Daily Times: We are the pariahs of the world — Yasser Latif Hamdan

Dr Abdus Salam is one of the few heroes this nation can be truly proud of, but instead of recognising his great services to Pakistan and humanity, the nation remained silent

As the world inched closer to understanding the mysteries of the universe after the discovery and confirmation of the famed god particle, Higgs Boson, Pakistan should have had a lot to celebrate. A Pakistani physicist, a scientist who remained Pakistani to his dying day, was credited by the world for having played a key role in the discovery. Dr Abdus Salam is one of the few heroes this nation can be truly proud of, but instead of recognising his great services to Pakistan and humanity, the nation remained silent as the minaret of a ‘place of worship’ (since calling it a mosque is a crime under the law) was pulled down in Kharian by the proud Islamic police of Punjab. That place of worship belonged to Dr Salam’s community of ‘forced’ non-Muslims.

The day our Islamic heroes were demolishing the minaret in a house of worship, I happened to come across a bearded gentleman in the Lahore High Court who introduced himself as a luminary of the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat. He boasted, “Mirzais (Ahmedis) have been reduced to the level of chooras (sweepers) and will soon bite the dust by the grace of God.” The irony could not be clearer. While the world celebrates Dr Salam and by association (at the great man’s insistence), Pakistan, these various hate-mongers are busy denouncing and denigrating not one but two peaceful communities who have always contributed to the progress of Pakistan, with the full force and might of the state. No wonder then the entire world now treats us as pariahs at best and lepers at worst. The ideological heirs of the Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam who had called Pakistan ‘Kafiristan’ (land of infidels) and Jinnah ‘Kafir-e-Azam’ (the biggest infidel), and the ideological heirs of Maududi, who called Pakistan ‘Na-Pakistan’ (non-Pakistan), have now brought us to the brink of disaster. We are staring into an abyss and Maududi’s children are driving us there. Like India, we too are world famous for IT, except that in our case IT stands for international terrorism. Is this what we want for ourselves?

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