Muslim Inventions - Nobel Prizes
Albert Einstein in a circle of other Nobel Prize Winners in 1928 (from the left Walther Nernst, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Robert Andrews Millikan and Max von Laue).
I poked fun at the lack of Muslim patents and inventions in
More Muslim Inventions
the Arab Contribution to Civilization: Nothing Lately
How the world looks when you've created nothing
List of Chinese Nobel Prize Laureates
If you google "Muslim/Islamic/Arab Nobel Prize Winners" you will invariably get quite a number of websites that erroneously list ten or eleven names. They are far too generous.
MUSLIM/ARAB NOBEL WINNERS
Here are the usual suspects that most blogs mistakenly count as Muslim or Arab Nobel Laureates:
Physics
1979 - Abdus Salam
Literature
1957 - Albert Camus
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
Peace
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat
2003 - Shirin Ebadi
2005 - Mohamed ElBaradei
2006 - Muhammad Yunus
Chemistry
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail
Medicine
1960 Peter Brian Medawar
1998 Ferid Murad
First off, I ignore the Nobel Peace Prize since one can be a village idiot and get one; Yasser Arafat is a perfect example.
As to the rest:
- Albert Camus, neither Arab nor Muslim, happened to have been born in Algeria which at that time was a French Colony; his father was French, his mother - Spanish. An accurate ethnic designation for Camus is pied noir.
- Elias James Corey, neither Arab nor Muslim, was born and raised in America of Lebanese Christian Phoenicians. Many Christian Lebanese do not identify themselves as Arab but rather as descendents of the ancient Canaanites and prefer to be called Phoenicians.
- Sir Peter Brian Medawar, neither Arab nor Muslim, was born in Brazil of a British mother and a Lebanese Christian father. Medawar was raised and educated in the UK and was in fact an atheist.
- Ferid Murad, neither Arab nor Muslim, was born and raised in America of an Albanian Muslim father and an American Baptist mother. Murad was baptized Episcopalian in college, his wife is Presbyterian, and two of his daughters married Jews.
This leaves Naguib Mahfouz, Abdus Salam, and Ahmed Zewail. So three Muslims won the Nobel Prize in Science and literature. Out of 1.2-1.5 billion Muslims.
It should be noted that Abdus Salam was born in British India, in what is now Pakistan, and although listed as Pakistani, was ethnically a Punjabi. Mahfouz and Zewail however are both Arab. That means that two Arabs won the Nobel Prize in Science and literature. Out of 300 million Arabs.
A further note on Professor Salam, he was educated at Punjab University, St. John's College, Cambridge and Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1952. He then returned to Pakistan where he served as Professor at Government College, Lahore and Punjab University. It was here that he found intellectual pursuits being stifled. There was no postgraduate work of any value; there were no journals written; there were no scientific conferences. Given the choice between physics or Pakistan, he returned to Cambridge to take up the position of Lecturer. In 1957 he was appointed Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College. Certainly if he stayed in Pakistan he would never have accomplished anything of note, nor would he ever have won a Nobel Prize.
Salam holds the distinction of being the first Pakistani Nobel Laureate, and is the first Muslim Nobel Laureate in science.
It should also be pointed out that of the three Muslims only Salam was devout. Mahfouz and Zewail were brought up in a secular environment. Zewail is Muslim in name only. Mahfouz in fact was stabbed by Muslims for his anti-Islamic mutterings.
Both Zawail and Salam did their research in non-Muslim countries and spent almost the entirety of their lives outside of Islamic countries. So much for "Muslim" Nobel Prize Winners. I doubt any of Zawail's colleagues ever think of him as Muslim.
Although I ignore the Peace Prize as irrelevant to intelligence, it is noteworthy that Shirin Ebadi's Peace Prize was awarded precisely for being anti-Islamic: promoting human rights and democracy in Iran.
But for those who persist in being technical as to how many Muslims won a Nobel Prize: OK, OK, Updated total: 8 (of which 5 [Peace] do not involve creativity at all) - if that makes you feel better (but it's really only three).
JEWISH NOBEL WINNERS
0.2% OF WORLD'S POPULATION (16-19 Million Jews)
Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
Chemistry
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
2000 - Alan J. Heeger
Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Rober Fogel
1994 - Harsanyi, John C.
2001 - Stiglitz, Joseph E.
2001 - Akerlof, George A.
2002 - Kahneman, Daniel
Medicine
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
1997 - Prusiner, Stanley B.
1998 - Furchgott, Robert F.
2000 - Kandel, Eric R.
2000 - Greengard, Paul
Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1995 - Martin Perl
1996 - Osheroff, Douglas D.
1996 - Lee, David M
1997 - Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude
Total 131 (I am not counting Peace Prize winners)
The following is for refence only, I do not count them as intellectual achievements:
Peace Prize
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
No wonder Muslims hate Jews: It's so embarrassing to see what Jews have accomplished compared to a population 100 times larger. But in some respects one may wonder if indeed Jews control the world - it seems they control the Nobel Prize Awards Committee.
It would do Muslims well to start teaching their children important things other than how to blow themselves up. Please consider:
If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.
Other bloggers on Nobel Prizes and Jewish Creativity:
A deeper look reports that Google buys search algorithm invented by Israeli student.
Find other bloggers discussing these technorati tags: ahmed zewail, anwar el sadat, elias james corey, naguib mahfouz, noble biography, peter brian medawar, noble prizes, Islam noble prizes, Muslim noble prizes, Arab noble prizes
TrackBacks from Old System
- They're the Best from Silflay Hraka
Call them stereotypes if you like, but various groups of people gain the reputation for doing certain things well (i.e. Germans make cars, Italians cook, Catholic priests do... various things). It led me to wonder what is it that modern day muslims ... [Read More]Tracked on September 18, 2006 06:07 PM
Comments from Old Comment System
- ??!! Is it a serious problem with Muslims? Or the Nobel committee? Btw, how many Hindus or Chinese got this? Or, someone is claiming Jews are the most brilliant race ever [ahem... after Christians, obviously].
- Its strange coming across these websites. People get so caught up with this stuff. I have a philosophy, and I'm not saying its a good one. But here goes, I never worry about what I am not willing to change. I converted to Islam, I'm Black, and I think its ipmortant to make the distinction between "Nation of Islam" and "Islam". They are not one and the same. I do not recognize Nation of Islam as Islam, there are reasons for that which I will clarify if I am requested to do so. I didn't convert to this religion because I needed a religion, or because I like beards, or I like the nagative attention, or I like to dress like muslims, or I love eating with my hands, or any of the Islamic traditions, in fact, I'm egnostic by nature. I converted to this religion because it is the undeniable truth, plain and simple. I questioned this religion for years before I converted, I could find no doubt in it. I find far too many people don't take the time to get the facts instead of taking statements out of context. I mean, anyone can pull excerpts from texts and misconstrue their meaning. If I found any doubt in this religion, I would not be muslim, and its as simple as that. I could care less what religion I belong too, as long as it is the 100% Truth, I will follow it. Personally, I could care less about religion. I grew up in a Christian household, but I have had a problem with my religion since I was 9 years old. I spent many years exploring religions, mormon, judaism, lived with Amish, Menonite, and researched many others, untill I came across Islam. What I'm trying to understand is this. Why are muslims being grouped into this big heap. Its like "me" saying I'm christian, yet I don't believe Jesus is the son of God, and I don't go to church, etc. Is that person muslim. So, does this mean, if I'm born a woman, If I want, I can call myself a man? Muslim has a specific definition and there is very specific criteria. People that blow themselves up, are not muslims, they are simply people that blow themselves up, lol. As Suicide in Islam is Forbidden. Anywho, please tell me your thoughts, and if you wish to know how I came to this religion, I'd be glad to share it with you, believe it or not, I started to question life and my religion when I was nine. By the way, thank you for clarifying those facts concerning 1001 muslim inventions. Peace.
Comment by: grey.type on March 9, 2006 04:07 AM
Comment by: Torontoyes ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://plancksconstant.org/nav-commenters.gif)
on October 27, 2006 06:17 PM
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