London, July 10 (ANI): Abdus Salam (died in 1996) , the first Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize in physics after he predicted the existence of the so-called 'God particle', had been shunned in his own country because of his religious beliefs.
Salam had predicted the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle in the 1970s but despite being a leading figure in Pakistan's Space and Nuclear Program, he was shunned by Muslim fundamentalists when they took control of the country during those years.
According to the Daily Mail, although Salam was a Muslim, the physicist, who died in 1996, belonged to the Ahmadi sect, who believed Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was their spiritual leader as opposed to the Prophet Muhammad.
As a result Salam, along with Pakistanis from other religious minorities, such as Shiite Muslims, Christians and Hindus were attacked by militants from the Sunni Muslim majority.
The physicist's life, along with the fate of the three million other Ahmadis in Pakistan, drastically changed in 1974 when parliament amended the Constitution to declare that members of the sect were not considered Muslims under Pakistani law.
Salam resigned from his government post in protest and eventually moved to Europe to pursue his work and created a centre in Italy for theoretical physics to help physicists from the developing world.
He reportedly received a string of international prizes and honours for his groundbreaking work in the world of subatomic physics, while in 1979, he shared the Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg for his research on the Standard Model of particle physics, which theorized that fundamental forces govern the overall dynamics of the universe.
Salam died on 21 November 1996 at the age of 70 in Oxford, England, after a long illness.
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