Why do more Arabs not win the Nobel Prize?

A woman enters the the Swedish Academy ahead of the announcement of the laureate of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 10. AFP

An important area of scientific inquiry is understanding why certain groups underperform in areas such as education and income. This allows for the determination of appropriate countermeasures. However, the pressure to produce politically correct findings has distorted the scientific process in western academic journals. With the right investment, Gulf academic journals have the opportunity to overtake their western counterparts in delivering credible solutions to these pressing social problems.

Every year in October, when the Nobel committee declares the year’s winners, as a proud Arab and a Muslim, I am hurt by the underrepresentation of people who share my identity. Securing the highest scientific honours is one of many areas where Arabs and Muslims have performed poorly in recent decades. It is a phenomenon that I would like to see reversed, and as a professional researcher, my innate preference is for it to be studied and understood scientifically so that suitable remedies can be proposed.

I myself recently tried to publish research arguing that Arab culture contributes to the underperformance of Arabs in certai

Speaking from my own life experience, I am confident that part of the problem is animus toward Arabs and Muslims, as I have witnessed such overt discrimination first-hand. However, I am even more confident that societal habits pervasive in the Arab and Muslim worlds play a large role, too, as I can see some problematic forms of behaviour in the education systems and social norms in many of these countries.

Nevertheless, my musings are mere conjectures, and what we actually need is rigorous scientific inquiry. After all, overcoming animus-induced discrimination requires a very different set of interventions than does underrepresentation caused by possessing different preferences and values to other groups.

The same core set of issues arises in other inter-group differences, such as those in the gender or racial domain. For example, in Arab countries, are women underrepresented in jobs for chief executives because of discrimination in the appointment stage, or is there a dearth of qualified women due to limited opportunities for them to build their resumes earlier in the professional development chain? Or, perhaps, is there some aspect of the job that makes women less likely to pursue it than men? Clearly, rigorous research is critical to determining the correct remedy.

Western academic journals are generally the most important forum for the vetting and dissemination of high-quality research, including research on inter-group differences. They emerged during the Enlightenment, a period of western history characterised by the embrace of reason and logic. The journal system – while flawed – has delivered countless improvements in our understanding of natural phenomena that have had a profound impact on our daily lives, especially in areas such as medicine, physics, chemistry and engineering.

However, in recent years, and around inter-group differences, too many western academic journals have begun deserting the core principles of scientific inquiry, instead mutating into vehicles for political agendas. The tacit set of publication rules adopted by these journals is that the only acceptable explanation for inter-group differences is institutional discrimination against the underrepresented group. There is occasional tolerance for studies that ascribe differing outcomes to differing preferences, as in the tendency for women to work in health or education as opposed to construction or security reflecting their affinity for the former sectors.

However, even in such cases, there is a pressure for the findings to be interpreted as reflecting socialisation as opposed to biological differences. In other words, if society exerts sufficient effort at behaving in a gender-neutral manner from birth, then women will want to be soldiers at the same rate as men, and any deviation from equal affinity can only be the result of gender-biased behaviour at some point in life. The exception is in the field of biomedical research on illnesses, where it is still acceptable to deem that there are biological differences in the propensity to suffer from a certain disease, as in the case of polycystic ovary syndrome, which is exclusive to women.

I have heard many tales from my colleagues across the social sciences having their work suppressed by leading academic journals because it does not satisfy the scientific zeitgeist. I myself recently tried to publish research arguing that certain cultural norms in the Arab world contribute to the statistical underperformance of Arabs in certain domains. My work was not only rejected scientifically – I was rebuked for even deigning to make the argument. Puzzlingly, I am an Arab and the person wagging their finger at me was not. Had my research ascribed this Arab underperformance to systemic discrimination by some other race, it may have fared better.

The suppression of scientifically sound research on inter-group differences and the promotion of scientifically questionable research on the grounds of political correctness reinforces the very problems it ostensibly tries to solve. If I affirm that Arabs don’t win Nobel prizes because the committee has a hatred for Arabs, and I demand quotas, it will likely result in Arab winners being laughed at, further perpetuating negative stereotypes. If I reject the role played by certain aspects of contemporary Arab culture, such as the tendencies to promote dogma and often limit freedom of expression, these problems fester.

Unfortunately, for the time being, western academic journals seem to be diving even deeper into the sea of political correctness, leaving the shores of the Enlightenment further and further behind. If the Gulf countries invest sufficient capital in their own academic journals, they can leapfrog their western counterparts in the study of inter-group differences. This will allow them to make further contributions to these difficult problems, as opposed to the ideological farce that some western journals have become.

The key will be wooing some of the numerous disgruntled western scientists who are fed up with politics corrupting science. Bringing the high-quality ones onto editorial boards, asking them to edit special issues and providing them with a venue to publish their research can initiate a virtuous cycle of growth for Gulf academic journals that is consistent with their broader innovation strategies. It can also cast them more prominently as contributors to vexing global problems.