Salam - The First ****** Nobel Laureate
Producer: Zakir Thaver
Director: Anand Kamalakar
Year: 2018, runtime: 75 minutes
Trailer: TSAFF 2018 - Salaam The First Nobel Laureate Trailer
Dr. Abdus Salam was a theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1979 for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. His work laid the foundation of the Standard Model where he introduced Higgs bosons to the theory, which were later
experimentally produced at CERN. He worked tirelessly to reinvigorate the Muslim world in regaining their place in the scientific community. In 1964, he established the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Each year ICTP funds hundreds of students from many developing countries (both non-Muslims and Muslims alike) to train them for their PhD studies.
Abdus Salam came from humble beginnings, growing up in a small brick house in the remote village of Jhang, Pakistan. His father, Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain, was a devout Muslim who had a dream before his son’s birth that he would achieve great things for humanity. Abdus Salam turned out to be a deeply spiritual person who traversed two worlds with ease: one of science and religion, modernity and tradition, war and peace and obscurity and celebrity. He was a man of immense love who kept loyal to his people, country, and faith.
In 2014, the Pakistani government removed the word “Muslim” from his tombstone in Rabwah, Pakistan, due to his belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, which received wide condemnation from the scientific community and human right groups. This film will explore the life of Abdus Salam, from his steadfast growth in the physics community to the numerous hardships he faced during his life.
Despite the unfair treatment he received from the Pakistani leadership, Abdus Salam kept striving to educate the Muslim youth, often narrating anecdotes from the past when Muslims were at the pinnacle of scientific discoveries. Copied below is the narration he made during his speech at the Nobel prize ceremony. It's the story of a young Scottsman who traveled great distances to Andalusia to study
under the great Arab-Muslim scholars in Spain, a time when the Western civilization was still in its infancy.
Nearly seven hundred and seventy years ago, a young Scotsman lefthis native glens to travel south to Toledo, Bologna and Salerno. His namewas Michael, his goal to live and work at these places and to master thenewer developments in sciences, then available only at these Centres.Since Arabic was the language of science at that time, he had to learn Arabic.
Michael reached Toledo in 1217 AD [...] Once he reached the South, Michaelformed the ambitious project of introducing Aristotle to Europe, translatinginto Latin not from the original Greek, which he knew not, but from the Arabic translation ofAristotle then taught at Toledo. This was the first introduction ofAristotle's work into medieval Europe, together with the work of Arab-Muslim writers like Averros (Ibn Rushd). At Salerno there flourished a great medicalschool chartered by Frederick in 1231. Here Michael met the Danishphysician Henrik Harpestraeng — later to become Court Physician ofEric IV Waldemarsson. Henrick, the physician, had come to Salerno tocompose his treatise on blood-letting and surgery. Henrik's sourceswere the medical canons of the great clinicians of Islam, Al-Razi andAvicenna (Ibn-e-Sina), which Michael the Scot translated for Henrick from Arabic.Toledo's, Bologna's and Salerno's schools, representing as they did thefinest synthesis of Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin scholarship, were some ofthe most memorable of international assays in scientific collaborationin the Middle Ages. To these centres came scholars not only from therich countries of the East, like Syria, Turkey and Egypt, but also fromdeveloping lands of the West, like Scotland and Scandinavia. Then, asnow, there were obstacles to this international scientific concourse, withan economic and intellectual disparity between different parts of theworld. Men like Michael the Scot or Henrik Harpestraeng, the Dane,were singularities. They did not represent any flourishing schools ofresearch in their own countries. With all the best will in the world theirteachers at these universities doubted the wisdom and value of trainingthem for advanced scientific research.
Abdus Salam cared deeply about the state of the Muslim nations and played a key role in developing the scientific body in Pakistan and elsewhere. His wife Louise Johnson also played a role in the development of science in Islamic countries, lecturing in Iran, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and supported the creation of SESAME, the new synchrotron in Jordan. Abdus Salam wrote numerous books and gave lectures stating that science is the common heritage of all mankind and no one nation can solely claim in its development. He repeatedly advised third-world countries to invest heavily in science, as he believed science was crucial to alleviate their poverty.
(Many thanks to Adeel Ahmad for proposing and organising the projection and to the producer Zakir Thaver for offering the film.)
Books (most of these are available at the CERN library):
Abdus Salam, a biography, by Jagjit Singh: https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/abdus-salam-jagjit.pdf
Renaissance of sciences in Islamic countries: https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/0884
Ideals and Realities — Selected Essays of Abdus Salam: https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/0403
Interviews:
Living History presents Abdus Salam, Duke University [English]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbwBx2tGW4
Interview by Akhtar Said [Punjabi]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWc_tw1YrzI
Salam Memorial held at CERN in 1997: http://cds.cern.ch/record/423799
Memorial website for Abdus Salam: https://salam.ictp.it
Visit to ICTP, Italy: https://adl1995.github.io/wanderings/ictp
Misc.
Life of Dame Louise Napier Johnson (1940-2012): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2021.0038
Reflections Through Neutrino Oscillations: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1360752
Muhammad Zafarullah Khan (from whom Abdus Salam took inspiration): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Zafarullah_Khan