Twenty Days On, Pakistani Professor Who Apologised For Teaching Darwin's Theory Is Still Not Speaking To Media

Various Pakistani publications recently reported a peculiar case from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where an assistant professor of Zoology at a government college was forced to give in writing that he was denouncing Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as the notion that women are equal to men.

Women are inferior to men, the teacher said in a forced undertaking to the local administration after he was harassed by a group of maulanas.

The incident reportedly took place in Bannu district. Assistant professor Sher Ali, who holds an MSc degree in Zoology from the University of Peshawar and MPhil’s in human genetics from the Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, currently teaches at the Government Postgraduate Degree College in the province.

As per Dawn, the matter began on 5 October, when Ali addressed a seminar at the college about women’s rights in the light of the Constitution. The event was reportedly in response to growing demands by religious leaders that women should not step out of homes without Hijab.

The clerics in the area staged a protest saying that Ali was “spreading debauchery and speaking against Islam”.

The college administration intervened. All the parties concerned were taken to the district administration office, where Ali submitted an undertaking to the deputy commissioner of Bannu that he renounced the idea that women are equal to men.

The clerics also demanded that he renounced Darwin’s theory as anti-Islamic in the same affidavit, which contains 11 points.

Ali later took to Facebook, where he has 20,000 followers, and said that he was teaching the theory only because it was published by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Textbook Board. 

“Chapter 24 of the biology textbook discusses Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and if someone has problems with this topic, then they should approach the government for the removal of the chapter from the course,” he reportedly said in the video.

Watch his video below:

Ali has not been speaking to the local media about the incident. Yesterday, he left a post on his Facebook account that he requested national and international news channels to not contact him repeatedly. He would talk when he deemed it right, he said.

On his Facebook account, Ali has described himself as "Liberal humanist, bibiliophile, hodophile, aesthete, sport aficianado, loner and gregarious- a combo".

In another post on 9 October, that is two days after the Hamas terror attack on Israeli civilians, Ali posted (translated from Urdu by Facebook), "Maybe just as the 9/11 attacks justified America for occupation and massacre worldwide, Hamas's current attacks are to justify Israel's occupation of more Palestinian territories. We have to be patient..not emotional..We celebrated 9/11 but when America waved its sword, we said it was done by America itself."