Finally Pakistan honors 1st Nobel Prize winner

Finally, Pakistan has plan to rename a university centre for physicist Abdus Salam, its first Nobel laureate, after over 30 years of all but disowning his achievements, as a member of a minority sector barred from identifying itself as Muslim.

Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win the prize for science, was a member of the Ahmadi sector, which is deliberated as heretical by law in Pakistan, criticized by Muslim leaders and targeted by the powerful activists.

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The office of Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif said it had given the permission for National Centre for Physics at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the capital, to be renamed after Salam.

Salam shared the Nobel Prize of 1979 in Physics along with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for helping to pave the way to the discovery of the "God particle," which is considered as one of the greatest achievements of science in the last 100 years.

Though, under pressure from right-wing priests as well as students, Salam was banned from giving lectures at the government sector universities during his lifetime, and even after winning the Nobel.

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Abdus Salam is buried in the Pakistani town of Rabwah, one of the major centres for Ahmadis, where his gravestone was defaced by local powers who removed the word "Muslim" from the writing that called him "the first Muslim Nobel laureate".

"All his life, Professor Salam wanted to establish an institute for physics in Pakistan but no one permit him to do this," said Saleemuddin, the Ahmadi community's Pakistan.

"They did not honour him in his life however we are happy they have finally done so now, better late than never," added Saleemuddin, who uses just one name.