Salam stood out right from the moment he was born in 1926 in the city of Jhang, then part of British India. His father, a teacher, believed Salam’s birth was the result of a vision from God he had received during Friday prayers, and so growing up, Salam was treated as a superior being to his siblings – made exempt from household chores like milking the cow and emptying the toilet area, and afforded time to work on his astounding skills in mathematics. Yet his childhood was not a particularly luxurious one. When he left his city to attend Government College University in Lahore, it was the first time he had seen an electric light.

There, Salam’s skills in mathematics and physics set him apart from his classmates. He won a scholarship to attend Cambridge University, where he became one of the few South Asian faces at the time in St John’s College. But the pull of home was strong: after completing a doctorate at Cambridge, he then moved to Lahore to work as a Professor of Mathematics.

Reconciling science and religion

Throughout his life, Salam was a dedicated Muslim. He listened to the Koran on repeat while he worked in his office in his London home. He never saw his religion as a barrier to his science. In fact, he saw them working together, and claimed to colleagues that many of his ideas came to him from God. He was striving for a unified theory that would explain all of particle physics, which was in line with his religious beliefs. “We [theoretical physicists] would like to understand the entire complexity of inanimate matter in terms of as few fundamental concepts as possible,” he once said. But he accepted that there were areas of science that did not fit easily with his beliefs – like the Big Bang theory.

While his faith was deeply important to him, it was also a source of great pain, thanks to the way in which his particular sect of Islam, the Ahmadiyya Muslims, has been treated in Pakistan. The Ahmadiyya movement was formed in 1889 in Punjab, in British India. Ahmadi Muslims believe their founder, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, to be the expected Mahdi and Messiah. However other Muslims do not agree, and instead they believe they are still waiting for him. “The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community is a law-abiding, loving community,” says Adeel Shah, an Ahmadi Imam based in London. “However, it has been subject to various forms of persecution and discrimination especially in Pakistan.”

In 1953, the trouble really began for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community with a series of violent riots in Lahore against the movement. The Punjab government inquiry found the official death toll from these riots to be 20 people, but other estimates put it much higher, some in the thousands. A law passed in 1974 declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslims, and deprived them of their rights. As recently as 2010, two Ahmadi mosques in Pakistan were attacked, with 94 people killed and more than 120 injured.