Michigan [US], October 28 : US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr faced backlash after claiming that modern Arab Muslims do not produce science and literature as they did in the past and do not win prestigious awards, according to The Washington Post.
Kennedy made the remarks on Monday (local time) while campaigning for Republican candidates in Michigan, including former congressman Mike Rogers, who is running for an open Senate seat. He blamed the 'Muslim Brotherhood', an Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928, for decline in "Islam’s contributions to art and literature and science and engineering."
“The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood took over in 1928; that’s why you don’t see any Muslims, any Arab Muslims, winning the Nobel,” Kennedy said at the event, according to The Washington Post.
“There are 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Field [s] prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce the literature they used to produce,” he added.
Kennedy also said the 'Muslim Brotherhood' “launched a new ideology that departed from traditional Islam in a very, very dangerous way” and argued that it had created “stagnant societies” that had “let down their own people.”
"The Muslim religion produced the Golden Age, which lasted almost a thousand years where Islamic lands were the centre of the foundation for art, literature, and science and engineering," he said.
"All of that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood," Kennedy added, arguing that "talking about the Muslim Brotherhood is not Islamophobia."
His remarks triggered criticism online, with opponents highlighting the achievements of Arab scholars and scientists.
Nirav Shah, a former principal deputy director at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, criticised Kennedy in a series of posts on X, calling him “unserious and incurious about the world” and listing Nobel laureates and scholars to counter his claims.
https://x.com/nirav_maine/status/2115060737181663690
Among the examples cited in response to Kennedy's remarks were Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian American chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999, and Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
In another post, Shah rejected arguments from Kennedy's supporters that some of the listed individuals had done their work in the United States, that Kennedy was referring to achievements relative to the Arab world's global population, or that one of the individuals was Persian.
https://x.com/nirav_maine/status/2115187365404614774
"But none of that is what he actually said. So those defences are all post hoc rationalisations," Shah said.
He added, "More broadly, this is another chapter in the long-running attempt to denigrate and devalue the work of non-Western people (here, Arabs)."
Shah also cited a quote attributed to Saul Bellow, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"
"Racists are not just odious, they are unoriginal," he said. 
Samer S Shehata, an associate professor of Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma, called Kennedy's remarks "incredibly disappointing" and "bigoted," according to The Washington Post.
He said there was a “long history of Arab science in the Golden Age, but also more recently, there have been Arabs who’ve contributed in major ways to science,” as well as to literature. He also pointed to Ibrahim Nasrallah, who won a literature award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma last year.
The controversy comes as Kennedy has sought to link Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in Michigan's Senate race, to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has denied accusations of personal or family ties to the movement and previously called attempts to associate him with it Islamophobic.
Last year, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating the process of designating certain chapters of the 'Muslim Brotherhood' as foreign terrorist organisations, according to The Washington Post.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the newspaper reported.
Michigan is a key Senate battleground as Republicans seek to maintain control of the chamber. Kennedy has been campaigning across the country for Republican candidates ahead of the midterm elections. He also criticised El-Sayed on Monday (local time) over his support for pandemic-era measures, including lockdowns and social distancing.