Died September 1971London Name Mahmoud Muftic | Author abbrev. (botany) | |
Residence BosniaEgyptIraqWest GermanySwitzerland Citizenship YugoslaviaCroatiaUnknown Institutions Tuberculosis Research InstituteSchering AGUniversity of Lausanne | ||
Mahmoud Kamal Muftić (born ca. 1925/1926 in Sarajevo, died September 1971 in London; also spelled Mahmud Kemal or Mahmut Kemal, sometimes known as Mahmoud K.S. Muftić) was a Bosniak medical doctor, scientist, Muslim religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood activist. His scientific work focused on the two distinct fields of medical microbiology and hypnosis, and he also wrote prolifically on political and religious issues. He was involved in Croatian émigré politics and CIA-sponsored activities in the intersection of pan-Islamism and anti-communism during the Cold War, and was a key member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close confidant of Said Ramadan. He lived for many years in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq before moving to West Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom in the 1960s. He was assassinated in London in 1971.
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Career and scholarship
Muftić, a keenly religious Bosnian Muslim, grew up in Sarajevo in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, he worked as a physician and researcher in several countries of the Middle East. He worked in Cairo (AMA Laboratories) and Gaza City in Egypt, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia (Biological Laboratories of Saudi Arabia), and Basra (Royal Hospital), Kufa (Middle Euphrat Hospital) and Nasiriyah (King Faisal Hospital) in Iraq. He participated as a volunteer physician on the Arab side in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He was allegedly at one point accused of being a Russian spy when living in Iraq, and was later described as having ties to several intelligence services.
In 1962 he became a researcher at the Tuberculosis Research Institute in Schleswig-Holstein, West Germany. He then became a researcher at Schering AG in West Berlin, where he eventually became director of the Department of Medical Microbiology in the late 1960s, and also held a secondary appointment at the Biochemical Laboratory at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He moved to Geneva in the late 1960s, and alternately lived in London. At the time of his death he was affiliated with the Biochemistry Department at Trinity College, Dublin.
He has published around 40 papers in medical journals. His major research interests were medical microbiology and hypnosis. He was also a co-inventor of several patents held by Schering. He also wrote articles on political issues, including Yugoslav politics and the Middle East conflict, such as Israel's development of a biological warfare program, and on Islamic theology and religious matters. He was also interested in experimental or parapsychological topics; building upon the work of Walter John Kilner and under the sponsorship of the Metaphysical Research Group of the United Kingdom, he published a book on aura phenomena, based on research he carried out in the 1950s on the human energy field with a device utilizing a semiconductor and an electroluminescent panel called an optron.
Muftić discovered and named a species of yeastlike fungus, blastomyces cerolytica. His author abbreviation in botany is "Muftic."
He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Hypnosis, an institution founded by his "long time personal and professional friend" William Joseph Bryan, whose work notably found use in psychological warfare during the Cold War. According to Bryan, Muftić was "a true scientist in every way [who] always looked for physical and chemical explanations of psychological problems. He frequently took as his motto Gerard's famous statement, 'there can be no twisted thought without a twisted molecule.'"
Religious and political activity
In the postwar era, he was involved in CIA-sponsored anti-communist and pan-Islamic circles, and was a close associate and confidant of Said Ramadan, a major figure of the Muslim Brotherhood and the most important CIA intelligence asset among Muslim leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also highly active in Croatian émigré politics from around 1960 to around 1966; in 1960 he was elected to the executive of the largest Croatian émigré organisation, the Croatian National Resistance, and due to his connections in the Muslim world, he became their foremost campaigner in relation to Muslim countries. He was the Yugoslav delegate to the World Muslim Congress in 1962. In the late 1960s, he became disillusioned with Croatian nationalism over the issue of Croat–Bosniak relations, and left the Croatian émigré political scene, while associating himself more closely with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Death
He was assassinated in London in 1971, when he was found poisoned in a hotel, supposedly because his killers suspected him of being a Mossad agent.