Mustafa Mahmoud, intellectual, writer, and novelist, departed from our world on Saturday 31 October at the age of 88, after six years in a coma following a stroke.
Intellectuals, artists and thousands of the ordinary public attended his funeral. As he offered his condolences to Mahmoud’s family, head of the Journalists Syndicate Makram Mohamed Ahmed called him the “friend of the poor”. Mohamed was alluding to Mahmoud’s life work of founding a medical centre to serve the poor at affordable prices. The centre, which began as a small clinic in 1976, is today one of the best-equipped and most efficient in Cairo.
Mahmoud was born to a middle class family in the town of Shebin al-Koum in the Delta province of Menoufiya. His father was into soap manufacturing and owned a modest laboratory in which his son was encouraged to innovate. As a child Mahmoud excelled in school and, upon graduation, joined the Faculty of Medicine in 1953.
Yet Mahmoud gained fame as a writer and philosopher rather than as a doctor. He wrote in a lucid, eminently attractive style some 90 books, tackling scientific, social, political, religious and philosophical topics. His works aroused much controversy, especially since he tackled such issues as atheism and faith. He began his youthful years as an atheist communist but, some 30 years later, ended as an Islamist.
Among his most famous works are his My Journey from Atheism to Faith, Political Islam, The Deluge, Existence and Non-Existence, Off With Your Masks, Gentlemen, and The Spirit and the Body. During the 1960s, when Gamal Abdel-Nasser was president of Egypt, Mahmoud’s book God and Man was banned, but was later printed during the years of the presidency of Anwar al-Sadat who greatly admired Mahmoud. Yet Mahmoud’s attempts to understand the Qur’an in a modern context—in his An Attempt at a Modern Understanding of the Qur’an—placed him in the direct line of fire of Islamic clerics. They accused him of atheism and said he was a ‘mere doctor’, implying he was not to tackle religious topics.
His most controversial book, however—and his last, published in 2003—dealt with the topic of the intercession of the Prophet Mohamed who is believed to intercede before God on behalf of all Muslims in the afterworld. Mahmoud rejected the idea and was hence viciously criticised by Muslim scholars who branded him as a deviant believer. He stopped writing and, in the same year, fell victim to a stroke that put him in a coma out of which he never recovered.
Mahmoud is succeeded by his two children: Adham, an accountant and Amal, a housewife. He also has four grandsons.