“Pakistan has moved away from advanced scientific research and science has literally disappeared from Pakistan’s education system,” said American academic Noam Chomsky during his recent lecture. Speaking at a virtual session — part of the Habib University’s flagship Yohsin Lecture Series. Well with such astonishing revelation, Chomsky is sadly mistaken that we’ll ever lend an ear to his thoughts. That would be a great misunderstanding. We are such blessed creatures who don’t care about trivial things like education and science.
For us, the infidels are engaged in research and exploration, and once they introduce any new technology, we rush to buy it to augment our prestige, and soon afterwards with great pride fulfill the duty of cursing their mere existence. We are living under the delusion of our greatness of the past and narcissism has become our motto.
Mr. Chomsky please pardon our ignorance. We are prisoners of another kind, we have learnt to flirt with obliviousness. We are contend with throwing raw mediaeval hatreds boiling over from time to time with or without an excuse against the very reality of scientific education.
We have been dreaming for many centuries in the mirage of world leadership and the sleep of our negligence is not going to be awakened by any big revelation. We have embraced science and scientific knowledge as consumers and by no means are we ready to apply scientific knowledge in its true letter and spirit.
Discrimination is built into our laws and in our genes: Pakistan’s Constitution explicitly excludes non-Muslims from full citizenship. For multiple reasons every human rights listing puts Pakistan close to the bottom. Such is the irony that Dr. Abdul Salam, the only great Pakistani physicist, who seriously impacted the word of science, we disowned him in life and in death. The government denied him the honor of a state funeral; the media remained absent from the burial ceremony at Rabwah, which has since been renamed not after Abdus Salam but as Chenab Nagar, just to spite its Ahmadi residents. The restyled epitaph at his grave near his native Jhang awkwardly reads: “First —— Nobel Laureate”, from which the word “Muslim” has been deleted under court orders; the court, even in its narrow mindedness could have ordered the replacement of “Muslim” with “Pakistani” but that was not to be.
Just recently some students have strengthened their faith by throwing ink on his portraits and video-recorded the event. The posted video went viral with tens of thousands of views — and that it received high approval — speaks of the callous and misogynist attitude of us collectively as a society. In this world full of diversity, we separate individuals in just two segments i.e. believer and non-believer, we are very much interested in Islamizing everything and we have left no stone unturned in disguising science as Islam.
Proof of this is our science textbooks, which begin and end with religious words, and many teachers ignore the chapter on evolution. To include religion in purely secular sciences is a concept to which the enlightened world is alien to, but to this day, we have not been able to understand the clear difference between secular sciences and religious studies. Pakistanis do not question science’s utility for making bombs, machines, and medicines. But any step-by-step process that demands carefully weighing empirical evidence is culturally alien. Few encounter it in school, even while studying science subjects.
We have hit an extreme point where we have associated science and scientific knowledge with atheists and atheism. Due to this attitude and thinking, our contribution in the scientific world today is almost non-existent. We are teaching science in our educational institutions but not promoting science and the product we are developing is certainly familiar with science but lacks “scientific brain”.
We are developing “confused minds’’ in our educational institutions which are reluctant and afraid to openly acknowledge scientific knowledge and resultantly these ‘’confused minds’’ try to find answers to their scientific queries in religion and theology, which results in further confusion.
Sadly, our society and universities do not tolerate certain individuals also who try to dispel this confusion. The prime example of it would be the attitude adopted by the pundits of FC College towards Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a brilliant professor of physics. His efforts to promote science are unparalleled and cannot be denied. But perhaps we do not need the critics of consciousness and we do not want to wake up from our slumber because we are fearful of new realities and we do not have the capacity to face them either. Prejudice poisons the well of knowledge, making its water too toxic for science and inquiry to grow. So, Professor Chomsky, what’s certain, however, is that this ship’s crew and captain are powerless to steer it away from the iceberg ahead.
