Abdus Salam Quotes
There is no question but … science is the weakest in the lands of Islam. The dangers of this weakness cannot be overemphasized since honorable survival of a society depends directly on strength in science and technology …
First Muslim to win the Nobel Prize
Abdus Salam, 1926-1996, Pakistani Physicist, Quoted in Natural History, February 2003
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation is fascinating but sad. In 1902, Aga Kahn III and other Muslim reformers gathered to improve the terrible state of Muslim education. Muslims could attend the English operated public schools which were excellent, but the Imams fought these schools as they were purely secular and not under their control. Yet the Madrassas religious schools that then existed taught by rote and only Islamic religious content—no mathematics, science, other literature, art or anything else. Much of the teaching was religiously extreme with not even modern religious content. Over a century later the Schools of Pakistan—the Islamic nation carved out of India and those of most of the Arab nations are little better and despite a century of progress, the curriculum is the same.
This is a very Jeffersonian type statement.
If we do not have more scientific graduates from the university we will lose contact with modernity.
One of his major initiatives was to reform the Italian university curriculum to have more scientific offerings. Italy historically has been a great scientific culture ranging from Galileo to Enrico Fermi, but in recent times the universities have not had strong scientific curricula.
What is ironic about this fact is that 1000 years ago, the Muslim Middle East was scientifically and mathematically far in advance of Europe. However, after about 1100 AD, the Muslim religion began to lose its intellectual tolerance and cultural appreciation for science and innovation to the point where innovation of any kind was regarded as heresy, and the logic and empiricism that was present in early Islam disappeared, and there has been little scientific innovation and progress in traditional Arab Islamic nations ever since.
Mohammad Abdus Salam NI(M) SPk, was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and Muslim to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize (after Anwar Sadat of Egypt).
