The Nobel gap: Reclaiming the Muslim legacy of knowledge

Winning a Nobel Prize is universally regarded as the highest recognition of human intellect—the pinnacle of creative and scientific achievement. Since its establishment in 1901, the Nobel Foundation has awarded 633 prizes to 1,026 individuals and organisations for advancing the frontiers of knowledge, promoting peace, and enhancing human welfare. Yet, among Muslims, only five have ever received this honour for sciences, while eight have been awarded for peace and three for literature.

This disparity does not arise from exclusion, but mainly from a civilisation's retreat from its own legacy of inquiry. The Muslim world, once known for scientific curiosity and philosophical brilliance, has over time lost its enthusiasm for discovery. The same ideals that once illuminated fields of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry with near-spiritual dedication to knowledge have, in many areas, faded into reverence without research, belief without exploration. For the decline of intellectual discipline and neglecting the very spirit of ilm (knowledge) that once defined the Muslim world, there is no one to blame but the civilisation itself. The story of Muslim absence from the Nobel list is not a tale of oppression or bias; it is a chronicle of diminished pursuit of passion unrenewed and potentials unfulfilled.

Among the rare exceptions stand a few luminous names. Dr Abdus Salam, the Pakistani physicist, became the first Muslim Nobel laureate in 1979 for co-developing the electroweak unification theory that revolutionised particle physics. In 2006, Dr Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh and his Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize for microcredit—a social innovation that empowered millions of poor women and redefined development economics. Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who defied Taliban bullets, was awarded the 2014 Peace Prize at just seventeen, becoming the youngest laureate in history and the voice of every silenced girl denied education.

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In 2015, the Nobel Committee honoured a Muslim scientist in chemistry: Aziz Sancar, a Turkish-American biochemist, for mapping the intricate mechanisms of DNA repair. A decade later, in 2025, Omar Yaghi stood on the Stockholm stage, sharing the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for pioneering the field of reticular chemistry—the art of weaving molecules into porous, functional materials.

That makes only five Muslim laureates for science. The disparity here is glaring—not of intellect but of environment. The West has built a culture that rewards inquiry; much of the Muslim world has built systems that fear it. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Muslim scholars translated Greek texts, invented algorithms, measured the stars, and laid the groundwork for modern algebra, optics, and medicine. Knowledge was then seen as a divine pursuit—"Seek knowledge even unto China" was more than a proverb; it was policy. Baghdad's House of Wisdom rivalled any modern research institute, and scholars from Córdoba to Samarkand made discovery a sacred duty.

That light dimmed when theology eclipsed philosophy and dogma displaced doubt. The collapse of intellectual pluralism—the marginalisation of thinkers such as Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina—marked the beginning of the decline. Colonial intrusion later deepened the decay, leaving many Muslim nations politically independent yet intellectually dependent. Many of the brightest minds emigrated for oxygen to laboratories in Cambridge, MIT, or Berkeley, where freedom of thought replaced fear of offence. The story repeats itself: most Muslim Nobel laureates built their careers in Western universities. Their success does not indict their belief; it indicts the systems that could not sustain their curiosity at home.

Science thrives on scepticism, not obedience. Yet in many Muslim societies, questioning authority is mistaken for defiance, and conformity masquerades as virtue. Critical thinking is largely absent from classrooms that prize rote memorisation over reasoning. Research budgets are meagre, peer review perfunctory, and political patronage suffocates merit. A young physicist in Cairo or Karachi spends more time chasing visas than experiments. Without autonomy, institutions become ornamental, not generative.

Islam equated ilm with spiritual duty. The Qur'an's first revealed word to Prophet Muhammad was Iqra (Read)—emphasising the primacy of knowledge in Islam. The tragedy is not that Muslims have stopped reading, but that too many have stopped asking why. The revival of intellectual vibrancy requires reclaiming that original mandate: to explore, to reason, to verify. Science and faith were never meant to be rivals; one explains creation, the other its meaning. When belief becomes afraid of the microscope, both religion and reason suffer.

Omar Yaghi's Nobel in 2025 is more than a personal triumph; it is a reminder that intellectual exile need not mean extinction. His journey—from a Palestinian refugee family to the world's most cited chemist—exemplifies what happens when intellect meets opportunity. His discoveries in green chemistry could help solve some of the world's most pressing challenges: clean water, breathable air, and sustainable energy. The irony is that while his innovations can hydrate deserts, many of the Muslim world's universities remain intellectual deserts—barren of inquiry, barren of dissent.

The Muslim world needs more than laureates; it needs laboratories that breathe curiosity, classrooms that encourage debate, and governments willing to fund science as vigorously as they fund theological undertakings. Research and scientific exploration are about survival in a fast-changing world. When a society invests in science, it invests in sovereignty—intellectual, economic, and moral. The Nobel Prize is not the measure of a civilisation's worth, but a reflection of its direction.

The task before Muslims is to reclaim that civilisational zeal by restoring freedom to think, courage to question, and dignity to fail in pursuit of truth. The next Nobel will not arrive by miracle; it will emerge from classrooms unafraid of curiosity, from universities liberated from biased politics, and from children taught that wonder is not heresy.

Dr Abdullah A Dewan is professor emeritus of economics at Eastern Michigan University in the US, and a former physicist and nuclear engineer of Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission. He can be reached at [email protected].

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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