Lughz al-Hayat

Lughz al-Hayat ("The Riddle of Life") is a book on the wonders of living things by the Egyptian writer Mostafa Mahmoud; the copy used here is Dar al-Awda's Beirut printing with rights dated 1986 ⁴. It presents the popular biology of its day and reads it through faith; its judgements are the author's views, attributed to him.

By the table of contents: Introduction; The Forbidden Tree; A Dracula Called the Virus; The Plant Discovered Its Atom Bomb; Her Majesty; Before the Ants' Nest; The Language Bees Speak; We and the Apes; The Embryo Gives the Story Away; A Gap in Darwin's Theory; And After Evolution?; A Great Exchange Called the Brain; The Self and Freud's Talk; The Question Mark; Was It Chance?; The Key to the Riddle ⁵.

The author opens by saying that "reality is more astonishing than magic", and that the true miracle "is not in breaking order but in establishing order", like the sun rising every day with precision for millions of years ¹.

In "We and the Apes" he tells of the 1925 trial of a biology teacher in Dayton, in America, the lawyer Clarence Darrow's exchange with the politician William Bryan, and then Darwin's voyage on the Beagle ^{6 7}. In "A Gap in Darwin's Theory" he holds that Darwin started from sound premises, the anatomical likeness of living things, but erred in making the causes of evolution "internal", with no "guiding hand" ^{8 2}. He argues that the beauty of peacock feathers and butterfly wings "is required by no necessity of life" ⁹, and says the theory "is not scientific certainty, at most a mere preponderance", "a beautiful theoretical garment, no doubt, but full of holes" ^{2 10}. See the question of evolution and Islam.

In "The Self and Freud's Talk" he criticises Freud's sexual reading of infant behaviour and of the Oedipus complex as "an unscientific overreach" ^{11 12}. In "Was It Chance?" he asks about bird migration, the chick breaking its shell at the weakest point, and the floats on mosquito eggs: does all this happen by chance or "by the inspiration of an Inspirer"? ^{13 14 15}

He ends by saying that modern science, in seeing the unity of the cosmos, enters "the forbidden zone the Sufis long kept for themselves", and that at the edge of the fog "religion's role begins... when science has said all it has and falls silent, the prophet's role comes" ^{16 3}.

• Citations use PDF page numbers; printed page = PDF page − 2.
• 1986 is the rights year of this printing; the first edition's date is not given, and the book already appears in the author's book lists in older editions such as Lughz al-Mawt (1972) ¹⁷.