Credit to Pakteahouse: Repost: By Yasser Latif Hamdani

The poison of ignorance and extremism that Bhutto and General Zia jointly fathered during their dictatorial regimes has fully indoctrinated even those who otherwise describe themselves as educated.

This week the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN inched closer to the discovery of Higgs Boson or the God Particle as it were. In this extraordinary story of human achievement,  Dr. Abdus Salam is a key player who put Pakistan on the map of theoretical physics. In his homeland though, a group of self-styled champions of Islam have started a posthumous campaign of scurrilous slander claiming that Dr. Salam was giving out nuclear secrets. Forget that even a confirmed bigot like General Zia  held a ceremony in our only nobel prize winner’s honour or that no one ever accused Dr. Salam of any such thing; in Pakistan to be a hero you have to actually transfer technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Now consider the case of 11 year old Sitara Akbar. Every Pakistani and his mother in law are citing her as a crowning national achievement, blissfully oblivious of the fact that she is an Ahmadi. To them her religion is suddenly unimportant or irrelevant or is it? How many Sitara Akbars have been expelled from our schools for being Ahmadi? How many productive citizens of this republic have been killed and maimed for believing differently?

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s National Assembly imagined itself the Islamic equivalent of the Council of Nicea. Just as that ancient bastion of Christian orthodoxy excommunicated unitarian Christians for not believing in the trinity of the father, son and the holy ghost, the National Assembly saw it fit to – primarily at the instigation of the Prime Minister and his law minister- declare an entire sect non-Muslim. Just like the post hoc elevation of the principle of trinity at Nicea, Pakistan’s National Assembly located Islam in the principle of the finality of Prophethood.

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