Opinion ‘Brilliance’ is not unbiased. Nor is the Nobel Prize

Omar Yaghi’s Nobel Prize in science and Maria Corina Machado’s in peace are really a measure of how visibility and recognition are shaped by global politics

Rashid Ali

October 14, 2025 12:24 PM IST First published on: Oct 14, 2025 at 12:24 PM IST

When Omar Yaghi, a scientist of Palestinian origin, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Muslim world revelled in it. But Zionist media soon started flooding social media platforms with data showing that Jews, though less than 0.2 per cent of the global population, have received more than 20 per cent of all Nobel Prizes since 1901. Muslims, constituting two billion, have won just a few in all categories.

These derisive messages depict Jews as “innovators” in comparison to Muslims, often seen as “laggards.” These terms were coined by the thinkers of modernisation who turned religious demographics into a marker of progress and failure.

Whenever a Muslim wins a Nobel, the debate turns into what Edward Said called an “imagined geography”, a world divided between the “enlightened” West and the “backward” East. Such thinking once justified colonial rule; now it paints Muslims as prisoners of faith.

The Nobel Prize, instituted in 1901 during Europe’s imperial rise, signified brilliance that the world recognised. However, it also symbolised what counts as knowledge and who qualifies as “knowledgeable”. During the Cold War, it became a soft power tool. The Prize often went to those who promoted Western interests. One commonality between Maria Corina Machado, who won the Peace Prize and the US President Donald Trump is Zionism. Machado, has many times, asked Benjamin Netanyahu to bomb Venezuela to liberate it and establish “democracy”.

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According to Nature, over 90 per cent of Nobel Prize winners in science come from institutions of repute from the US or Western Europe. The lingua franca of this achievement has unswervingly remained English, where research infrastructures know no other language.

It’s also true that not all Muslim laureates have won the award for their “excellence”. Some were given it for their ideological connection to the West. For others, it became a civilisational litmus test. The question is not why there are few Muslim Nobel winners, but why the world keeps asking this question at all.

Just look at Yaghi’s background. His background is partitioned into his being reduced to a man of rubble, which an ordinary Palestinian is subjected to, and the man who has done pathbreaking work in the field of chemistry. The irony simply laughs at us. The world celebrates his achievements in Stockholm, and his ancestral land in Gaza turns into debris. The same world that commends the brilliance of a Muslim in laboratories, sees with complicit eyes, the destruction of Palestinian lives on the ground.

Just as the Sophists once sold education to ancient Greeks, modernity now sells an old question in a new package: Can Muslims ever be modern? The question is itself rooted in what Mahmood Mamdani calls “culture talk”. Binarised as “Good Muslim” and “Bad Muslim”, it looks at political and historical problems as cultural flaws. It ignores global power structures and shifts the blame to Muslim culture itself. This shifting of blame became the justification for Israeli aggression on Palestine and the US war on Iraq and Afghanistan. When Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi regime, it was seen as “Good Muslim”. But once the Ayatollahs challenged US dominance, the same Iran was recast as “Bad Muslim”.

Therefore, history is an important site that can settle scores. Modern science did not begin in Europe. Thinkers like Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Alhazen in the golden age of Arabs made breakthroughs in various areas of science and laid the groundwork for the European Renaissance. The English scholar Roger Bacon himself acknowledged in his famous Opus Majus (1267): “We have seen nothing of philosophy except what has come to us through the Arabs.” Today, the West claims “universal knowledge” as its own, shames the descendants of Arab scientists and bulldozes their houses even if it honours them as brilliant minds.

Ironically, the Nobel Prize owes its origin to Alfred Nobel’s wealth, which came from dynamite. In the amassing of wealth, both the surge of innovation and the upsurge of destruction coexisted. Today’s world mirrors the same contradiction. The cognitive ability of brilliance produces the folly of global hierarchies. Its non-aligned status is pure illusion. Debates on deep structural inequalities, colonial exploitation, the systematic dismantling of native education and the displacement of scholars are marred by the debates on wars and economic policies of the West. Naturally, a Palestinian can only find a laboratory in the USA and not in Gaza.

So, the question should be: What and who defines brilliance? What makes scientific breakthroughs possible? In which language do people receive funding and recognition? Can the current neoliberal world separate scientific prowess from economic power?

Omar Yaghi’s Nobel Prize in science and Maria Corina Machado’s in peace are really a measure of how visibility and recognition are shaped by global politics. Demography doesn’t compete on scoreboards. The moment we start to think beyond empire and dynamite, we shall have a non-essentialised category of excellence.

The writer teaches at Central University of Jammu