Washington Post: Malala Yousafzai needs little introduction. The 17-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl, education advocate and survivor of a Taliban assassination attempt is her country’s most famous teenager and has been the darling of the international community for more than two years now. Her triumph today — winning the Nobel Peace Prize alongside an Indian activist who fought against child labor — makes her both the youngest person ever to be awarded the prize and only the second Pakistani.
But the story of the first Pakistani Nobel laureate is worth remembering, and not for particularly happy reasons.
In 1979, Abdus Salam, a Pakistani physicist known for his pioneering work on subatomic particles, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics alongside two other scientists. The research conducted by Salam and his colleagues anticipated the discovery decades later of the Higgs Boson, known colloquially as the “God particle.”
In the years preceding his Nobel victory, Salam had been one of Pakistan’s most notable and acclaimed scientists. He helped establish Pakistan’s space agency, was a science adviser to the government and played an integral role in starting research into nuclear and other technologies.
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Anti Islam act by Muslims, Asia, Pakistan