Arabs and Nobel Prizes: Five* Arabs have hitherto won Nobel prizes. Anwar Sadat for "peace"-I shudder when I write that, Naguib Mahfouz for literature, Ahmad Zuwayl for chemistry, and now Muhammad Bradi`i for "peace." Four are from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and the four men have not said a negative word about Israel in 25 years. Is that unrelated? Yes, if your skills of political comprehension are very limited. (And Syrian comedian Durayd Lahham ended his association with UNICEF, where he was a goodwill ambassador--when he supported the right of Arabs to resist Israel). And you will not find anybody who knows anything about Arabic literature who believes that Mahmud Darwish, or Tawfiq Al-Hakim or Taha Husayn or Mikha'il Nu`aymah or Badr Shakir As-Sayyab or Khalil Hawi, for example, are less deserving than Mahfouz.
*Yasir `Arafat won a 1/3rd of a prize, WHEN he signed a peace treaty with Israel.
PS I am so glad that there is no Lebanese who won a Nobel prize because if that ever happens--and I sure hope that it does not because it will fuel so much the myths of ultra-Lebanonese nationalism and bothersome claims of Lebanese superior genes widely believed among Lebanonese nationalists--we will never hear the end of it, especially in An-Nahar newspaper, and LBC-TV, etc. And I am sure that An-Nahar will claim that the Nobel prize won by that "Lebanese" was "the best and most prestigious" of all the Nobel prizes ever won. But Lebanonese can win all the Tabbulah prizes that they want. That would not bother me.