At a glance
- Era
- The Contemporary Era
- Region
- Egypt & Nile
Contested: This record includes matters on which scholars differ. The speaker's views are labelled as his, and other views are marked where no cited source yet exists.
Health, body and deathAfterlife and eschatologyIslam and atheism or secular thought
Summary
Lughz al-Mawt ("The Riddle of Death") is a reflective book by the Egyptian writer Mostafa Mahmoud, published by Dar al-Awda in Beirut in January 1972 with a cover by the artist Jamal Kamil 4 5. It sets out its author's own views on death, life and the soul; they are the views of a modern writer, attributed to him, not the museum's position.
The idea
The first chapter, "The Riddle", opens with an image the author repeats: "each of us carries his corpse on his shoulders" 1. For him death is not a single event at the end of life but a process going on in the body every moment, so that he can write "because death, in its reality, is life" 6 and "because life is the process of death" 7. Life, he says, is not a still balance but a "crisis", a tension and a pull of opposites 7.
The chapters
According to the table of contents the chapters are: The Riddle, A Smuggling Operation, I, Time, Love, The Thread, Determined or Free?, Sleep, The Chemistry of Life, Dust, The Ant's Head, The True One, The Soul, God 3. The book moves from the daily experience of dying to questions of the self, time and freedom, and then to the soul and the Creator.
The ending: one Creator
In the last chapters the author discusses the claim that God is nature itself and calls it "a play on words" that flees the duality imposed by a Creator and a created world 8. He holds that the revealed religions "offered the only solution to this problem", and argues from the single stuff of the universe revealed by scientific analysis, and from the similar laws described by the sciences of evolution, that the Creator is one, with no partner in His making, and is not nature itself 8. He adds that the sciences show that what the senses perceive is not all that exists, citing infrared and ultraviolet rays and radio waves 9. He ends by saying the answer to death is what "the revealed books say" 2.
Among his books
The edition ends with a list of the author's books published by Dar al-Awda 10. It belongs to the reflective books that came before and around My Journey from Doubt to Faith; see also God and Man.
For young visitors
Imagine the cells of your body renewing every day: some go and new ones are born. This is what made the writer Mostafa Mahmoud say that we live and die a little every moment, and then ask: what comes after? 1
Notes for researchers
- Citations use PDF page numbers; printed page = PDF page − 2.
- Everything on this page is the author's view, attributed to him, not a ruling of the museum.
Connections
- Authored by
- Mostafa Mahmoud
People and things also explored
al-Ruh wa-l-Jasad· al-Insan wa-l-Zill· al-Islam fi Khandaq· al-Qur'an Ka'in Hayy· Allah wa-l-Insan· Hiwar ma'a Sadiqi al-Mulhid· Lughz al-Hayat· Muhammad: Muhawala li-Fahm al-Sira al-Nabawiyya
Sources
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 7
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 127
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 129
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 4
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 6
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 8
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 10
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 124
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 125
- Mostafa Mahmoud, Lughz al-Mawt (Dar al-Awda, Beirut, January 1972) , p. 132
Cite this page
islam.museum contributors. “Lughz al-Mawt”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/work/lughz-al-mawt/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-11-04.
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