Fathi Osman

Mohamed Fathi Osman (March 17, 1928 – September 11, 2010) was an Egyptian author and scholar who advocated on behalf of cooperation between Islam and other religions and whose writings include an overview of the Koran for the general public.

Biography

Osman was born on March 17, 1928, in Minya, Egypt. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s and worked on its weekly journal. Osman was awarded an undergraduate degree in 1948 from Cairo University where he majored in history in 1948. He broke with Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1950s and wrote the 1960 book Islamic Thought and Change, which presented a more progressive view of the religion, earned a law degree in 1960 from Alexandria University in 1960 and returned to Cairo University where he received a master's degree in Islamic-Byzantine relations in 1962. He was on the faculty of Al-Azhar University during the 1960s, where he worked on restructuring the teaching of Islam at universities and colleges in Egypt. He was granted a doctorate in Near Eastern studies in 1976 from Princeton University, where he wrote a dissertation on the subject of Islamic land ownership and taxation and later taught history at Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Saudi Arabia.

Osman's writings, including 40 books written in English and Arabic, were aimed at making Islamic civilization and culture more understandable to non-Muslims and at showing followers of Islam that the religion provided the flexibility to adapt to modern times. The New York Times cited Osman's "monumental" 1997 book Concepts of the Quran: A Topical Reading as "his most important work in English", in which he explicated concepts in Islam for non-Muslims. He was survived by his wife, Aida Abdel-Rahman Osman, as well as by his daughter Ghada Osman, a professor of Arabic studies at San Diego State University.