Rihlati min al-Shakk ila al-Iman

Rihlati min al-Shakk ila al-Iman ("My Journey from Doubt to Faith") is Mostafa Mahmoud's intellectual autobiography, published by Dar al-Ma'arif in Cairo, in chapters titled God, the Body, the Soul, Eternal Justice, Why Suffering, What Solitude Told Me, the Great Balance, and the False Messiah. ^{4 5 3}

The book opens with a memory from the age of thirteen or fourteen: his question to those around him, "who created God?", and his argument that if God could come of Himself, so could the world. ¹ The author later judges that his motive was "pride in my mind" rather than a search for truth, that the question contradicts itself by making the Creator a creature, and that a first cause must be necessary in itself, as Aristotle concluded with the "first mover". ⁶

• The materialist scientific mind: he tells of reading Shibli Shumayyil, Salama Musa, Freud and Darwin in the Tanta municipal library, his small laboratory, his generation's fascination with Western science, his medical studies in English, and his adoption of the view that "what does not fall under the senses does not exist" for science. ^{7 8 9}
• God as immanent energy: he says he still could not deny a divine power, and imagined God as "the energy immanent in the universe", the creative vitality in all things. ⁹
• Pantheism: he then held that existence is eternal because "nothingness does not exist", fell into "Indian pantheism", Spinoza's philosophy and Bergson's idea, practised yoga, and for a long time was taken with reincarnation, which appears in his novels al-'Ankabut and al-Khuruj min al-Tabut. ^{10 11}
• The transcendent Creator: he says science showed him "unity of material" and of laws, not that the Creator is the created; like a critic who sees one style in all the paintings of an exhibition and concludes there is one painter, not that the paintings are the painter; and that this "gave me the complete Islamic idea of God". ^{12 13 2} Against an eternal universe he argues that "absolute nothingness" is a hypothesis like the mathematical zero, and cites the second law of thermodynamics as showing the universe had a beginning. ²

At the end of the edition is a list headed "Published by the author" with twenty-six books of stories, novels, plays, studies, essays and travel. ¹⁴

• The two copies in the harvest are byte-identical; one was used.
• Printed page = scan page + 2.