Over the past decade, the United Nations has issued several reports documenting the stagnation of scientific research in Arab societies. In an interview by Rod Dreher, Algeria-born astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum elaborates :
All sectors of activity in the Arab society have suffered during these decades of autocratic rule, from politics and economics to culture, science, and human rights. In my view, that stagnation and continuous falling behind was due to three factors: dictatorship (denial of basic freedoms), corruption (financial and moral), and nepotism and cronyism.The mediocrity of the Arab world’s performance in academic and scientific fields is well documented in various reports, some of which you have mentioned. To give just a few examples: out of 1,000 or so universities in the Arab world, only two or three are in world’s top 500 — and they are ranked between 400 and 500); while the Arab world’s population makes up about five percent of the world’s and its financial resources are much larger than that, only 1.1 percent of the world’s scientific production comes out of the Arab region; the number of frequently cited scientific papers is 43 per million people in the USA, 80 in Switzerland, and 38 in Israel; it is 0.02 in Egypt, 0.07 in Saudi Arabia, 0.01 in Algeria, and 0.53 in Kuwait.
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