What risks will scientists and the science-minded take to stand up for free speech and reason? In Pakistan—with political turmoil, nuclear weapons, Osama bin Laden’s former hideout, and the world’s seventh-largest population—consider the latest in what physicist and polymath public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy faces.
Hoodbhoy has published dozens of papers like “Probing quark-distribution amplitudes through generalized parton distributions at large momentum transfer” in Physical Review Letters. In 2013, after he edited and contributed extensively to Oxford University Press’s Confronting the Bomb: Pakistani and Indian Scientists Speak Out, a prominent Pakistani newspaper reminded readers that he’s “a vociferous opponent of the nuclear bomb.”
He’s also a vociferous advocate for rational civic openness for Pakistan’s 33 million Facebook users.
“Facebook was where Pakistan could debate religion,” reported a 21 July Guardian headline. “Now it’s a tool to punish ‘blasphemers.’” The subhead elaborated: “Laws that criminalize insulting Islam have led to a death sentence for posts, as activists worry Facebook’s commitment to Pakistanis’ ‘voice’ is mostly lip service.”
Hoodbhoy doesn’t “blaspheme” or insult Islam. But that doesn’t mean he shrinks from religion-related volatility in public affairs. He has published some 300 political and social commentaries worldwide. So when Guardian reporters needed authoritative quotations about Pakistan’s Facebook crackdown, they contacted Hoodbhoy:
“Until recently, social media afforded a measure of privacy where you could discuss the hypocrisy of people whose behavior was loathsome but who wore the thick garb of piety,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a prominent academic and activist.
“Now the state is saying that we will track you down wherever you are and however you might want to hide,” Hoodbhoy added. “Pakistan is fast becoming a Saudi-style fascist religious state.”
In late July, MIT-educated Hoodbhoy complained in an interview by Pakistan’s Newsline that too many Pakistani TV channels “propagate so-called Islamic healing and miracles, and rail against evolution.” The article was headlined “Science refuses to take root in Muslim countries.” Hoodbhoy said that pseudoscience, though found everywhere, is especially common “wherever excessive emphasis is placed upon tradition and belief.” And he declared that it’s hard to “summon forces” against pseudoscience, adding, “Sadly, charlatans, crooks, and religious people” are good at misleading others.
Being misled isn’t the only threat, of course. At least twice, Hoodbhoy has publicly recounted the horror of losing friends and colleagues to political-religious murder.
The June Guardian article “Pakistan: Man sentenced to death for blasphemy on Facebook” noted that in Pakistan, “blasphemy is so contentious that the mere mention of unfounded allegations can ignite mass uproar.” It reported that in April, a mob had lynched a university student for allegedly offending Islam, that the allegation had later been proven false, and that some students and university staff had conspired to incite the murder. In early July, Fortune reported that a Facebook official and Pakistan’s interior minister Nisar Ali Khan had met to “discuss a demand that the company prevent blasphemous content or be blocked.”
Last month in Dawn, a major English-language Pakistani newspaper, Hoodbhoy published a commentary about the international Muslim community under the headline “The ummah is at war with itself.” He called the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, with 57 member states and belief that it’s the Muslim world’s collective voice, a “fantasy.” Back in March, Dawn reported that interior minister Khan had called for Muslim countries to “tackle this very important issue of blasphemy as a united ummah.”
In 1991, Hoodbhoy published Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, with translations in Turkish, Malaysian, Indonesian, Arabic, Spanish, and Urdu, the language of Pakistan. Later he did for Pakistani television something like what the late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan did elsewhere. He produced and anchored a series of shows called Living in the Cosmos, then another called Mysteries of the Universe. His August 2007 Physics Today commentary “Science and the Islamic world—the quest for rapprochement” had this dek: “Internal causes led to the decline of Islam’s scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.”
Hoodbhoy’s CV lists him as “founding board member” of the Eqbal Ahmad Centre for Public Education. His July Dawn commentary ended with a prescription for the ummah that reflects the foundation’s philosophy:
There is a way for Muslim states and peoples to move forward. This will require creating strong democratic institutions based on equal rights for all citizens, encouraging the participation of women in public life, and respecting equally all Muslim sects as well as other religions, providing space and freedom to individuals and education for all based on science and reason.
Editor’s Note, 11 August: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to a Facebook page as Hoodbhoy’s. He has no involvement with the page, which frequently posts quotes from his various articles and interviews.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
