Mahmoud K. Muftić

Mahmoud Kamal Muftić (or Mahmut Kemal Muftić; born 14 January 1919 – died September 1971) was a Bosnian Muslim medical researcher and political activist during the Cold War. He worked in biomedical science, combining it with unconventional research into hypnosis and metaphysical topics, and was a key figure bridging pan-Islamist, anti-communist, and Croatian nationalist exile movements. Muftić spent most of his adult life between Europe and the Middle East, involved in exile communities, revolutionary politics, and intelligence networks. He died in 1971 under circumstances that remain unclear, reportedly having claimed to suffer from radioactive poisoning.

Muftić grew up in Sarajevo in a prominent Bosnian Muslim family rooted in Islamic scholarship and the Naqshbandi Sufi tradition. He reportedly earned a medical degree in Zagreb in 1944. Following the collapse of the Independent State of Croatia and the communist takeover of Yugoslavia, he fled the country amid a broader wave of political displacement. By 1948, he had joined the Arab Liberation Army during the Palestine war and was granted asylum in Egypt, marking the start of a twelve-year exile across the Middle East, with periods in Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine. In Egypt Muftić quickly embedded himself in Islamist circles tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, and married a cousin of the Brotherhood's preeminent leader from the 1950s, Said Ramadan. He later moved to West Germany and Switzerland, becoming a director at Schering (now Bayer) in West Berlin.