Mustafa Mahmoud, an Egyptian physician, writer, and philosopher, built bridges between science and faith. He gave up medicine to enrich the Arab and Islamic library with masterpieces of works in thought, philosophy, sociology, and literature. For half a century, he remained an intellectual and literary phenomenon that sparked controversy, reflection, and contemplation, and called for dialogues on unspoken topics.
Birth and upbringing
Mustafa Kamal Mahmoud Hussein Al Mahfouz was born on December 27, 1921 in Shebeen El-Koum, in the Menoufia Governorate, Egypt.
And his family was called the title of supervision, due to their affiliation with the family of the Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace, as his lineage goes back to Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, may God be pleased with him.
He was the youngest among his brothers in a middle-class family in the Menoufia Governorate, then he moved with his family to the city of Tanta, where his father was a government employee, and they lived near the Al-Sayyid Al-Badawi Mosque, which is one of the famous Sufi shrines in Egypt, which left a clear impact on himself that appeared in his orientations. and his thoughts.
His father was a lot of reading, loving science, fluent in the French language, inclined to noble ideals and moral perfection, simple, loving goodness and mercy, and from him Mustafa learned a love of reading and science and his attachment to books, and he was raised on virtuous morals, asceticism and humility.
marriage
During his life, he went through marriage experiences that ended in failure and separation. His first marriage was in 1962 and ended in separation in 1973. He gave birth to his two sons, Adham and Amal. He renewed the experience in 1983 and became associated with Mrs. Zainab Hamdi, but that experience, like the previous one, ended in divorce in 1987, and he did not marry after that and settled. In a small wing of no more than 80 meters in his mosque in the Islamic Center.
Mostafa Mahmoud attributes the reason for this to the difference in temperament, in addition to his tendency to isolate and withdraw, which the other party may not be able to understand and accept.
Mustafa Mahmoud memorized a lot of the Holy Qur’an and studied Arabic and arithmetic (Egyptian Press)
Scientific study and training
He began to seek knowledge at a young age, as he joined the book at the age of no more than four, but he could not continue, because of his fear of beating, which was common, and which was contrary to the atmosphere of his meek, peaceful family full of softness, so he would run away and sit on a garden wall until the hours of study ended. Then he returns home.
Then he joined the “Al-Shawki” school, where he memorized a lot of the Holy Qur’an, and studied the Arabic language and arithmetic, but the emergence of the stick again prevented him from progressing in educational attainment, and he entered into a severe struggle and a stage of failure that lasted 3 years in order to adapt to the atmosphere of violence and then ended with his success overcoming This period overcame his fear.
After this stage, he showed great superiority, and his talents began to appear, and he became attached to the atmosphere of Sufism, birthdays, dhikr, accompanying music and the flute, and he showed the ability to improvise stories and tell stories to his peers, as his love for travel and travel appeared on the horizon, so he bought scout clothes, and from his youth he used to go out For camping in nearby areas.
He attended Tanta Public School to complete his secondary education, and at this stage his literary and poetic talents began to blossom, as he wrote short stories, poetry and zajal, and began playing the flute. He also showed a great fondness for science and scientific experiments, so he used to collect his daily expenses to buy chemicals and do his own experiments.
And he wished to become a traveler, musician, scientist, inventor, or a hero of history, and he combined all these talents, preoccupying him with the conditions of the whole world.
He joined the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University, and his attachment to science increased and developed to the point where he established a small laboratory in 1939 at his father's house. He used to make soap and perfumes, dissect frogs, and use chlorine to kill insects.
He immersed himself in experiments related to electricity and batteries, and he also implemented inventions for devices with a friend of his, such as a distillation apparatus, a microphone, and a device for measuring the pulse, so he designed the device and his friend implemented it using simple materials.
He was known among his colleagues by the nickname "Al-Mushraji", due to his keen interest in dissecting dead bodies. He bought half a body and a brain and placed them in formalin to preserve them and studied them at home, which led to his sensitivity to the smell of formalin and damage to his respiratory system.
His musical inclinations remained accompanying his study trip, so during that time he learned to play the oud, learned the musical notes, and used to participate in weddings and parties, and when his family refused this environment, he left the house and started working in the "Al-Nida" newspaper to earn a living.
He contracted a disease in his chest in the third year of his university studies, which forced him to leave work and study and stay in a sanatorium for 3 years. This isolation left him with reading, thinking and contemplation, which affected his intellectual formation, and he began writing short stories.
After he recovered, he went back to school, which seemed to him after these three years to be tough and required arduous effort, and his friends had graduated and left the university, so he focused on his studies until he was able to graduate from the Faculty of Medicine - specializing in chest diseases in 1953.
But he remained attached to literature, and he published from time to time in newspapers and magazines some of his articles, reflections and short stories.
Intellectual and literary experience
Mustafa Mahmoud considered his literary life during 30 years as a continuous migration towards the realization of life and the search for truth, and the focus of his research during these long years revolved around the divine secret of man’s creation and the purpose of his existence, and each of his books was a station on the path of this long journey, so it was His literary experience is a reflection of his intellectual experience.
stage of doubt
In his intellectual beginnings, he was fascinated by science and its tangible facts, and he believed that science presented him with a picture of the universe that was very precise and disciplined, and provided him with a means by which he imagined God in a material way, and he used to imagine that God is the inner energy in the universe, which organizes it into beautiful systems of living things and inanimate objects, earth and heavens And he began to see that God, in this view, is the whole and the creatures are His manifestations.
And here he fell into the clutches of the theory of the unity of existence and the theory of creative subconscious energy, and the idea of reincarnation dominated him, and he says that this stage was a stage on the true path to God, and confirms that he was never an atheist, and he did not doubt the divine truth or the unity of God, but it is a journey of consideration and development that It is the nature of the thinker, and it is doubt that leads to faith, not stubbornness and ingratitude.
During this stage, which he called the secular stage, he tried in his writings to depict society from a purely realistic perspective, and his attitude towards religious postulates was that of doubt and discussion, and this trend appeared in his writings from his literary beginnings.
And the real first step in his life as a writer began after the isolation he spent in the sanatorium in his last years at the university. Ordeals recast his personality as a thinker.
After leaving the sanatorium, he presented 30 stories to Al-Akkad, who in turn presented them to Al-Zayyat, so he published two of them in “Al-Risala Magazine” in 1948. He also met Kamel Al-Shennawy after that, who gave him the opportunity to write in “Akhbar Al-Youm.”
Immediately after graduating from the Faculty of Medicine, he worked in a number of dispensaries and hospitals, such as Abbasiya and Giza, and then moved to work in the "Almaza" sanatorium, which is located in a remote area in the desert, and constitutes an environment steeped in calm and stillness, which provides a fertile field for meditation, and those conditions were a call for Exciting writer, thinker and philosopher lurking inside him.
In the meantime, he began writing for "Al-Tahrir Magazine", and got acquainted with a group of doctors and writers such as Youssef Idris, Ihsan Abdel Quddous, and Tharwat Okasha, who nominated him to work in Rose Al-Youssef magazine, and he agreed to satisfy his desire to write and compose.
He began writing regularly and issued a group of his books between 1954 and 1958 that represented this skeptical thought. He published the book “God and Man” and some collections of short stories such as “Amber 7” and “Eating Bread”.
With the passing of the years in his practice as a doctor, his standing before death began to break his scientific ego, and it seemed to him the inability of material scientific thought to provide a convincing explanation in understanding the mystery of death and the mystery of life. Death is the beginning of the road.
He joined to work as a doctor in the "Umm al-Masryeen" clinic for chest diseases in ancient Egypt for two years, and while reviewing with the director the results of their work for the past year, he found that the patients who were being treated would come back the following year complaining of the same symptoms, and from here he began to feel that his work did not express his true ambition as a doctor. .
After suffering a severe drop in white blood cells due to exposure to radiation while examining patients, he was forced to take a two-month leave to recover, and during this leave he reconsidered his work as a doctor, and he was frustrated with the inability of medicine to treat people with a real treatment, so he resigned in 1960 and devoted himself to writing, From here, the full-time literary writer began.
The sabbatical gave him the opportunity to travel, travel, and try to discover the truth. In 1962, he traveled to the tropical forests, then he traveled to the heart of the Sahara Desert. The fruits of these two trips were my books “The Jungle” and “An Adventure in the Desert.”
During this period, he also wrote some scientific novels, such as The Spider and Man Below Zero, and scientific studies such as Einstein and Relativity.
In the late sixties of the last century, the world of religions embarked on a long journey that began with Indian religions, then Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Neosofism, then Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and ended up on the shore of the Holy Qur’an to find all the eternal problems he was looking for.
Mustafa Kamal Mahmoud Hussein Al Mahfouz was born on December 27, 1921 in Egypt (the Egyptian press)
stage of certainty
Thus came the stage of complete transformation into certainty in the period between 1970 and 2009, and his writings in Islamic studies continued, such as the book “The Qur’an, an Attempt to Understand My Modernity,” “My Journey from Doubt to Faith,” and “A Dialogue with My Atheist Friend.”
At this stage, he took an explicit stand against Marxist thought and communist thought, and this approach appeared in many books, including "Why did you reject Marxism?"
And "The Lie of the Islamic Left" and "The Fall of the Left", as he discussed all kinds of intellectual invasion from existential, absurd and chaotic, to the doctrines of rejection, rebellion and the absurd.
Sufism stage
Mustafa Mahmoud was greatly influenced by Sufi thought and its sheikhs, such as Sheikh Al-Nafari, Ibn Arabi, Ibn Atta Allah Al-Iskandari, and Imam Al-Ghazali. In the late seventies of the last century, the Sufi trend was evident in his writings, such as the book “Existence and Nothingness”, “Secrets of the Qur’an” and “The Qur’an is a Living Being.”
He published his book “God and Man” in 1957, which is a discussion in which he questions religious postulates and rejects many of them. In it, he raised issues and topics that society is not used to raising, such as the issue of fate and destiny, heaven and hell, and right and wrong. Some Al-Azhar scholars liked it at the time, so they opposed it with their articles accusing it of infidelity and immorality, and the pressure continued until the book was banned and withdrawn from the market.
Years later, the writer reconsidered the book, not in response to pressures, but because of the intellectual transformation that occurred to him, as he began to tend to the idea that the materialistic approach cannot explain all phenomena.
Once again, the scholars of Al-Azhar confronted him when he issued the book “The Qur’an, An Attempt for Modern Understanding”, as it was not allowed for those who graduated from other than religious colleges to interpret the Qur’an, so they published writings critical of it, and it was referred to the committee with the aim of revision, and the book was banned for a while, then it was allowed to come out into the light.
The famous crisis known as the "Crisis of the Book of Intercession", which took place in 2000, sparked a lot of controversy about him and his ideas, and the revolution exploded in his face from all directions, and there were many responses to his book, but this crisis, with his old age and poor health, led to his retirement from social life. He refrained from writing except for simple articles in the Youth Magazine and Al-Akhbar newspaper.
Harassment of Israel
Mustafa Mahmoud devoted an important aspect of his efforts to an issue he considered historical, centered around the Zionist threat. He issued 9 books in addition to a number of articles during the nineties of the twentieth century to discuss this issue, and warned against Zionist ambitions and normalization. Among these books is the book "Israel... The Beginning and the End" On the Brink of Suicide and Nazi Israel and the Language of the Holocaust.
Therefore, Israel took an inciting stance against Mustafa Mahmoud. It pressured the Egyptian government to stop the "Science and Faith" program under the pretext that it was an incitement program in which it defames Israel and its nuclear program. It also pressured to stop his articles in Al-Ahram newspaper under the pretext of his anti-Semitism. He faced political isolation at the end of his life, which affected his funeral. None of the officials participated in it.
Charity work
Mostafa Mahmoud wanted to embody the ideas and meanings he presented through many years of authoring and television presentation, and his dream was to establish something practical through which he could leave a realistic impact on people's lives.
To achieve this dream, he devoted his life from 1970 until his death to charitable work, so he built a large mosque, at his own expense, which he named after his father, "Mahmoud Mosque" - but it was known as the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque - and then attached a specialized charitable hospital to it.
He also built a medical center called Al-Kawthar, in addition to establishing an association that includes many medical centers and research centers specialized in alternative medicine and physiotherapy. It also contains 4 astronomical observatories and a museum of geology.
The number of centers included in the institution has reached 6 major medical centers, which receive thousands of patients daily in various specialties, with 60 free surgeries performed daily, and these supplies reach remote villages in Egypt, and he called them winter and summer convoys.
his refusal of positions
Former President Anwar Sadat offered him to choose the position of Minister of Culture or Minister of Endowments, but he refused, and said, “I have been suffering from power for 20 years, so how do I enter the game?”
Achievements and Authors
Dr. Mustafa Mahmoud - may God have mercy on him - has written nearly 89 diverse books in many literary fields, such as short stories, novels, theater, science, philosophy, politics, religious thought, and travel literature.
Among his literary works in the short story:
who laughed to tears.
The smell of blood.
group of people
Among his novels:
impossible.
Opium.
It plays
Alexander the Great.
Human and shadow.
From travel literature:
Traveler's Tales.
Woods.
Scientific books:
Einstein and relativity.
As for his books on Islam, they are many, such as:
Islam in a trench.
Islam what is it?
The way to the Kaaba.
I saw God.
Soul and body.
Among his philosophical writings:
Being and nothingness.
The greatest secret.
Among his political writings:
Israel.. the beginning and the end.
Political circus games.
The grand conspiracy.
The author has many literary and sentimental articles, such as:
Midnight Diary.
55 love problem.
They confessed to me.
Science and Faith Program
The Science and Faith program is a television program that is considered the most famous and widespread in its time, and which is a huge scientific and cultural encyclopedia. It included multiple fields: natural, environmental, geographical, medical, astronomical, and plant and insect sciences. Science is the opposite of faith, by taking the viewer directly to the facts linking science and faith.
The total number of episodes of the program amounted to about 400 episodes, which were broadcasting one episode per week from the beginning of 1971 to 1999. Through it, Dr. Mustafa Mahmoud sought to urge meditation, contemplation, and reflection on the power of God Almighty, using a simple scientific method that all viewers can understand differently. their classes and cultures.
Awards
Due to his intellectual and literary efforts, he won the State Appreciation Award in 1995 in Egypt.
Death
He suffered a stroke in the last days of his life, and his treatment journey lasted for several months, until he passed away on Saturday, October 31, 2009 in Cairo, Egypt, at the age of 88, and his body was shared from his mosque in a solemn funeral.
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