US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has sparked uproar with his comments denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature.
On Monday, in a highly charged speech, the US Secretary of Health declared: “There are five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet, they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
RFK Jr, who has been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism, made the comments at a US election campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while supporting Republican candidate Mike Rogers, who faces Arab-American Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, in a hotly contested battle for Michigan’s Senate seat in next week’s midterm elections.
Critics said the comments were racist, Islamophobic and factually inaccurate, highlighting modern and historic Arab innovation in multiple areas.
Here’s how the Arabs made vital contributions to human understanding of mathematics, science and literature over the centuries.
Arab contributions to mathematics, science and the humanities
The period known as the Islamic Golden Age, from around 750 to 1258 AD, produced many key Arab contributions to medicine at a time when Europe was said to be in its Dark Ages. At that time, Arabic was the language of science and scholarship.
1st-4th centuries: The numbers 0-9, originating in ancient India, were adopted by Arab mathematicians who spread them throughout the world. They replaced Roman numerals as a more advanced number system in mathematics.
8th century: Arab and Persian mathematicians were studying the ancient Indian concept of zero in mathematics in Baghdad, long before the Europeans. The number zero played a crucial role in the development of mathematics, but it was absent from the Roman numerals widely used in Europe.
813-833: The Arab mathematician Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – one of those who studied the number 0 – is often called the “father of algebra”, because he was the first to treat the method as a separate mathematical discipline in his work, Al-Jabr. This method provided the first linear and quadratic equations, still used today as an essential part of mathematical study.
965-1040: Ibn al-Haytham, known as the “father of modern optics”, explained the role that light entering the eye plays in human vision. He was born in Basra, Iraq, but spent most of his professional life in Cairo among noble families.
936-1013: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, nicknamed “the father of modern surgery”, was considered the greatest surgeon of the Middle Ages. He wrote a 30-volume encyclopedia detailing medical practices and designed and illustrated numerous surgical instruments. Born in Azahara, Andalusia, he was known in Europe as Abulcasis.
9th century: Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. It is often cited as the oldest operating university.
1213-1288: Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation – the process by which blood passes through the lungs – centuries before Europeans understood it. He wrote more than 110 volumes of works on surgery, ophthalmology and philosophy while working as a senior physician in Egypt.
915-965: Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, considered the greatest poet in the Arabic language, was Yemeni and grew up immersed in Bedouin Arab culture. He wrote in classical Arabic and many of his verses became sayings used in everyday Arabic.
11:00-11:65 a.m.: Muhammad al-Idrisi was a geographer known for producing the Tabula Rogeriana, one of the most accurate and detailed medieval world maps, and a high point of Islamic geography. He was born in Ceuta in Morocco.
Prize-winning Arabs
In more modern times, RFK Jr’s assertion that Arabs do not win Nobel Prizes in science and literature is very far from the truth. Here are some of the highlights:
1960: Nobel Prize in Medicine
Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on acquired immune tolerance, which underlies organ transplantation. He was born in Brazil to a Lebanese father.
1966: The Fields Medal
Michael Atiyah won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, in 1966. He was born in London to a Lebanese father and a Scottish mother. Educated in Egypt, he spent much of his childhood in Cairo and Khartoum.
1988: Nobel Prize for Literature
Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work, notably the Cairo Trilogy, which, according to the Swedish Academy, constitutes “an Arabic narrative art which applies to all humanity”. He is still the only winner of the prize to have written in Arabic.
1990: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Elias James Corey won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing retrosynthetic analysis. He is an American of Lebanese origin.
1993: Wolf Prize in Chemistry
Egyptian Ahmed Zewail won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. The Wolf Prize is an international prize awarded annually to scientists and artists living in Israel by the Wolf Foundation since 1978.
1999: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Zewail also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering femtochemistry, which involves studying chemical reactions on extremely short time scales. He also won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1993.
2005: Nobel Peace Prize
Egyptian scientist Mohamed ElBaradei shared his Nobel Prize with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he headed.
2018: Wolf Prize in Chemistry
Omar M Yaghi, born in Jordan to a family of Palestinian refugees, won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for his work on metal-organic structures. He shared the prize with the Japanese Makoto Fujita. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemned his acceptance of the prize because it is awarded by an Israeli foundation.
2023: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Moungi Bawendi won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. He was born in France to a Tunisian father, but based in the United States.
2025: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Yaghi also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal-organic structures. They are crystalline materials with large internal cavities that can capture and store gases, harvest water from the air and trap pollutants. He shared the prize with Susumu Kitagawa of Japan and Richard Robson of Australia.
In an article on »
Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan called RFK Jr’s comments “racist” and, in an article on X, wrote: “One of the men who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year was a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi. »
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for the removal of the US health secretary. He said: “To publicly appear as a sitting U.S. cabinet official and dehumanize half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab-Americans – with fabricated rhetoric and white supremacy is completely disqualifying for public office. His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously wrong, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred at a time when “Communities are already vulnerable to sectarian attacks from other public officials across the country.”
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