Muslim Nobel Prize Winner Ahmed Hassan Zewail
Photo: Ahmed Hassan Zewail Nobel Prize Chemistry
Two years ago I noted that hundreds of blogs and websites mistakenly offer up the statistic that there are 10 or 11 Muslim Nobel Prize Laureates. Excluding the Nobel Peace Prize which does not reward intellectual achievement (after all, Yasser Arafat got one) I wrote that there were only three Muslims (out of 1.5 billion) who have won Nobel Prizes in Science or Literature: Naguib Mahfouz, Abdus Salam, and Ahmed Zewail.
Seven months after I wrote that article I should have updated the total to 4. So please add Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Pamuk, it should be mentioned, is hardly a Muslim having been brought up in a secular, westernized family. He is what I call a MINO, a Muslim in Name only.
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