ONE point in the first column under this title, printed last week, requires clarification. It has brought in countless e-mail messages from readers all over the world. Abdus Salam, at the time the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to him in 1979 was listed universally as the sole Muslim winner of the prestigious prize on merit for scientific or academic achievements. This I did not make abundantly clear.

Anwar Sadat had been awarded the Peace Prize the previous year, but then that is quite a different matter.

Since 1979, there have of course been other Muslims — two were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Naguib Mahfooz in 1988 and Orhan Pamuk in 2006; one for Chemistry, Ahmed Zewail in 1999; and seven additional Peace Prize winners — Yasser Arafat in 1994, Shirin Ebadi in 2003, Muhammad ElBaradei in 2005, Mohammad Yunus, Kamal Jacqui, Muhammad P Dofile and Rag Headiv in 2006.

Well worth reproducing is one anecdotal message received from a regular e-mailer, Ali Gibran, sitting in far away Boston, USA :

“It was really nice to see that somebody still remembers the only scientific giant that Pakistan ever produced. Though I was quite disappointed by the lack of any articles in memory of Abdus Salam on 21 November. But finally somebody broke the ice. But I am quite sure this tradition would not last long. And we as Pakistanis are bound to forget the legacy of that old man. But I can’t really do anything about it if I am not in the army or civil service.

“Just to throw a little information your way about Abdus Salam: In the early 1960s he worked on the problem of overlapping divergences and discovered something fundamental about neutrino particles (though I barely understand what he was talking about but this is how I read it) and he submitted his paper to Wolfgang Pauli (anybody even in Pakistan who had a chance to go through physics in F.Sc knows the impact of Pauli — from its exclusion principal, it can be said that he was the Robert De Niro of Theoretical Physics at that time).

“Pauli rejected the idea presented by Salam straight away and made fun of his theory saying that this young man does not realise the sanctity of parity. Salam, who at that time had submitted the paper for publication, ran to the publisher and was barely able to save himself what he thought would be great embarrassment in scientific circles. Next year Lee and Yang proposed the same idea in their paper and they received a Nobel Prize for their research. And the most interesting thing about it is that Lee and Yang even quote references from Salam’s paper. In the view of some, Salam should have shared that prize with them, because he was the first one to present that particular idea. But Salam’s undue reverence for Pauli served him a big blow.”

“By the way, I really appreciate you writing about Abdus Salam. Keep on writing about minorities, may be this would in time lead to a plural society.”

One other columnist, my old friend Khalid Hasan, also remembered the great man and his column appeared in one of our up and coming newspapers on the same day as mine, which newspaper had carried an editorial on Salam on November 22. Farhatullah Babar wrote in another publication on November 25. And on November 30, The Hindu (India) carried a column on Salam entitled ‘The scientist Pakistan chose to forget’ written by Nirupama Subramanian. Salam, may have been officially forgotten by his country, but there are still those who recognize his outstanding achievements as a scientist and a man.

A year before Salam was awarded his Nobel Prize, The Royal Society of London (founded 1660, claims to be the oldest learned society still in existence) awarded to him its Royal Medal. The then President of the RS, Lord Todd, while presenting it, had this to say about our greatest scientist : “The unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions has been justly described as analogous to the 19th century unification of electricity and magnetism. It is an idea of the first importance ... Salam has been active in promoting scientific research in developing countries. The Institute at Trieste, of which he is a director, plays a leading role in encouraging theoretical work in these countries.” Over one thousand young Pakistani scientists have benefited from the facilities at Trieste.

One Pakistani, closely associated since 1985 with Abdus Salam, is fellow physicist Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy. In 1986 they jointly authored a preface to Michael Moravcsik’s book ‘On the road to world-wide science’ and two years later Salam wrote the introduction to Pervez’s book ‘Islam and Science — Religious Orthodoxy and the battle for Rationality.’ I quote from one of Pervez’s many writings on Salam :

“How great a scientist was Salam? This is an important question because one must chart a delicate course between the Scylla of adulation and hyperbole, and the Charybdis of ignorance and prejudice. The truth is that Abdus Salam was not Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman; he never claimed otherwise and would have felt deeply uncomfortable if someone else had claimed this for him. But his achievement of unifying two basic forces of nature has had far greater impact upon the development of physics, and is deeper and more profound, than the works of most other Nobel Prize winners in the past century.” The work done by a great physicist is acknowledged by all but one of the countries of this world — the exception being his own.

To end, there are those who have asked me, referring to the last paragraph of my last column, whether in my opinion President General Pervez Musharraf can right the wrongs in his country done by others before him. My answer is yes. He is neither a fundamentalist nor an obscurantist. In fact he came in as a liberal extremist (which has receded somewhat along the way) and he does accept that bullies are cowards.

One case in point : he has just undone one wrong perpetrated by President General Ziaul Haq and managed to get through parliament what is known as the Women’s Protection Bill. He signed it on December 1 and it is now law. His two predecessors, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, had neither the will nor the ability. This is just one small step forward. Let us hope that he will fully revert to his 1999 frame of mind and restore Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan, re-establishing that religion “...is not the business of the State.”

E-mail: arfc@cyber.net.pk