Physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy proselytizes for secular rationality in Pakistan
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0209
The polymath Pakistani physicist and public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy, who wrote the Physics Today article ‘Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement’ (August 2007, page 49), brings a scientist’s outlook to culture and politics. In a pair of recent high-visibility opinion articles in Pakistan, he has stood forthrightly for science and reason and against public folly—sometimes merely insidious, but sometimes deadly—that claims religious justification.
Both articles appeared in an affiliate of the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times,the Express Tribune , which says it ‘caters to the modern face of Pakistan’ with the mission to defend ‘liberal values and egalitarian traditions.’
In the commentary ‘ On neutrinos and angels ,’ Hoodbhoy starts with the recent news from CERN that neutrinos might have exceeded the speed of light. He engages actual physics to expose pseudoscientific nonsense. Here is an example:
Speed of light issues have often moved sections of religious people in rather strange ways. Way back in 1973, as a young physics lecturer at Quaid-i-Azam University, I had been fascinated by the calculation done by the head of our department. Seeking the grand synthesis of science and faith, this pious gentleman—who left on his final journey last month—had published calculations that proved Heaven (jannat) was running away from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His reasoning centred around a particular verse of the Holy Quran that states worship on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr (Night of Revelation) is equivalent to a thousand nights of ordinary worship. Indeed, if you input the factor of 1,000 into Einstein’s famous formula for time dilatation, this yields a number: one centimeter per second less than the speed of light!
The internet ‘groans’ these days, writes Hoodbhoy, ‘under the weight of claims that the Holy Quran had specified the speed of light 1400 years ago.’ Such ‘unrestrained leaps of logic’ bring him to his point, which is to explain how real science works:
Science comes from persistently and patiently checking hypotheses, building upon earlier discoveries and knowledge, and systematically sifting out all which cannot pass stringent tests of logic and observation. For example, experiments at CERN consume the working lives of some of the most brilliant people on earth, require billions of dollars of equipment, and stretch human capacities and ingenuity to the limit. When real scientists eventually publish a result, it comes from solid evidence and not from uncontrolled spurts of imagination and strident assertions of faith.
Hoodbhoy levels charges against other ‘uncontrolled spurts of imagination and strident assertions of faith’ in the commentary ‘Remembering Salmaan Taseer.’ He indicts ‘the kind of psychological conditioning that has turned [Pakistanis] into nasty brutes, cruel both to [themselves] and to others.’ He condemns religious indoctrination for making ‘so many Pakistanis disposed towards celebrating murder, lawlessness, and intolerance.’
Hoodbhoy recalls the murder of the prominent politician Taseer, the murderer’s proud claims of divine sanction, the few who stood up for civilized decency in the matter, and the many who raucously celebrated the crime, in effect mocking the rule of law.
Taseer had publicly questioned Pakistan’s harsh religious blasphemy law, with its single sanction of capital punishment, in the case of ‘an illiterate Christian peasant woman, Aasia Bibi.’ This ‘earned him 26 high-velocity bullets from one of his security guards, Malik Mumtaz Qadri,’ while the ‘other guards watched silently.’ Hoodbhoy continues:
In this long, sad, year more has followed. Justice Pervez Ali Shah, the brave judge who ultimately sentenced Taseer’s murderer in spite of receiving death threats, has fled the country. Aasia Bibi is rotting away in jail, reportedly in solitary confinement and in acute psychological distress. Shahbaz Taseer, the governor’s son, was abducted in late August—presumably by Qadri’s sympathisers. He remains untraceable. Shahbaz Bhatti, another vocal voice against the blasphemy law, was assassinated weeks later on March 2.
Hoodbhoy also remembers how ‘the Pakistani public reaction to Taseer’s assassination horrified the world’ a year ago:
As the news hit the national media, spontaneous celebrations erupted in places; a murderous unrepentant mutineer had been instantly transformed into a national hero. Glib-tongued television anchors sought to convince viewers that Taseer had brought ill unto himself. Religious political parties did not conceal their satisfaction, and the imam of Lahore’s Badshahi Masjid declined the government’s request to lead the funeral prayers. Rehman Malik, the interior minister, sought to curry favour with religious forces by declaring that, if need be, he would ‘kill a blasphemer with my own hands’.
Hoodbhoy adds that televisions worldwide ‘showed the nauseating spectacle of hundreds of lawyers feting a murderer, showering rose petals upon him, and pledging to defend him pro-bono.’ He reports that the chief justice of the Lahore High Court said that the murderer had ‘merely done his duty as a security guard’ and that ‘it was actually Taseer who had broken the law of the land by attempting to defend a person convicted of blasphemy.’
Hoodbhoy ends by diagnosing this insanity as originating in something he calls ‘deadly': fervid ‘khutbas (sermons) delivered across the country’s estimated 250,000 mosques.’ This Pakistani advocate of freedom of mind sees the situation as dire enough to require censorship.
I’ve seen him quote Thomas Jefferson, another advocate of freedom of mind. But it seems safe to assert that Jefferson never faced anything like what Hoodbhoy faces.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.