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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...
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!
"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.
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.
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.
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!
People can handle accidental, isolated deaths. Yes, someone dies, but there is no malicious force that caused it. ...
People cannot accept someone else who is out to kill them intentionally because of hatred or a belief system.
I find sporadic intentional, malicious deaths to be far more acceptable than widespread preventable accidental deaths. Any decent human being would feel the same. The important thing is to minimize the loss of human life. Whether there's intentionality behind the deaths is irrelevant.
The problem is, most people aren't decent human beings and care more about being slighted by foreigners than about actually saving lives.
The reason there ever was a "war on terror" isn't to "funnel money to corporate buddies" â" it's because, to be blunt, we don't put up with that shit
What's sad is that you probably actually believe that. If that were actually true, we'd have actual reasons for going to war, instead of flimsy pretexts.
e.g. Afghanistan, we're there to get Bin Laden, but once we get there we stop looking for him and waste years spending money for nothing. Who does that benefit besides military contractors?
e.g. Iraq. What reason is there to invent a non-existant link between Saddam Hussein and OBL, and hype up non-existent WMDs based on evidence that was known to be false?
Why did we go intervene in Lybia and haven't done much yet in Syria? One's an oil producing nation, the other isn't.
You've made a bold assertion in that "we don't put up with that shit". What sort of mechanisms are in place to prevent that shit from happening? If a well connected vice president actually decided to go to war in order to benefit his cronies, how does the system prevent that? What reason is there to believe that ANY US politician makes ANY decision without considering how it would profit their friends and campaign contributors?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
" 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!"
Well actually there was LBJ, he was a pretty successful war profiteer on Bell helicopter, General Dynamics fighters and his buddy ran Brown and Root. Brown and Root did very profitable general contracting for the military in Vietnam.
Brown and Root became Kellog Brown and Root and ended up owned by Halliburton which Dick Cheney used to war profiteer in Iraq 30 years later. The second Iraq war turned in to one massive exercise in war profiteering for people well connected with the Republican party. The U.S. would fly in plane loads of 100 dollar bills and they would be made to disappear. How else do you explain the Bush administrations overwhelming urge to invade Iraq. There was no actual rational reason for it that wasn't a lie.
War profiteering is as old as war, Dave. Are you actually that naive or do you not even believe the stuff you're writing anymore.
Profiteering may not be the prime reason for a war but it sure is a huge fringe benefit for the well connected.
@de_machina
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.
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.
While there is some irrational hatred at play, the fact remains that the US and its allies have been overthrowing governments, propping up dictators, and generally fucking with many countries in the Middle East for over 50 years now. I'd say it adds up to a bit more than nuance.
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!"
The reasons for the War on Terror are myriad. Many players are interested in it for their own reasons. For the defense contractors and the banks, the purpose of the War on Terror is very much to make money. That $500 billion the Pentagon spends every year has to go into someones' pocket. And the debt to finance the war has to come from somewhere. Not much gets done in America that doesn't have a profit motive.
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.
On the world stage it's never about good and evil. It's about power and control; who has it and who wants it. It's as simple as that.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)