Chalk one up for religious intolerance. Pakistan’s only Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam, who pioneered theoretical work leading to the God-damn particle, worships the wrong God, or the wrong prophet, or something. So Pakistan’s government, being the nuclear armed medieval embarrassment they are, has stricken his name from textbooks.
Nat’l Post — Salam’s life, along with the fate of the three million other Ahmadis in Pakistan, drastically changed in 1974 when parliament amended the constitution to declare that members of the sect were not considered Muslims under Pakistani law.
Ahmadis believe their spiritual leader, Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who died in 1908, was the Promised Messiah — a position rejected by the government in response to a mass movement led by Pakistan’s major Islamic parties. Most Muslims consider Muhammad the last prophet and those who subsequently declared themselves prophets as heretics.
All Pakistani passport applicants must sign a section saying the Ahmadi faith’s founder was an “impostor” and his followers are “non-Muslims.” Ahmadis are prevented by law in Pakistan from “posing as Muslims,” declaring their faith publicly, calling their places of worship mosques or performing the Muslim call to prayer. They can be punished with prison and even death.
Don’t worry, they will probably say sorry in a few hundred years. Just like the RCs and Galileo.
Haha, wow. I knew much of Islam is plagerized from Christianity and Judaism, but they have their very own Mormons too!
time to wall off the religous countries and leave them with sticks and rocks.
You mean like the US, which is more religious than the rest of the industrialised world?
The late Prof. Salam is the only Muslim to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. His good friend, fellow physicist Steven Weinberg, with whom he shared that prize, said that Salam became more religious toward the end of his life. Previously, it had not been a significant influence on him.
Such a civilized country.
Regarding the Nobel laureate in Pakistan: Ahmadis are a -relatively- liberal group of muslims and are of course persecuted by the entrenched factions of muslims.
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More about Pakistan from Dispatches from the Culture Wars:
Pakistani Mob Burns Man for Blasphemy
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/07/09/pakistani-mob-burns-man-for-blasphemy/
A possibly mentally unstable man was arrested for allegedly burning a koran. A mob gathered around the olice station, broke in and burned him to death.