Mostafa Mahmoud

Mostafa Mahmoud was an Egyptian physician and writer. The page introducing him in the first printing of his book Allah wa-l-Insan (1957) says he graduated from the Qasr al-Aini Faculty of Medicine in December 1953, specialising in chest diseases, began writing short stories in 1947 in the weekly al-Risala, and then worked for Akhir Sa'a, Akhbar al-Yawm, al-Tahrir and Rose al-Yusuf. ¹ He is the author of Rihlati min al-Shakk ila al-Iman ("My Journey from Doubt to Faith"), in which he narrates his passage from doubt to faith. ^{2 3}

In al-Qur'an: Muhawala li-Fahm 'Asri he relates that his first meeting with the Qur'an was at the age of four in the Qur'an school of Shaykh Mahmud, that he grew up in a family where "each member was left to himself", and that he failed his first school year three times without being scolded. ⁴ In Rihlati he relates that in early adolescence he began asking: who created God? and that he now thinks his motive was pride in his own mind rather than a search for truth. ^{2 5} As a boy he immersed himself in the Tanta municipal library, reading Shibli Shumayyil and Salama Musa and discovering Freud and Darwin, and kept a small laboratory in his room. ⁶ He then entered medical school, studying in English, and learnt "the scientific outlook" that recognises only what the senses perceive. ^{7 8}

The introduction says his first book, Akl 'Aysh, appeared in the Golden Book series with short tales and popular sketches, and that he "discussed the problem of religions freely in Rose al-Yusuf", which had a wide effect on readers. ¹ At the end of Rihlati is a list of twenty-six of his books, among them collections of stories, novels, plays, studies and essays, including Allah wa-l-Insan, Lughz al-Mawt, Lughz al-Hayat, Einstein and Relativity, al-'Ankabut and al-Khuruj min al-Tabut, the play al-Shaytan Yaskun fi Baytina written in April 1973, and al-Madina, on his journeys to Europe between 1956 and 1968. ⁹

The list of his books at the end of the fifth edition of Muhammad: Muhawala li-Fahm al-Sira al-Nabawiyya gives fifty-four titles and records that his novel Rajul taht al-sifr won the State Prize for 1970 and that his complete works were published in Beirut in 1972 ¹⁰. His reflective books include Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, 1972) ¹¹, and on the Prophet ﷺ's life he wrote Muhammad: An Attempt to Understand the Sira ¹².

He says it took "thirty years of drowning in books" and thousands of nights of solitude and reflection. ⁵ He describes stages: first imagining God as "the energy immanent in the universe" in a materialist way; then falling into "Indian pantheism", Spinoza's philosophy and Bergson's idea, practising yoga and being taken with reincarnation, which appeared in his novels al-'Ankabut and al-Khuruj min al-Tabut. ^{8 13 14} He says science itself, by showing a single fabric and single laws across living things, led him to one transcendent Creator, and "gave me the complete Islamic idea of God". ^{15 16 3}

• His years of birth and death are not given in the pages read, so none are recorded.
• The introductory page in Allah wa-l-Insan is unsigned and in the third person.
• The list of works in Rihlati separates titles from their descriptions in the machine reading, so dates are given only where clearly tied to a title.