Mustafa Mahmoud


Mustafa Kamal Mahmoud Hussein commonly known as Mustafa Mahmoud was an Egyptian doctor, philosopher, and author. Mustafa Mahmoud was born in Shibin el-Kom, Monufia province, Egypt. He was trained as a doctor, but later chose a career as a journalist and author, traveling and writing on many subjects.
He wrote 89 books in science, philosophy, religion, politics, and society as well as plays, tales, and travelogues.
He is also known for his popular program. He is the founder of a mosque, medical clinic as well as a charitable association, all named after him. They are considered to be one of the leading examples of Islamist social services and a redefinition of communal norms in the public sphere in post-Nasserist Egypt.
In 1994, the German newspaper Die Zeit compared his celebrities in Egypt as a writer to the German author Heinz G. Konsalik and as a TV presenter to Robert Lembke.

Autobiography

The material in this section is derived from self-published information by the subject.

Early life

Mustafa Mahmoud says that he was raised in a middle-class family. His father was employed as a secretary in the province of El Gharbiyya.
Mustafa Mahmud says he led his early life in a pleasant atmosphere wherein there was no oppression or violence. Rather, he enjoyed freedom and responsibility. In his early age in elementary school, he failed three years consecutively, yet he was left without any reproach or blame. In his childhood, he used to lay down ill. Thus, he was deprived of enjoying rough play, and running, which the children used to indulge in. He remained an introvert and spent his early days in imagination and dreams. He dreamed of being a great inventor or a discoverer or a traveler or a famous scientist. His role models were Christopher Columbus, Edison, Marconi and Pasteur.

Medical studies

Mustafa Mahmud chose medicine as a field of study.
In his third year of studies he was admitted into hospital for three years of treatment. He describes this long isolation as a positive contribution to the development of his character, when he could indulge himself totally to reading and thinking of literary works. In these three years, the meditative character was fashioned within himself, and thus the writer was born.
After his recovery, he resumed his medical studies and says that he subsequently realized an immense change within himself. He discovered within himself the artist who reflects, reads, and peruses regularly the major sources of literature, plays, and novels. Owing to this new activity,, he began to write regularly to the newspapers,. Accordingly, he had to intensify his effort to graduate and attain success. He started writing for El Tahrir and Rose El Yusef magazines. Due to his illness he graduated two or three years after his colleagues, in 1953.

His journeys

Mustafa Mahmud describes his frequent travels, starting with his journeys to the Tropics in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and the south of Sudan, where he stayed for two months with the tribe of Niam Niam. Thereafter, he traveled to the Sahara Desert, to the oasis of Ghadamis, where he stayed for a month with the tribe of El Tawariq. Furthermore, he traveled to many capitals of European and American countries, such as: Italy, Germany, Greece, France, Canada and the United States; and to the Arab countries, beginning with Morocco and Algeria in the west; and ending with Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia in the east.
There was another journey, one within himself; he boarded the ship of science, knowledge, and religion was presented as a film; twenty-five books deal with Islamic subjects; and the rest consists of studies and short stories.
TV presented for him more than four hundred episodes of the program "Science and Faith", in which the movie, scientific substance and Sufi meditation guide us to the faith in God.
In the year 1960 he left his medical career, devoting himself totally to writing for newspapers. As a physician, moving from one hospital to another, between the years 1953 and 1960, all had a great influence on his writings, principally: Storehouse No. 7, the Social Gang, and Eating Bread. In the meantime, it had an influence on his scientific and anatomical access to the public adversities, to the human soul and to the characters he dealt with in all his writings.
Another character who had a profound effect on him was his father, whose long-time illness, patience, faith, and pure innate nature remained in his mind throughout his life. As he grew older and encountered life's affairs in his thirties, a woman played a great role in and had an effectual control on his life, as a friend, a dialogist, and a lover. His faults were always due to losing control of himself when he looked at any beautiful things. Above all, he believed that no man is a perfect one unless he has found a woman to love, to marry, to have children with, and to feel parenthood and establish a family.

Marriage

Mustafa Mahmud says that his first marriage in 1961 was not successful, though from it, he was endowed with a girl and a boy, Amal and Adham. The marriage ended in 1973. His second marriage in 1983 was also unsuccessful and ended in 1987. The reason behind these divorces was the passion of writing that controlled his life, his preoccupation with his work and finally his isolation. Yet both of them were to be blamed.

Books

  1. : Understanding The Qur'an : A Contemporary Approach
  2. : What's Behind The Gate of Death
  3. : The Password
  4. : New Quranic Psychology
  5. : Israel: The Beginning and The End
  6. : The Burning Tomorrow
  7. : Islam in the Dike
  8. : I Saw God
  9. : Political Islam and the Upcoming Battle
  10. : Political Circus Games
  11. : Reading for the future
  12. : The Perplexed Question
  13. : Bahai Facts
  14. : Marxism and Islam
  15. : Gentlemen, Unveil These Masks!
  16. : What is Islam?
  17. : From America to the other Shore
  18. : Dialog Antara Muslim Dan Atheis
  19. : The Quran: A Living Creature
  20. : Age of Monkeys
  21. : The Lie About the Left Islamist Groups
  22. : Existence and Nonentity
  23. : Muhammad
  24. : The Greatest Secret
  25. : Dialogue with an Atheist
  26. : Allah
  27. : The Torah
  28. : My journey from Doubt to Belief
  29. : The Quran - An Attempt to a Modern Understanding
  30. : Einstein and Relativity
  31. : Death mystery

    Articles

  32. : The World of Secrets
  33. : The Devil Rules
  34. : Is It The Age of Insanity?
  35. : Fire under the ashes
  36. : The Spirit & The Body
  37. : In Love and Life

    Short Stories

  38. : The Antichrist
  39. : The Smell of Blood
  40. : The Social Gang
  41. : Eating Bread

    Novels

  42. : A Man Less Than Zero
  43. : Getting out of the Coffin
  44. : The Spider
  45. : Opium
  46. '': The Impossible

    Plays

  47. : A Visit to Heaven and Hell
  48. : The Smallest Hell-fire
  49. : The Leader
  50. : The Devil Lives in our House
  51. : The Human and the Shadow
  52. : The Earthquake
  53. '': Alexander The Great
N°Book TitlePublication
1Alexander The Great1963
2The Earthquake1963
3The Human and the Shadow1964
4The Devil Lives in our House1973
5The Leader1973
6The Smallest Hell-fire1982
7A Visit to Hell and Heaven1996

Travel Literature

  1. : The Road to the Kaaba
  2. : Traveler Stories
  3. : Adventure in the Desert
  4. : The Forest

    Memorials, honors and awards