The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, to be fired after remarks denying Arab contributions to science, literature and major awards.
At an Oct. 26 campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kennedy was supporting Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize,” he said. He also said Arabs do not win the Fields Medal or Wolf Prize or produce literature, and blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for what he described as the loss of a scientific and cultural tradition.
The Associated Press reported that the remarks came during a discussion of allegations linking Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has denied ties to the group. The AP distinguished Arab identity, which it linked to ethnicity and language, from Muslim identity, which is religious.
In a statement dated Oct. 27, CAIR called for Kennedy’s immediate firing. It characterized his remarks as a “sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity,” called them “maliciously false” and said they could fuel anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate. EconoTimes previously reported on Kennedy’s claims about Arab contributions.
CAIR named Ahmed Zewail, Naguib Mahfouz, Tawakkol Karman and Omar M. Yaghi as Arab Nobel laureates. Nobel Prize records list Zewail, an Egyptian-born chemist, as the 1999 chemistry laureate, Mahfouz as the 1988 literature laureate and Yaghi as a 2025 chemistry laureate. The Swedish Academy said Mahfouz was the first literature laureate whose native language was Arabic. Wolf Foundation records list Zewail and Yaghi as chemistry award recipients in 1993 and 2018, respectively.
Al Jazeera’s explainer places Arab scholarship in a longer historical context, including what it calls the Islamic Golden Age, roughly 750 to 1258. Michigan’s general election, in which Rogers and El-Sayed are competing, is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 3.
