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Nobel Laureate Wiped From Pakistan's Textbooks As Heretic
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson. But that isn't the case in Pakistan, where Salam has been wiped from textbooks and history for not being fundamentalist enough. 'He belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants who view its members as heretics,' says Sebastian Abbot. 'His grand unification theory of strong, weak and electromagnetic fields opened the gateway for the discovery of bosons and laid down the basis for this quantum electrodynamics project,' writes Anam Khalid Alvi for Pakistan's Express Tribune. But Pakistan can't celebrate his achievements, since Ahmadis like Salam are and were prevented from 'posing as Muslims,' and can be punished with prison and even death. By contrast, fellow Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, who played a key role in developing the country's nuclear bomb and later confessed to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is considered a national hero. Khan is a Muslim."
Remember, it's all fine, carry on. They keep saying it's a religion of peace and all that. Don't forget that they scrubbed "muslim" off his grave. And other muslims in the region are expected to go out of their way to persecute them.
Om, nomnomnom...
It's coming soon to the U.S. Don't think they want this sort of thing to happen to Texas schoolbooks.
Rather a shame the way people can't respect one faith from another.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've always thought the Ahmadis (there's actually two Ahmadi sects) are appealing to Western converts. They talk a lot about pluralism, etc, and seem to mean it. Alas, they aren't quite as progressive as I'd like on LGBT rights. A lot of their commitment to pluralism probably comes from being persecuted in traditionally Muslim countries.
What kind of backwards country would modify their curriculum to fit religious ideals?
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/03/12/texas-removes-thomas-jefferson-from-teaching-standard/
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
A group of idiots deprives themselves of an opportunity to feel some extra national pride in what can only be described as "shitting into one's own shoes", if I were to literally translate a proverb from my native tongue. Serves them right. I wouldn't want to be in their textbooks either, I'd feel dirty.
Ezekiel 23:20
"Religious" governments are ALWAYS a bad idea.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
It was electroweak unification. Important enough.
(So far, all attempts at grand unification have failed, including Einstein's.)
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Dr. Sheldon Cooper jumped to the top of my head.
People can handle accidental, isolated deaths. Yes, someone dies, but there is no malicious force that caused it.
People can handle mass-death less easily, even when it's accidental (or not intentional). But things like the sinking of the Titantic, air disasters, bus accidents, and similar still disproportionately capture attention.
People cannot accept someone else who is out to kill them intentionally because of hatred or a belief system. Yes, foreign policy, resources, economics, geopolitics, and myriad other nuances are involved here, but it really is that simple at its core.
The reason there ever was a "war on terror" isn't to "funnel money to corporate buddies" — it's because, to be blunt, we don't put up with that shit, even if our response is imperfect — not to mention that Europe and the West has enjoyed US defense-by-proxy for over a half-century. The fact that war is an economic driver is incidental (even if it can be argued to be important in its own way). But make no mistake: when US policy makers of any political stripe make the decision to go to war, the thinking isn't, "Hey, this can line the pockets of my corporate buddies!! Lulz!"
But I know that you and many other readers here are cynical (and ignorant) enough to actually twist a story about Pakistan and Islam into, yet again in true topsy-turvy bizarro-world style, how the US is evil. (Same thing happened with the recent Syria Wikileaks story.) It might be amusing if it weren't so predictable, pathetic, and shameful.
Personally I am an atheist, but it seems that low-levels of religious belief seem to do most people little harm and some good and at least in smaller communities seem to provide a certain amount of greater good & charity which might otherwise go missing.
It would be nice if the people involved could just enjoy getting together for the sake of getting together and do charitable works because helping people is usually the right thing to do without shame-based moralizing and all the hocus pocus, but human experience seems to suggest a more Hobbesian outcome without some kind of organizational direction.
Look up Alan Turing and what he was prosecuted for by the SECULAR government.
Look up how the Catholic church has treated scientists throughout its history.
Look up the Protestants in the USofA right now to see how they are trying to hide parts of history that they don't like.
This is more about a party in power trying to re-write history LIKE MOST PARTIES IN POWER DO than it is about evil Muslims being all evil and Muslim.
Are you saying ALL Muslims follow the Taliban? Would any of you have a problem with saying ALL Atheists are baby killers?
You are setting up a nice straw man there. Not all Muslims follow the Taliban, but all Muslims follow a cdoctrine that says that non-Muslims must be killed or accept inferior status. Read the Qur'an.
Khan is a Muslim.
Yes, and so was Dr. Abdus Salam.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Christians used to be this bad and they're getting worse again. They are becoming increasingly insulated from other ways of thinking and increasingly bigoted. This is in the US, of course, but I have no hope that it won't spread elsewhere
So yeah, Christianity is a lot better now, and Islam is still the worst, but the trend isn't good.
Play Command HQ online
The U.S. should invade Pakistan and never leave until they get their textbooks right.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
The Bible has it's fair share of questionable text. So...to be fair, it all depends on who reads and teaches the document. If you read any book as the truth and fact, you are in for a very dark world. One thing I've learned about religion in general is that you have to take the words with a grain of skepticism to even start to be a rational person. (I've chosen to flow on the side of non-belief myself, but whatever.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous.
Not really - Just a matter of degree, limited solely by how much power each group has over their respective countries... AIDS sucks more than the flu, but you don't really want to catch either of them.
But hey, I hear ya - It makes perfect sense to devote the full resources of the US government to hashing out whether or not whores... er... "young women"... should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies when it comes to reproductive health. Certainly, no fine upstanding Fundies would suggest beating people to death just because their god whispers sweet, sweet nothings to them in the dark...
Religion is a disease, which any sane person would seek to cure ASAP.
I would argue that on top of the sectarian issues in this particular case, there is a major lack scientific achievement in that region of the world. Dr. Abdus Salam is one of only two Nobel laureates from a Muslim country. Islamic Universities have a shockingly low output (only 300 out of the 1800 universities in the region have even _one_ faculty member who has ever published anything. Compare that to Western Universities where typically every faculty member will have publications.)
Part of the problem might be the rote learning paradigm that dominates in the middle east. Free inquiry and critical thinking are probably discouraged in a region dominated by so many authoritarian regimes. However, I would argue that one of the main reasons science has failed to flourish in Arab-Islamic countries is the legacy of one man: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.
Al-Ghazali helped codify and unify several competing schools of Islamic thought, binding them around the central premise of rejecting outside influences to concentrate on spiritualism and devotion to God. While European philosophy focused on understanding the material world, al-Ghazali focused instead on the supernatural. After the Crusades destroyed the Islamic world's scientific Golden Age, al-Ghazadi's anti-scientific philosophy held sway and kept the region from experiencing the kind of Renaissance that moved Europe out of the dark ages.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
It was quite interesting. As an atheist, while his family wasn't comfortable with the idea of him opening a tech store with someone not of their faith, I was more welcome than someone convinced of another faith. When bored, we'd often discuss his faith, and his history with it. He had come to Canada as a refugee around age 14, and eventually acquired citizenship (He deserved it--he busted his balls when it came to work and spoke better English than many born Canadians I know). The primary focus of their faith is to teach that (basically) Jihad is wrong, and that the Muslim faith is one of complete peace. A good friend of his was a long standing member of their mosque and would affirm this, as would anyone else I questioned of their faith. None of them would ever be pushy and, frankly, were a hell of a lot more fun to be around than Christians.
I, of course, never converted, but I did gain some insight into the problems of the Muslim religion and exactly why countries like Pakistan are screwed up.
Clearly you have never read the Bible or the KKK's hate literature. There's considerable overlap - look up the Heresy of Peor, for example. God rewards Phinehas and all his seed for the extrajudicial murder of Zimri, who has committed miscegenation. Or check out the Prophet Ezra's viewpoint on race-mixing - the KKK is right in line.
At some points in US history, the KKK has run governments - such as the Indiana state government in 1925, for instance.
The only "crazy" they invented on their own was the curious idea that Christianity wasn't founded by Jews.
Amen to that, brother.
That would be Zeus (Greek) or Jupiter (Roman). Zeus is a Greek God while Mercury is a Roman God.
Only three days remain until Thor's day or Jeudi (Jupiter's day) like the French call it.
I think it is partially just people who are very self centered. They need everything to be about their lives. So when there is a story about things happening in other nations, they have to try to find a way to spin it around to be about the US, so it is about them. There is a story about something, good or bad, in another nation and they have to start up with how it is or is not like that in the US and so on and so forth. They continually steer the discussion back to themselves.
The other part is for some people, many of whom hang out on Slashdot, it is trendy to hate the US and to feel like they are "oppressed". So everything needs to become about how bad the US is. Another country does something bad? Try to find a way to say the US does the same thing. Another country does something good? Whine about how the US does not do that. Everything is turned in to how the US is bad because that is what they wish it to be.
All in all it equals a situation where any story about another country has people making posts to try and show the Us in a bad light, rather than discussing the story.
The most important difference between say, christians and muslims is one of those groups still reads it to the letter today. Christianity started getting over that after the crusades. Islam is still living in what, the 600's or so?
Most religions started with tenants built around conquering other religious groups. Back then it was simply a matter of survival. Most religions either did it or were conquered and destroyed as a result. What we have left now are the "winners", but a few of them are still fighting, with Islam containing the most public, radical, and fundamental batch of nuts of the bunch. And they aren't the least bit concerned about behaving like 600AD barbarians to do it. And the rest of the world tends to frown on that now. These "fundamentalist clerics" have a lot in common with vile little dictators that are using religion as a means of creating power and influence. I can't help but wonder what percentage of them is a real religious leader and what percentage are just taking advantage of their religion and their influence.
And most of these religions' holy books flat out say that the world belongs to them and everyone else can either join or it's ok to kill them. That wasn't meant for the modern world. I have zero respect for that attitude now. Anyone that agrees with a book that says it's their god-given right to force me to do something or kill me for not doing it deserves that Hellfire comin' down their cave.
Unfortunately it gives the rest of the more modern/moderate/reasonable followers a really bad rep. I think right now the fastest way to get discriminated against in the US would be to make your Islamic religion known. Moreso than race etc. A lot of that is the govt P.R. engine at work, but you can't place all the blame on them. You're just going to get a lot of bad bias when you're associated with nuts that like to blow up large groups of uninvolved innocents, particularly from the part of that pool of innocents that would prefer to keep breathing. The moderates need to do something about their fundamentalist relations. Either smack some sense into them or split. The extremists are the one to blame for the bias, not the extremists' targets. All I hear are the moderates complaining about the public grouping them together. They are a group. They are a part of the group, and they either need to do something, affect change within the group, or leave it. "Guilt-by-association" is impossible to dodge. So far of all the religious conversations I've had with followers of Islam, every one of them still thinks the bad light that shines on them is 100% the fault of the world, they don't see the root of the problem, and aren't in any hurry to do anything about it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous
So, let's not learn anything from the past then? And by the past I mean of course the Crusades and the Dark Ages. Fundamentalist anything is detrimental to the growth of a peaceful, progressive society.
Having been raised Christian, I would like to agree that my inherited religion is the nobler one, but I feel it is necessary to point out that a) there is a lot of equally ludicrous effort in the United States [q.v. young-earth creationism, Sarah Palin who does the speaking-in-tongues bit, anti-evolution activities, etc.] and b) supposedly Christian nations have perpetrated warfare and genocide on other people at the behest of their holiest teachings [q.v. Deuteronomy chapters 7 and 20, The Crusades, and the invasion of Iraq]. Conflating the two is not ridiculous at all. On the contrary. As an exercise in introspection, it should trigger some soul searching in terms of teaching and foreign policy.
Germany = Catholic, Russia = Orthodox.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Just wait until a US political leader announces that he or she is an atheist, then watch how quickly that person gets erased from political life.
But those crazy religious people over there in Oogaboogastan are totally worse than our crazy religious people. Totally.
So No true scotsman is how you choose to respond? Pretty telling, when you can't even come up with a better line than that.
In the middles ages islam was new, and actually far ahead of being civilized of european christianity. Where do you think we got 0?