Muslim Nobel Prize winners

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ahmed Zewail, 1999

Nobel Prize in Literature

Naguib Mahfouz, 1988
Orhan Pamuk, 2006

Nobel Peace Prize

Anwar El-Sadat, 1978
Yasser Arafat, 1994
Shirin Ebadi, 2003
Mohamed ElBaradei, 2005
Muhammad Yunus, 2006

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ahmed Zewail, 1999

Ahmed Hassan Zewail (born February 26 1946 in Damanhur, Egypt) is an Egyptian American chemist, and the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry. Born in Damanhur (60 km south-east of Alexandria) and raised in Disuq, he received his first degree from the University of Alexandria before moving from Egypt to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. After some post doctorate work at the University of California, Berkeley, he was awarded a faculty appointment at Caltech in 1976, where he has remained since. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1982, and in 1990, he was made the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics.

Zewail’s key work has been as the pioneer of femtochemistry-i.e. the study of chemical reactions across femtoseconds. Using a rapid ultrafast laser technique (consisting of ultrashort laser flashes), the technique allows the description of reactions on very short time scales – short enough to analyse transition states in selected chemical reactions.

In 1999, Zewail became the third ethnic Egyptian to receive the Nobel Prize, following Anwar Sadat (1978 in Peace) and Naguib Mahfouz (1988 in Literature). Other international awards include the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1993) and the Robert A. Welch Award (1997). In 1999, he received Egypt’s highest state honour, the Grand Collar of the Nile.

Cambridge University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Science in 2006.

Zewail is married, and has four children.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Naguib Mahfouz, 1988

Naguib Mahfouz (December 11 1911 – August 30 2006) was an Egyptian novelist who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mahfouz was born in the Gamaliya quarter of Cairo, named after Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882-1974), the physician who delivered him. A longtime civil servant, Mahfouz served in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and finally as a consultant to the Ministry of Culture. He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Arabic-language films.

Chitchat on the Nile (1971) is one of his most popular novels. It was later made into a film featuring a cast of top actors during the time of president Anwar al-Sadat. The film/story criticizes the decadence of Egyptian society during the Gamal Abdel Nasser era. It was banned by Sadat to prevent provocation of Egyptians who still loved former president Nasser. Copies were hard to find prior to the late 1990s. Mahfouz’s prose is characterised by the blunt expression of his ideas. He has written works covering a broad range of topics, including socialism, homosexuality, and God. Writing about some of the subjects was prohibited in Egypt.

Many of his novels were first published in serialized form, including Children of Gebelawi and Midaq Alley which was adapted into a Mexican film starring Salma Hayek (El callejon de los milagros).

Children of Gebelawi (1959), one of Mahfouz’s best known works, has been banned in Egypt for alleged blasphemy over its allegorical portrayal of God and the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In 1989, after Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed for apostasy, Egyptian theologian Omar Abdul-Rahman told a journalist that if Mahfouz had been punished for writing his novel, Rushdie would not have dared publish the Satanic Verses. Sheikh Omar has always maintained that this he was not calling for Mahfouz to be killed, but in 1994 Islamic extremists, believing that he was, attempted to assassinate the 82-year-old novelist by stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home. He survived, permanently affected by damage to nerves in his right hand. Subsequently, he lived under constant bodyguard protection. Finally, in the beginning of 2006, the novel was published in Egypt with a preface written by Ahmad Kamal Abu Almajd.

Due to his outspoken support for Sadat’s Camp David peace treaty with Israel, his books were banned in many Arab countries until after he won the Nobel prize.

Prior to his death, Mahfouz was the oldest living Nobel Literature laureate and the third oldest of all time, trailing only Bertrand Russell and Halldor Laxness. At the time of his death, he was the only Arabic-language writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In July 2006, Mahfouz sustained an injury to his head as a result of a fall. He remained ill until his death on August 30, 2006 in a Cairo hospital. Prior to his death, he suffered from a bleeding ulcer, kidney problems, and cardiac failure.

Mahfouz was accorded a state funeral with full military honors on August 31, 2006 in Cairo. His funeral took place in the Al Rashdan Mosque in Nasr City on the outskirts of Cairo.

Mahfouz once dreamed that all the social classes of Egypt, including the very poor, would join his funeral procession. In actuality, attendance was tightly restricted.

Orhan Pamuk, 2006

Pamuk, Orhan, 1952-, Turkey’s most celebrated contemporary novelist, studied Robert College (now Univ. of the Bosporus) and Istanbul Univ. Pamuk uses a variety of formal techniques derived from Western fiction to portray themes and settings from the Ottoman past and the Turkish present. Written in Turkish and translated into dozens of languages, his novels frequently explore the conflicts between European and Islamic aspects of Turkish society and the crises of identity attendant upon that conflict. Pamuk’s lyrical style and vivid imagery are often compared to those of Borges, Garcia Marquez, and other innovative Western writers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, appeared in 1982. He achieved best-seller status at home and fame abroad with The White Castle (1985, tr. 1990), a postmodern historical novel set in 17th-century Constantinople (Istanbul) during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Pamuk subsequently wrote two intellectual mysteries, The New Life (1994, tr. 1997), at once a thriller and a textual exploration set in rural contemporary Turkey, and My Name Is Red (1998, tr. 2001), a taut and magical story concerning a murdered 16th-century miniaturist. In Snow (2002, tr. 2004), an elaborately plotted tale of love and politics, he treats the current clash of values between theocratic Islamists and secular Westernizers in Turkey. His other novels include The Silent House (1983) and The Black Book (1990, tr. 1994). Istanbul: Memories and the City, a memoir of his youth, was published in 2005.

Pamuk is also an essayist and a human-rights activist with a particular interest in the rights of Turkish women and Kurds. In 2005 he was charged with denigrating Turkey’s national character by publicly stating that one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds had been killed in Turkey, a reference to the 1915 Armenian genocide and more recent conflicts with Turkish Kurds. In the face of severe criticism, much of it from the European Union, the charges were later dropped.

Nobel Peace Prize

Anwar El-Sadat, 1978

Sadat, Anwar al-, 1918-81, Egyptian political leader and president (1970-81). He entered (1936) Abbasia Military Academy, where he became friendly with Gamal Abdal Nasser and other fellow cadets committed to Egyptian nationalism. A German agent during World War II, he was imprisoned (1942) by the British but escaped after two years in jail. He was again jailed (1946-49) for participating in terrorist acts against pro-British Egyptian officials. Sadat took part in the bloodless coup (1952) that deposed King Farouk. Between 1952 and 1968, he held a variety of government positions, including director of army public relations; secretary-general of the National Union, Egypt’s only political party; and president of the national assembly. In 1969 he was chosen to be Nasser’s vice president, and after Nasser’s death (1970), he succeeded to the presidency. Less charismatic than his predecessor, Sadat was nevertheless able to establish himself as Egypt’s strongman and a leader of the Arab world. He assumed the premiership in 1973 and in October of that same year led Egypt into war with Israel. He became an Arab hero when Egyptian troops recaptured a small part of the Sinai Peninsula, taken by the Israelis in 1967. A pragmatist, Sadat indicated his willingness to consider a negotiated settlement with Israel and shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Menachim Begin as a result of the Camp David accords. He was assassinated by Muslim extremists, who were opposed to his peace initiative with Israel.

Yasser Arafat, 1994

Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (August 24 1929 – November 11, 2004), popularly known as Yasser Arafat, was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; 1969-2004) and President[2] of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA; 1993-2004). In 1994 Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for the negotiation of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord.

Arafat was a controversial and controlling figure throughout his lengthy career. While his supporters viewed him as a heroic freedom fighter who symbolized the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, his opponents described him as an unrepentant terrorist. Still others accused him of being corrupt or weak. Arab nationalists believe that he made too many concessions to the Israeli government during the 1993 Oslo Accords. However, Arafat has been widely recognized for leading the Fatah movement, which he founded in 1957.

Shirin Ebadi, 2003

Shirin Ebadi is a human rights and democracy activist, and a lawyer, who was awarded 2003′s Nobel Peace Prize. She is the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. Born in 1947 in Hamadan, Iran, Ebadi received a law degree from the University of Tehran and became the first female judge in Iran. She had to resign her position following the revolution in 1979, when conservative Islamic clerics took control of the country and introduced severe restrictions on the role of women, calling women “too emotional” to hold a high ranking position in the judicial system. Ebadi now lectures law at the University of Tehran, and is a campaigner for strengthening the legal status of children and women. In 1996, Human Rights Watch honored Ms. Ebadi as a leading human rights defender for her contribution to the cause of human rights in Iran.

As a lawyer, Ebadi is known for taking up cases of liberal and dissident figures who have fallen foul of the judiciary. Among others, she has represented the family of Dariush Farouhar, a dissident intellectual who, along with his wife, was found stabbed to death at their home. The couple was among several dissidents who died in a spate of grisly murders that terrorized Iran’s intellectual community. Suspicion fell on extremist hard-liners determined to put a stop to the more liberal climate fostered by President Khatami, who has championed freedom of speech.

In 2000, Ebadi was accused of distributing the video-taped confession of a hardline hooligan who claimed that prominent conservative leaders were instigating physical attacks on pro-reform gatherings and figures. She received a suspended jail sentence and a professional ban (which was later lifted). The case brought increased focus on Iran from human rights groups abroad. Ebadi recently established a non-governmental organization in Iran, the Center for the Defense of Human Rights. Ebadi has written a number of academic books and articles focused on human rights. Among her books translated into English are The Rights of the Child. A Study of Legal Aspects of Children’s Rights in Iran (Tehran, 1994), published with support from UNICEF, and History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran (New York, 2000).

Time Magazine named Ebadi one of 2004′s top 100 most influential people.

Mohamed ElBaradei, 2005

ElBaradei, Mohamed, 1952-, Egyptian lawyer and United Nations diplomat, b. Cairo, grad. Univ. of Cairo (1962), New York Univ. School of Law (1974). He worked (1964-80) in the Egyptian diplomatic service, becoming special assistant to the foreign minister (1974-78). After heading the international law program at the UN Institute for Training and Research (1980-84) and teaching at New York Univ. (1981-87), he joined the International Atomic Energy Agency, becoming its director general in 1997. He oversaw the IAEA’s shift from promoting the peaceful development of nuclear energy to also monitoring nuclear weapons proliferation, and has pursued a careful and persistent but generally nonconfrontational approach to verifying nonproliferation treaty violations. He was criticized by the G. W. Bush administration when the IAEA would not, due to the lack of conclusive evidence, confirm the existence of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, more recently, an alleged nuclear weapons program in Iran. He shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize with the IAEA for their efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Muhammad Yunus, 2006

Yunus, Muhammad, 1940-, Bangladeshi economist and banker, b. Chittagong (then in British India), grad. Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, Tenn. (Ph.D. 1971). Yunus, who was teaching economics in the United States after receiving his doctorate, returned to his homeland when it won its independence from Pakistan in 1972, and became an economics professor at Chittagong Univ. In 1976 he began offering small loans, using his own money, to poor village women who could not qualify for conventional bank loans, creating what has become known as microcredit or microfinance. His efforts, which expanded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, led to the establishment of the Grameen Bank [Bengali,=rural or village] in 1983. Bankrolled in part by loans and grants in the 1980s and 90s, the Grameen Bank has since become self-supporting. The concept of microfinance has spread to many developing countries, allowing some of the world’s most improverished people the means to improve their lives through their own initiative; the borrowers continue to be largely women. Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their work to create economic and social development from below.