Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood (; b. 1940) is a Pakistani nuclear engineer and a scholar of Islamic studies. After a career in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), he founded the Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) in 1999 – a radical organisation that was banned and sanctioned by the United States in 2001. He was the subject of a criminal investigation launched by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) over unauthorized travel to the Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks in 2001. Mahmood has been listed and sanctioned by the Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council since December 2001. He has also been sanctioned as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the United States' Office of Foreign Assets Control, with an address listing at the Al-Qaeda Wazir Akbar Khan safe house in Kabul.
He has since been living in anonymity in Islamabad, authoring books on the relationship between Islam and science.
Life and education
Mahmood was born in Amritsar, Punjab, British India to a Punjabi Muslim family. His father, Chaudhry Muhammad Sharif Khan, was a local zamindar (lit. feudal lord). Another one of his sons, Asim Mahmood, is a doctor.
In 1962, Mahmood went to attend the University of Manchester where he studied for a double master's degree. However, it remains unclear how much interaction had taken place during that time. Mahmood was one of the foremost experts on civilian reactor technology and was a senior engineer at the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP I)— the first commercial nuclear power plant in Pakistan. He gained notability and publicity in the Pakistan Physics Society for inventing a scientific instrument, the 'SBM probe', to detect leaks in steam pipes, a problem that was affecting nuclear plants all over the world and is still used worldwide. On 20 January 1972, the President of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, approved a crash atomic weapon programme, under Munir Ahmad Khan, for the sake of "national survival." Nevertheless, Mahmood continued his work at the KANUPP I engineering division.
In the aftermath of 'Smiling Buddha', a surprise nuclear test conducted by India in May 1974, Munir Ahmad appointed Mahmood as the director of the enrichment division at PAEC, where the majority of calculations were conducted by Dr. Khalil Qureshi– a physical chemist. Mahmood analysed the gaseous diffusion, gas centrifuge, jet-nozzle and molecular laser isotope separation method for uranium-enrichment; recommending the gas centrifuge method as economical. After submitting the report, Mahmood was asked to depart to the Netherlands to interview Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan on behalf of President Bhutto in 1974. In 1975, his proposal was approved and the work on uranium enrichment started with Mahmood as its director, a move that irked the more qualified but more difficult to manage Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had coveted the job for himself. His relations with Dr. Khan remained extremely tense and the pairs disagreed with each other and developed great differences. In 1976, Mahmood was removed from the enrichment division, Project-706, by Abdul Qadeer Khan, and Khan moved the enrichment division at the Engineering Research Laboratories (ERL) under military control. In the 1980s, Munir Ahmad secured Mahmood a job as project manager for the construction of the Khushab Reactor (Khushab-I) where he served as chief engineer and aided with designing the coolant systems.
2001 debriefing and detention
In August 2001, Mahmood and his colleague Chaudhry Abdul Majeed at the UTN met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Describing the meeting, the New York Times editorial quoted: "There is little doubt that Mahmood talked to the two al-Qaeda leaders about nuclear weapons, or that Al Qaeda desperately wanted the bomb". Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, later described intelligence reports of his meeting with Al Qaeda as "frustratingly vague." Investigators from Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were astonished and surprised at the extent of his nuclear weapons knowledge.
Mahmood-Hoodbhoy debates
Mahmood has written over fifteen books, the most well-known being "The Mechanics of Doomsday and Life After Death", which is an analysis of the events leading to doomsday in light of scientific theories and Quranic knowledge. However, his scientific arguments and theories have been challenged by some prominent scientists in Pakistan. His religiosity and eccentricity began troubling the Pakistan Physics Society; his peers often quoted him as "a rather strange man".
In 1988, Mahmood was invited to the University of Islamabad to deliver a lecture on science. During his lecture at the university's 'Physics Hall' he and several other academicians debated his book. While debating, a well known Pakistani nuclear physicist, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, and Mahmood, had an acrimonious public debate. Hoodbhoy had severely criticised Mahmood's theories and the notion of Islamic science in general, calling it ludicrous science. Mahmood protested that Dr. Hoodbhoy misrepresented his views, quoting: "This is crossing all limits of decency, he wrote. But should one expect any honesty or decency from anti-Islamic sources?" He has also written a tafseer of the Quran in English.
Mahmood is reported to be fascinated "with the role sunspots played in triggering the French and Russian Revolutions, World War II and assorted anti-colonial uprisings." According to his book "Cosmology and Human Destiny", Mahmood argued that sunspots have influenced major human events, including the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and World War II. He concluded that governments across the world "are already being subjected to great emotional aggression under the catalytic effect of the abnormally high sunspot activity under which they are most likely to adapt aggression as the natural solution for their problems". In this book, first published in 1998, he predicted that the period from 2007 to 2014 would be of great turmoil and destruction in the world. Other books written by him include a biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (sīrah) titled "First and the Last", while his other books are focused more on the relation between Islam and science like Miraculous Quran, Life After Death and Doomsday, and Kitab-e-Zindagi (in Urdu).
One passage of the book reportedly states: "At the international level, terrorism will rule; and in this scenario use of mass destruction weapons cannot be ruled out. Millions, by 2020, may die through mass destruction weapons, hunger, disease, street violence, terrorist attacks, and suicide."
Mahmood's lifelong friend, Member of Parliament Farhatullah Babar, who is currently serving as a spokesperson for the President of Pakistan, while talking to media, said: Mahmood predicted in Cosmology and Human Destiny that "the year 2002 was likely to be a year of maximum sunspot activity. It means upheaval, particularly on the South Asia, with the possibility of nuclear exchanges".
Mahmood has published papers concerning jinn, which are described in the Quran as beings made of fire. He has proposed that jinn could be tapped to solve the energy crisis. "I think that if we develop our souls, we can develop communication with them ... Every new idea has its opponents, he added. But there is no reason for this controversy over Islam and science because there is no conflict between Islam and science", Mahmood said to The Wall Street Journal in a 1988 interview.
See also
- Pakistan Academy of Sciences
- Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission
- Ummah Tameer-e-Nau