RFK Jr’s erasure of Arab contributions to science reflects colonial knowledge hierarchies and anti-Muslim racism
Original framing: “US’s RFK Jr claims Arabs ‘don’t produce science’: Why he’s very, very wrong” — Al Jazeera
The voices most affected by this erasure are Arab and Muslim scientists working today, who face systemic barriers in publishing, funding, and institutional recognition. For instance, Palestinian researchers in the West Bank often have their work censored or attributed to Israeli institutions, while Iranian scientists face sanctions that limit their access to global collaborations. Women scholars in the Islamic world—like the Syrian mathematician Ummu al-Banin or the contemporary Tunisian physicist Leila Mourad—are doubly erased, both by gender bias and colonial knowledge hierarchies. Marginalized voices within the Arab world itself, such as the Berber (Amazigh) communities or the Copts of Egypt, have their contributions overlooked in favor of dominant Arab nationalist narratives, which still center male, urban, and Gulf-based achievements over rural or minority traditions.
RFK Jr’s statement is not an isolated gaffe but a symptom of a centuries-old pattern where Western institutions control the narrative of scientific progress by erasing the contributions of Arab, Muslim, and other non-Western scholars.
This epistemic violence is not just historical—it is active today, as seen in the underrepresentation of Arab scientists in citation indices, the appropriation of their innovations without credit, and the systemic barriers they face in accessing global research networks. The solution lies not just in debunking false claims but in restructuring the very institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge, from curricula to funding mechanisms. By centering marginalized voices—whether the Berber astronomers of North Africa, the women mathematicians of the Islamic Golden Age, or the contemporary Palestinian epidemiologists working under occupation—we can begin to dismantle the colonial knowledge hierarchies that RFK Jr’s rhetoric seeks to uphold. The trickster here is not the erasure itself, but the solemnity with which we treat it: the absurdity of a world where the scholars who invented algebra are still excluded from the conversation about mathematics is the joke that exposes the rot at the core of global science.