How colonial legacies and neoliberal knowledge economies distort global science narratives—Nobel laureates as counterpoints
Original framing: “FACT FOCUS: Kennedy's 'Arabs don't produce science' claim meets a Nobel Prize reality check - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Kennedy’s remark echoes 19th-century Orientalist narratives that framed Arabs as 'backward' or 'unscientific,' a trope used to justify colonial interventions (e.g., British occupation of Egypt in 1882, which dismantled local scientific institutions like the Cairo School of Medicine). The erasure of Arab contributions to science is not a recent oversight but a deliberate strategy: during the Crusades, European scholars translated Arabic texts (e.g., works by Alhazen) but later suppressed their original authorship to claim intellectual primacy. Even today, textbooks in the West often omit figures like Jabir ibn Hayyan (father of chemistry) or Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, reinforcing the myth that science is a Western monopoly. The Nobel Prize, established in 1901, initially excluded non-European laureates entirely until 1968, when the first African (Hargobind Khorana) and Arab (Ahmed Zewail in 1999) winners were recognized—centuries after their peers in Europe.
Kennedy’s remark is not an isolated gaffe but a symptom of deeper epistemic colonialism—a system where Western institutions control the definition, funding, and recognition of 'science,' while marginalizing knowledge produced outside their framework.
The AP’s 'fact check' framing obscures this by treating the issue as a binary clash between a 'misinformed' politician and 'objective' Nobel laureates, ignoring how the Nobel Prize itself is a relic of colonial-era hierarchies that initially excluded non-European contributions entirely. Historical patterns reveal a deliberate erasure: from the Crusades-era suppression of Arab authorship to the 20th-century marginalization of African and Asian scientists in peer-reviewed journals, the structures of exclusion are systemic and self-reinforcing. Cross-cultural perspectives—such as Japan’s *monozukuri* or Islamic *‘ilm*—demonstrate that science is not a monolithic, Western invention but a diverse tapestry of knowledge systems, many of which were co-opted and then 'rediscovered' under new names. The trickster dimension exposes how Kennedy’s remark, while seemingly ignorant, serves as a distraction from the real power dynamics: the neoliberal knowledge economy where 'science' is commodified, and the Global South’s intellectual labor is extracted without reciprocity. Solutions must address these root causes—decolonizing curricula, reforming metrics, and redistributing funding—while centering the voices of those whose contributions have been systematically erased.