Nobel Prize. And for us, it didn’t make any difference,” Ahmad remarked.
Interestingly, Ahmad stated that the pressure Salam put on his children was the same as the one the scientist faced from his father. “It was just second nature for him to say that this is what you should be. You should always try and be the very best and be at the top of the class and get top marks in every single thing you do at school. And that was the same for me and my siblings.”
“We were already in that frame of mind that we had to be the best at school from a very young age,” he furthered. He also recalled how his mother raised him and his siblings single-handedly while Salam immersed himself in science. “My mother knew from a very early age that my father was destined for great things. And so, she always just quietly got on with all the rules of running the family,” said Ahmad.
“There were four children, my three older sisters and myself. So she would still manage to raise us, take us to school on the bus, walk us to school, come back home, cook us a meal, and have to do all these things by herself because my father was away.”
“So, she had an absolutely critical role. I have no doubt that if my father was here today, he would be paying tribute to her and the role that she played in his success,” he added. When asked if it was hard for them to see their father spending more time at work than with them, Ahmad insisted that their relationship can not be seen through the lens of a “conventional father-son role”.
“Of course, at the time, it was very tough, no question about it. But it’s very important to note that his legacy is not his scientific work, but the work that he did for humanity by setting
up the International Center For Theoretical Physics in Italy,” he said.
“It gave the best students from there an opportunity to come and expand their intellectual horizons, be recharged for up to six months of the year, and then go back to their own countries and spread that knowledge further. And so, inevitably, there’s a price to pay for that. And that price was my father’s normal family,” he added.
In regards to assertions that Salam spent more time on ICTP than working on any new research, Ahmad pointed out that “science could have been done by several people, but nobody else to do what he [Salam] did to create ICTP.”
Hope for science’s future in a sorry state
Ahmad lamented the fact that certain propagandists attempted to tarnish Salam’s legacy over the years. “What does that actually help you with? And how does it change your life? And how does it make anything better?” he asked.
“A lot of what we see now from these people in Pakistan comes from a lack of education and ignorance. Because they haven’t actually bothered to go and find out the truth of the matter,” he added. When asked what is the future of science in a country where the greatest minds are discriminated against due to their faith, Ahmad gave a grim response.
“I think a more fundamental question is what is the future of education in this country? It’s the same across the Muslim world, there isn’t a focus on excellence in education as there once was in the Islamic world.”
“We have a landlord who controls a certain area by his ownership of land. It’s in his interest as a landlord to make sure that education does not take place and that’s a real problem in countries like Pakistan,” he added. He also mentioned that the situation of Ahmadiyya and other minority groups in Pakistan will not improve until “the leaders learn how to behave with justice and integrity and respect for humans’ ability to choose their own destiny.” “That’s not going to happen very sadly,” he lamented.
What about a sense of belongingness and how to keep Salam’s legacy alive in such a climate?
While Ahmad acknowledged that problems exist in Pakistan, he noted that Salam’s legacy can be kept alive by telling his true story to people around the world. He mentioned how the Imperial College of London named a library after Salam and also spoke about the 60th-anniversary celebration of ICTP.
“I think 14 or 15 Nobel laureates are coming to it. So all these people are coming to it because of their memory and their respect for the Salam,” Ahmad said while talking about the ICTP event. “So I think one shouldn’t be overly negative. One has to look at the positivity of people who do remember him who do look up to him and who do absolutely understand the magic and the special life that he had on this earth,” he asserted.
So does Ahmad have a sense of belonging to Pakistan? Sadly the answer is no.
“To be honest with you, personally, no. I mean, yes, I have a lot of family members there and of course, my parents are buried there and maybe there’s a small part of me that still has a link, but I don’t have a huge amount of loyalty, not just because of the way they treated my father, but because of the way they treat my community. The attacks on my community are still going on, people are still being murdered and being killed and the government is doing nothing to stop this,” he explained. “The government has the power to stop it, and the government should do so,” he concluded.
This is the second story in the three-part series. Click the following link to read the first part.
Story of Pakistan’s first Nobel winner and how science lost to politics, religion
In part three of the series, we will follow the story of a top Indian science writer who Salam trusted to write his biography. Stay Tuned.
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