United States Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has sparked uproar with comments he has made denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature. In a high-voltage rant on Monday, the US health secretary 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.” RFK Jr, who has been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and has promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism, made the comments during a US election campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan while supporting Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who is up against Arab-American Democrat nominee Abdul El-Sayed, in a tightly contested battle for Michigan’s Senate seat in next week’s midterm elections. Critics said the comments were racist, Islamophobic and factually inaccurate, pointing to modern and historic Arab innovation in multiple fields. Here’s how Arabs have made vital contributions to the human understanding of maths, science and literature through the centuries.
The period known as the Islamic Golden Age, from around 750 AD to 1258 AD, produced many key Arab contributions to medicine at a time when Europe was said to be in its Dark Ages. During this time, Arabic was the language of science and scholarship. 1st-4th centuries: The numerals 0-9, which originated in ancient India, were adopted by Arab mathematicians who spread them across the world. They displaced Roman numerals as a more advanced number system in mathematics. 8th century: Arab and Persian mathematicians were studying the ancient Indian concept of zero in mathematics in Baghdad, long before the Europeans.
The number zero was crucial to the development of mathematics – but was absent from widely used Roman numerals in Europe. 813-833: The Arab mathematician Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – one of those studying the number 0 – is often referred to as the “father of algebra” as he was the first to treat the method as a separate mathematical discipline in his work, Al-Jabr. This method provided the first linear and quadratic equations, still used as a core part of mathematical study today. 965-1040: Ibn al-Haytham, known as the “father of modern optics”, explained the role that light entering the eye plays in human vision. He was born in Basra in Iraq, but spent most of his working life in Cairo attending to noble families. 936-1013: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, called “the father of modern surgery”, was considered the greatest surgeon in the Middle Ages.
He wrote a 30-volume encyclopaedia detailing medical practices and designed and illustrated many surgical instruments. Born in Azahara, in Andalusia, he was known as Abulcasis in Europe. 9th century: Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. It is often cited as the oldest continually operating university. 1213-1288: Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation – the process by which blood passes through the lungs – several centuries before Europeans understood it.
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