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Why aren’t there more Muslim Nobel laureates in science?

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Many Muslim-dominant countries today have been stifling scientific developments for ages.

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Free Malaysia Today

From Dr Amir Faizal Abdul Manan

The scientific world is again abuzz, this time with the much anticipated 2023 Nobel Prize announcements. The winners for this year include Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for critical discoveries that enabled the development of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.

A virtue of modern science is that it is fast becoming a global endeavour, independent of race, religion and nationality. It is axiomatic, therefore, that most major modern scientific breakthroughs, regardless of the lineage of the discoverer, aim to serve humanity as a whole.

It is fairly reasonable to expect that, notionally, the Nobel Prize winners would, over time, be somewhat representative of the global demography. In reality, however, there can be external factors deeply-ingrained within a social, institutional or national ecosystem that stifles the scientific progress of one particular community more than others.

Therefore, one cannot help but wonder why there aren’t more Muslim Nobel laureates in the scientific fields given that there are more than 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide today – almost a quarter of the global population.

In the 122-year history of the Nobel Prizes, only four laureates in the sciences have been of Muslim lineage: three in chemistry and one in physics, but none in the fields of medicine or economics.

Abdus Salam, a British-Pakistani, shared a prize in Physics with two others in 1979 for their work on electroweak interactions between elementary particles. Quite memorably, he proudly donned a traditional Pakistani shervani, a white shalwar and a turban when receiving the award from the King of Sweden.

Although he received overwhelming accolades globally, he was shunned terribly back home for his sectarian affiliation, which was what had caused him to leave Pakistan in the first place in the mid-1970s.

Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American chemist based at Caltech, was the rare solo recipient for the 1999 prize in Chemistry for his innovative use of laser-beams to map chemical reactions.

In a 2009 interview for the Fountain Magazine, Zewail lamented: “What America has given me is a system of appreciation and opportunity, and that is what we are lacking in the Muslim world. If I had stayed in Egypt, I would not have been able to do what I have done because of this lack of opportunity and appreciation for achievement.”

In 2015, Aziz Sancar, a Turkish-American biologist based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shared a prize in Chemistry with two others for their work on DNA repairs.

Although not explicit about his views on religion, the state and education, one could perhaps guess his inclinations from the fact that he was an avowed supporter of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, partly attributing his success to the founder of the Turkish republic.

In the latest 2023 announcement, Moungi Bawendi, a scientist of Tunisian descent at MIT, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two others for their work on quantum dots. However, Bawendi was actually born in France and spent most of his time in the US, quite unlike the three preceding Nobel laureates.

There are only four science Nobel laureates of Muslim lineage throughout history, and intriguingly, three had to leave their Muslim-dominant country of birth to pursue their passions in science and eventually win the Nobel Prize awards.

One must wonder if these scientists would still be science Nobel laureates had they remained in their country of birth.

Golden age nostalgia

During the Islamic golden age, as the 8th to 13th century is commonly referred to in the literature, science was understood as a common knowledge that belonged to all of humanity.

However, later, there was a rise of alternative fields that were deemed exclusive to the Muslims with notions of “Islamic” astronomy, “Islamic” philosophy, “Prophetic” medicines and so on. In fact, during this time, science began to be perceived as valuable only if religiously and immediately useful.

This led to the narrowing of the scopes for open-ended rational inquiries that have been the bedrock of scientific advancements.

The Ottomans learned this the hard way in the 18th century. When they attempted a military reform to catch-up with the advanced military equipment of the western powers that they used to defeat, they realised that they lacked the know-how. The madrasahs that had once focused on rational and mathematical sciences had been altogether eliminated through a gradual replacement with religious education.

Realising their mistakes, the Ottomans began importing experts from Europe, particularly the French, to establish western-style education in Istanbul. It was only in 1910 that they had successfully reintroduced mathematical education in madrasahs, but alas, it was too late as the empire crumbled a decade later after World War 1.

Islamic enlightenment

Muslims today frequently glorify past thinkers and scientists from the golden age, often with nostalgic references to the likes of Al-Khawarizmi, the great mathematician, or Ibnu Sina, the father of modern medicine.

Yet, these are scholars from over a thousand years ago, and we have to ask ourselves, what has happened since then?

When trying to identify ways of reviving the intellectual dynamism of the past, we conveniently ignore problems in many Muslim-dominant countries today that have been stifling scientific developments for ages.

Lest we forget, throughout history, there were many sporadic attempts to drive the Islamic-version of enlightenment. Predictably, however, they provoked a reactionary, counter-enlightenment movement in defence of orthodoxy, and with the support of authoritarian states, many of the rationalist movements were inevitably quenched.

Sadly, even today, we are still not able to have a proper conversation about this. Anyone who offers a critical appraisal would be immediately denounced, often even accused of being a symphatiser of Islamophobes, or worse still, anti-Islam.

Muslims urgently need our own version of reformation and enlightenment, if we wish for the Muslim community globally to break free from the chains that have been holding us back.

 

Free Malaysia TodayAbdus Salam, a British-Pakistani, shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with two others in 1979.

 

Dr Amir Faizal Abdul Manan is a scientist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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