This week Malala
Yousafzai
has become the second ever Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize. Malala came
to prominence as an anonymous blogger for BBC Urdu in the deeply conservative
Swat region of North West Pakistan,
where she bravely defied Taliban dictates that girls should not go to school
and remain in Burqa. In 2012, after she had gone public with her support of
education for girls and also against the custom of Burqa (she wears only a head
scarf), she was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen while returning on a school
bus in the orders of the Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Rushed to
Britain for treatment, she miraculously recovered and became an international
campaigner for the rights of children, especially girls to get education and
equal treatment in Pakistan and other Islamic countries. However, most people
in Pakistan are not rejoicing on Malala’s winning the Nobel Prize as they see
her as someone against their religious and social belief and custom. Even as people all over the world are
praising the young girl for her courage, many conspiracy theories are abounding
in Pakistan. Pictures with notes showing
Malala and her father are circulating giving so called ‘proof’ that the Taliban never attacked her
and that she alongwith her father are CIA
agents. According to some, she was attacked because the USA wanted to malign Pakistan. The belief that
the Taliban are not
responsible is startling as Taliban
commander Adnan Rasheed wrote a letter to Malala and publicly acknowledged the
attack. Tehreek-e-Taliban
Pakistan(TTP)
spokesperson, Shahidullah Shahid threatened her again recently with a statement
to French press agency AFP, saying “she is not a brave girl and has no courage.
We will target her again and attack whenever we have a chance”. Even the
mainstream media in Pakistan is also condemning her. Tariq Khattack, editor of
the “Pakistan Observer”, condemning the prize and Malala wrote in an editorial
that “she is a normal, useless type of a girl. Nothing in her is special at
all. She’s selling what the West will buy”.
The CIA angle is a very common
thing in Pakistan, which tends to see “foreign hands” as the root of all
problems faced by that country. Everything that happens in Pakistan is a plot
by the Indians, America or Israel or all three - the Taliban, power cuts, flood,
corruption, economic stagnation, Osama bin Laden et al. The tendency to see
plots and enemies behind every tree is a common trait of the Pakistani people,
which is overwhelmingly conservative and suspicious of India and the West.
Non-Muslims, foreigners, anyone embraced by the United States (such as Malala)
and even minority religious sects in Pakistan are all seen as agents of foreign
powers. The powerful Armed Forces of Pakistan who ruled the country more than
half of its existence need enemies to justify itself and “foreign hands” are a
convenient target. For decades, generations of Pakistanis have been
indoctrinated with false stories, distorted history, religion based education
and encouraged by the media, the military and the govt. to blame everybody who
is a non-believer for the country’s problems ignoring the cancer of “Jihadi
culture” that is eating away Pakistan since its birth. Therefore, how can Pakistanis accept
Malala to be a hero, when her speeches do not have any Islamic agenda? How can they
consider her to be an ideal future leader when nothing she says or does imbues
a false sense of superiority in them as Muslim or Pakistani? Just
see her plight. When Malala can't even live in Pakistan and is spending her
life in exile for what she stands for, do you really think her work is
appreciated by the majority in that country? She stood for a just cause but had
the majority of the population in Pakistan and Govt. supported her, she could still have continued
her life and fight from the soil of that country. But why is she unable to do
so? We have to accept what is reality and no point in trying to deceive
ourselves by saying that Pakistanis stand for peace, civilization, rule of law
and a modern pluralistic state where people have freedom to live their life as
they like. I too agree that there are people in Pakistan who are moderate, love
peace and a modern, scientific, rational and liberal civilized social order.
But the people who are moderate in Pakistan are not effective and the people
who are effective are not moderate. The moderate people in that failed rogue
state don't have any say in their scheme of things and they are a miniscule
minority. Had they been effective and influential, Malala would have still been
living in Pakistan.
But disowning and insulting its Nobel
laureates is a tradition in Pakistan. Before Malala, in 1979, Dr. Abdus Salam
won the Nobel Prize for Physics. He was the first Pakistani Noble Laureate and
also the first ever Muslim to win a Noble Prize for Science. But the story of
this first Pakistani Nobel laureate is worth remembering and not for
particularly happy reasons. He too, is a pariah in Pakistan, rarely
acknowledged and never claimed as the “pride” of the nation. But his crime? He was an Ahmadiyya, a minority
Muslim sect whose adherents are considered heretics by so called true Muslims
because they don't believe that Muhammad was the last
prophet and Pakistan declared them un-Islamic and against which it
discriminates horribly. Like Malala he, too, was in exile when he won the Nobel
Prize. Despite being a leading figure in Pakistan's space and nuclear program, Dr.
Salam was shunned by Muslim fundamentalists when they took control of the
country in the 1970s. In 1979, he was joint winner of the Nobel Prize for his
research on electroweak unification,
known as the Standard Model of particle
physics, which theorized that fundamental forces govern the overall dynamics of
the universe. Dr. Salam and Steven Weinberg, with whom he shared the prize,
independently anticipated the existence of the 'God particle' which many
decades later became formally known as the “Higgs Boson Theory” after the
British Professor Peter Higgs who said the particle was responsible for
endowing other particles with mass. The 5 million members of the Ahmadiyya
community face persecution in Pakistan, where the constitution was amended in
1974 to declare them non-Muslims. The members of the Ahmadiyya faith believe that Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad a 19th century saint from Qadian town of Gurdaspur district was a
messenger of the prophet and obey his teaching based on Quranic teachings of
Prophet Muhammad. The motto of the Ahmadiyya Community is "Love for All,
Hatred for None". In Pakistan, Ahmadiyyas, face prison or even death if
they pose as Muslims, practise their faith publicly, describe their places of
worship as mosques or take part in the sacred Muslim call to prayer. On grounds
that they are supposed "apostates," Ahmadiyyas face the perpetual
risk of prosecution for simply observing their faith. None of Dr. Salam's great
accomplishments mitigated the bias against his community in Pakistan. In applying for a Pakistani passport, all Pakistanis are required
to declare that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is an impostor prophet and that his
followers are non-Muslims. Madrasas
of all sects of Islam in Pakistan prescribe reading materials for their
students specifically targeted at refuting Ahmadiyya beliefs. As a result,
persecution and hate-related incidents are constantly reported from different
parts of the country, and Ahmadiyyas have been the target of many attacks led
by other Islamic religious groups.
Dr. Salam received the Nobel
Prize in traditional
Punjabi attire and quoted the verses of the Quran in his acceptance
speech. However, he had already been disowned in Pakistan. On his
return to Pakistan in December 1979, there was no one from the public or Govt. to
receive him at the airport. He was like a pariah in his own country. He could
not even give a lecture in the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, since there
were threats
of violence from students belonging to Islami
Jamiat-i-Talaba. This was not an isolated event and other institutes
also found it difficult to invite him for the same reason. His reputation was
further tarnished when the right-wing journalist stalwarts came up with their
stories claiming him to be a CIA agent and a traitor, who had sold the
country’s nuclear secrets to India. As a result of this, when Dr. Salam decided
to resign
from his government post and eventually moved to Europe, where he would live until
his death, which only gave further wind to those hurtful theories about
him being a ‘traitor’. While Dr. Salam was shunned in his own country, the
world held him in high regard. The then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi
invited him to India and bestowed a great gesture
of respect by not only serving him tea with her own hands but even
offered him Indian citizenship. In Geneva, Switzerland, a road
was named after him. In Beijing, the Prime Minister and the President of China attended a
dinner hosted in his honour while the South Korean President requested
Dr. Salam to advise Korean scientists on how to win the Nobel Prize. He was
also presented with dozens of honorary degrees of doctorate and awards for his
hard work by foreign universities. But despite his achievements, Dr. Salam's
name appears in few textbooks and is rarely mentioned by Pakistani leaders or
the media.
Even in 1989, the world's
first Muslim woman Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, who herself knew prejudice,
refused to meet Dr.Salam even after keeping him waiting in a hotel room in
Islamabad for two days. He was very disappointed when Bhutto’s personal
assistant rang him up to say that the Prime Minister did not have the time. But his
misery didn’t end there. For Dr. Salam, not even death saved him from being
targeted. The “ultimate insult” was upon his death in 1996 in Oxford, England,
his body was brought to Pakistan as per his last wish to be buried in his
hometown. The highest official representative of the Govt. of Pakistan at the
funeral was the local police inspector. But the wonderfully enlightened Islamic
fundamentalists were not satisfied with that also. The epitaph on his tombstone
was defaced and authorities removed the word Muslim from his tomb, which
initially read ‘First Muslim Nobel laureate’ on the orders of the local
magistrate. This final disgrace explains
why this hero was abandoned in the first place. The theological amendment in
the constitution of Pakistan does not allow members of the Ahmadiyya faith to call themselves
Muslims. No Muslim nation or countrymen acknowledge him because they don't see
him as Muslim
Ahmad Salam, the London-based
son of Dr. Abdus Salam on hearing that
Malala won the Nobel Prize said, “I am delighted to hear that Pakistan has
gained its second Nobel. It is controversial but we can’t deny she is an
amazing young girl”. However, he added that the Pakistani establishment never
gave his father his due, “Pakistan still does not acknowledge my father in any
official capacity. His name doesn’t appear in any history or science books. He
has one small hall in Government College, Lahore, named after him, so there
isn’t really any widespread recognition that he was a lifelong Pakistani or
that Pakistan should be proud of him”. Ahmad
Salam also said his father was very touched by the warmth and affection he
received during his visit to India after winning the Nobel Prize and recalled
that the then PM Indira Gandhi had offered him Indian citizenship.
This year alone, at least 13
Ahmadiyyas have been killed so far
in targeted attacks in Pakistan. The Taliban insurgency in Pakistan,
steeped in sectarian slaughter, has called for the death of Ahmadiyyas and
other minorities and the destruction of their holy places. That "stony
barrenness" is now once more in view. Like Dr. Salam, Malala Yousafzai,
whom the Taliban tried to kill for her outspoken role in promoting education
for girls, lives in de facto exile in Britain. She is the source of a
conspicuous and disgraceful amount of slander back home, with some critics deeming
her a stooge of Western interests, a CIA agent and a "useless type
of girl". Islamists of various stripes, including some with a great deal
of influence, have all heaped such calumny upon the teenager and
will likely to continue to do so. They were pleased with her as long as she was
another local victim. But then, she cast off her victimhood and emerged as a
hero, a beacon of hope for young girls around the Islamic world. So she is
threatened with death, exiled, vilified and scorned so that children like her
won’t dare again to rise for their universally accepted civilized rights and
the society in particular remains slave to the age old backwardness and
injustice. Perhaps, if Dr. Salam had
been accepted and embraced in his own country, science would have enjoyed a
completely different status in Pakistan. Surely, Pakistani people would have
travelled far on the road of scientific progress. But alas, they did not. Pakistan
as a nation does not know how to honour its Nobel Laureates. Hatred, jealousy,
bigotry and believing in conspiracy theories are norm of life in that country.
Victim mentality and blaming others is prevalent in their society. But if it
has to progress in a civilized world order, it needs to come out of being the
custodians of religion and let everyone live their lives within their beliefs
and help each other as members of the society.
There is a quote from German
music composer Johannes Brahms that sums up the mentality of those in Pakistan,
who rejected Dr. Salam and are now making efforts to belittle Malala’s struggle-
"those who enjoy their own
emotionally bad health and who habitually fill their own minds with the rank
poisons of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, as a rule take umbrage at those who refuse
to do likewise and they find a perverted relief in trying to denigrate
them". However, it is never too late. If Pope John Paul II could apologise
on behalf of the Catholic Church for the mistreatment of Galileo in
the 17th century, why can’t Pakistanis apologise to Dr. Salam and Malala? But
they won’t. I don't think Nobel achievement should be the wakeup call, wakeup
call should be the support from the so called educated class of Pakistan for
the barbarians who would not even allow girls to go to school. So
let's accept the reality. Peace and civilized life can't prevail in the ‘Islamic Terrorist Republic of Pakistan”.
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