RFK Jr. Says Arabs 'Don't Produce Science,' Drawing Backlash and a Long List of Counterexamples

US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. has drawn widespread criticism over remarks denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature. Critics called the comments racist, Islamophobic and factually wrong.

Speaking on Monday at a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kennedy said: "There's 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."

Kennedy was backing Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who faces Arab-American Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a tightly contested race for Michigan's Senate seat. The midterm elections take place next week. Kennedy has previously been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and has promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism.

The historical record points the other way. During the Islamic Golden Age, from about 750 AD to 1258 AD, Arabic was the language of science and scholarship while Europe was said to be in its Dark Ages. Arab mathematicians adopted the numerals 0 to 9, which originated in ancient India, and spread them worldwide, where they displaced Roman numerals. In Baghdad in the 8th century, Arab and Persian mathematicians were studying the concept of zero long before Europeans.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, active between 813 and 833, is often called the father of algebra for treating it as a separate discipline in his work Al-Jabr. Ibn al-Haytham, who lived from 965 to 1040, explained the role of light entering the eye in vision. Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi wrote a 30-volume medical encyclopaedia and designed surgical instruments, while Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation centuries before Europeans understood it. Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, often cited as the oldest continually operating university.

Modern prize records also contradict the claim. Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 and remains the only winner who wrote in Arabic. Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1993 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999. Michael Atiyah, born in London to a Lebanese father and a Scottish mother, won the Fields Medal in 1966. Peter Medawar, born in Brazil to a Lebanese father, took the 1960 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Other laureates include Elias James Corey, an American of Lebanese descent, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Moungi Bawendi, born in France to a Tunisian father, who won the same prize in 2023. Mohamed ElBaradei of Egypt shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he led. Omar M Yaghi, born in Jordan to a Palestinian refugee family, won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025 for work on metal-organic frameworks.

Reaction was swift. Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez of the Texas Medical Center wrote on X that Arab scientists of the Middle Ages "kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance." Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan called the remarks racist and noted that a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi, won last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Kennedy's removal. It said that dehumanising half a billion people with "fabricated, white supremacist talking points" was "utterly disqualifying for public office," and warned that the remarks fan anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a vulnerable time for these communities.