Daily Times

Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court passed away in February this year. He was a renowned conservative who was known for his pitched fork resistance to liberalism on the bench. Scalia was an extremely conservative Catholic who believed in a religious mission that he imbibed from his Church. In short, he was the one person on the Supreme Court that religious conservatives in the US could count on to hold back the tide of progress. President Barack Obama, a staunch liberal and at the opposite end of the political spectrum, paid him a glowing tribute saying that he was “one of the most consequential judges and thinkers to serve on the Supreme Court.”

This statement prompted me to pick up a copy of “Scalia: A Court of One” by Bruce Allen Murphy on a recent visit to the US. The book paints the picture of what I like to call a high-quality conservative. i.e. educated, articulate, and principled, even if with a decidedly religious mission. One may disagree with Scalia on many of his pronouncements, but it is hard not to admire the tenacity and sincerity of purpose that the man had.

The problem with us in Pakistan is that we as a nation suffer on account of low-quality conservatism. There is no figure equivalent to Justice Scalia in Pakistan, amongst the religious right. Some may point to the indefatigable Justice Jawad S Khawaja, the former Chief Justice, but he was hardly a man of the right. Pakistan has produced and continues to produce some great judges, but none of them is conservative.

Even in other fields, like journalism, what passes for conservatism in Pakistan is more akin to what is called alt-right in the US. There is a lot of fake news, lying, sensationalism, finger pointing, epithets, rabble rousing but hardly any substance. The poster boys of conservatism in Pakistan are utterly dishonest, often unprincipled and always flailing and high pitched.

Consider Ansar Abbasi’s latest column in Jang on the late Dr Abdus Salam, which was a cheap attempt to malign the memory of Pakistan’s greatest scientist. Make no mistake, Pakistan’s greatest scientist was Dr Salam and never that pseudo-scientist A Q Khan, the self-proclaimed father of the bomb (to which his contribution was marginal at best, but that is another story for another time).

Those familiar with Dr Salam’s incredible life know one thing about him: Like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Salam remained committed to his homeland, despite persecution and marginalisation, never giving up his Pakistani citizenship, despite offers from Britain, US and even India. As early as the late 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru approached Salam to come to India and head up their Physics research. Dr Salam refused and instead offered his services to Ayub Khan, and after Ayub, he was the Chief Science Advisor to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It is Salam who set up SUPARCO as well as Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission. It was Salam who founded Pakistan’s nuclear program. All these are undeniable facts. Even after Pakistan officially ex-communicated Salam’s sect, the Ahmadis, he continued to be actively involved in his endeavours to promote science in Pakistan. He did, however, resign from his post as Chief Science Advisor to Bhutto. Contrary to Ansar Abbasi’s claim, it was not Bhutto who fired him. In fact, Bhutto tried to convince Salam to carry on.

Pakistan’s proudest moment came when in 1979, the Sherwani, Qula and Khussa clad Dr Salam received his Nobel Prize. He started off his speech with these words: “On behalf of my colleagues, Professor Glashow and Weinberg, I thank the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Academy of Sciences for the great honour and the courtesies extended to us, including the courtesy to me of being addressed in my language Urdu. Pakistan is deeply indebted to you for this.”

Does this sound like a man who had disowned his country? On the contrary, it was the country that had disowned him, but he remained a Pakistani to the end. Thousands of Pakistani physicists have been the beneficiaries of Dr Salam’s various endeavours, including his centre in Trieste. All Ansar Abbasi has against Dr Salam is a lie repeated by A Q Khan, a man of dubious integrity and questionable morality, who is known around the world for nuclear proliferation, a crime he confessed to on television. The testimony of a person like that cannot be admitted. Does A Q Khan fulfil the requirements of tazkia-tul-shahood, the Islamic standard of evidence, given that he was selling nuclear secrets for decades? The late Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, a towering figure in his own right, rubbished A Q Khan’s slander against Salam as being nothing but a pack of lies.

Low-quality conservatism in Pakistan sustains itself by perpetuating myths and lies. There are certain stock myths that they wish to forward. The first is the founder of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. They want to argue that Jinnah, a staunchly secular Shia Muslim and a political liberal by all accounts, wanted Pakistan to be a Sunni-dominated theocratic state (despite the fact that he denounced theocracy repeatedly). The second is that Dr Abdus Salam, the only Pakistani Nobel Prize winner in Science, being an Ahmadi, was obviously a traitor. The third is that A Q Khan, a man who admitted to selling off the country’s nuclear assets for personal gain, is its greatest patriot. These three stock myths represent the entire universe of low-quality conservatism in Pakistan. To quote Jacques Abbadi, a French writer from the 17th Century: One can fool some men or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages.

The people of Pakistan are waking up and are no longer going to be fooled by liars, crooks, cranks and madmen who have taken this country for a ride over the last three decades.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via Twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com