But as I have noticed many people don't feel comfortable to reference a religion, so they go with race.
But find it interesting that we label these scientist based on their origin, not the place that gave them all the reasons to become all they were capable of becoming..
This is like saying Sergey Brin is a Russian entrepreneur.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the history of that part of the world, but the individuals that I named were Persian speakers, who lived in a region that is called the Greater Iran today, and wrote most of their work in Persian. But in all fairness, Arabic was the lingua-franca at the time so they wrote books in Arabic too.
A better example would be to call Grigori Perelman an American mathematician because he published his work on arXiv [1].
But if he spoke Enlgish, had an English name, lived his professional life in America. and most of his major works were in Enlgish.
I'd supposed you'd call him an "Anglophone" academic, which is the sense that Arab is used in.
And yet they are called Arab mathematicians.
he spoke arabic. Most of his major works were in arabic, in Baghdad. and he has an arabic name.