Tehran (Ikna) – Mostafa Mahmoud, an Egyptian Qur’anic scholar, physician, thinker and writer, left 89 books explaining the Qur’an and religious ideas. His full name is Mustafa Kamal Mahmoud Hussein al-Mahfouz, a descendant of Imam Sajjad (pbuh) (the fourth imam of the Shiites) and from a family of “nobles”, which is the title given to the descendants of the Prophet (Sadat) in Egypt.
Mostafa Mahmoud was born in 1921 in Shebin El-Kom, in Menoufia. Because of his father’s work, his family settled in Tanta in a house adjacent to Sayed Al-Badawi Mosque.
At the age of four, he learned the origins of the Arabic language and the recitation of the Qur’an, then memorized a large part of the Holy Qur’an. At the end of high school, Mostafa Mahmoud joined the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University. However, due to a lung disease, he had to give up his studies for three years in order to recover, three years that had a great influence on the way he thought for the rest of his life.
After working for some time in various medical centers, to answer his questions about life and death, he gave up medicine and began researching religions, the Holy Quran, science and faith.
The book “An Effort for a New Understanding of the Qur’an” published in 1970 is considered one of his most important works. In this book, Mustafa Mahmoud attempts to present a new understanding of the Qur’an based on the necessities of his time, and in accordance with developments. In this book, he deals with important topics such as the story of creation, predestination, free will, and the concepts of permissible and forbidden, and resurrection.
In this work, he tried to interpret the verses, understand them, and explain the extent of the Quranic miracle. Mahmoud’s efforts in this book can be seen as an attempt to make two environments, spiritual and physical, compatible. According to him, man lives between two worlds full of tension: the world of inner freedom and the world of material determinism whose immutable laws bind man and where the only way to act freely is to know these laws and exploit them skillfully, in harmony with them.
