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. He was living in Dublin at the time of his death.
Between the 1950s and early 1970s, Muftić published extensively on enzymology, immunopathological processes, and disease mechanisms, particularly in relation to tuberculosis, fungal infections, and drug development. At the same time, he pursued research into the biochemical basis of hypnosis alongside more speculative investigations into psychokinesis and aura phenomena. He also wrote on Islamic theology, showing an interest in medical ethics from an Islamic perspective. His work reflected an unusual attempt to bridge conventional medical science with experimental and fringe fields. William Joseph Bryan described Muftić as "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.'"
Muftić is best known for his attempt to forge a Cold War alliance between pan-Islamist movements and the Croatian radical nationalist diaspora. As secretary-general of the Croatian National Resistance (HNO), he served as the key link between the Muslim Brotherhood and Croatian émigré networks. In the early 1960s, he launched Operation Orient, a bold campaign of guerrilla diplomacy to form a Croatian government in exile that would be recognized by Arab states and admitted to the Arab League as an Islamic state. In this government he would serve as its envoy to the Arab world, effectively its foreign minister. The initiative collapsed as a result of HNO infighting, and Muftić—suspected by both allies and enemies of intelligence ties—was eventually left politically isolated. The Empire Never Ended podcast episode "Mustasha Brotherhood – The Mahmut Muftić Story" described him as "the enigmatic Ustasha who forged an unlikely alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and Croatian National Resistance." Despite his efforts to connect worlds that few others ever combined, Muftić ended as a restless and isolated exile, shaped by the shadow conflicts of the Cold War.
Career Early life in Bosnia, 1919–1945
According to World Who’s Who in Science, a source likely based on an autobiographical account, Muftić was born on 14 January 1919 in Sarajevo to Saleh (or Salih) Firuz Muftić and Umihane (or Umihana) Muftić (née Vranić). At the time, Sarajevo had only recently emerged from centuries of Ottoman rule and a decade under Austria-Hungary, and had been incorporated into the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes just weeks earlier, in December 1918. He belonged to a Bosnian Muslim family with deep roots in religious scholarship and the Sufi tradition. His father was a religious intellectual who wrote on Islamic theological debates under the name “Firuz,” and is likely identical with the Salih Muftić who is mentioned as a real teacher (pravi učitelj) at the Sharia Law School in Sarajevo in 1921–1922. His mother was a respected Islamic educator (muallima) active in Sarajevo during the 1960s and 1970s. The Muftić family from Foča, to which his father belonged, produced multiple generations of Islamic scholars, including sheikhs, muftis, imams, hafiz and teachers, many affiliated with the Naqshbandi Sufi order. They maintained a substantial private collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian, much of which was acquired by the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1960. Mahmoud Muftić was later described as a "a keen student of the Qur'an." While Branimir Jelić writes in his memoirs that a person who had known Muftić for a long time believed he was "born in Sarajevo in 1925 or 1926 and died suddenly around 1975," these dates are likely imprecise and conflict with other sources in regard to both his birth and death year.
According to his apparent autobiography, Muftić graduated as a medical doctor from Zagreb medical school in 1944. As discussed below, a number of political opponents or associates within Yugoslav émigré communities accused him of being a self-styled doctor, but such claims should be read with caution and in the context of Cold War exile politics, where personal attacks and allegations of fraud were common weapons in ideological and personal rivalries. According to Ian Johnson and a variety of other sources, Muftić served, apparently as a doctor, with the Handschar Division.
In the 1930s–1940s, many Bosnian Muslim students who studied in Zagreb were socialized into the Croatian nationalist milieu, which might help explain Muftić’s almost lifelong loyalty to the Croatian national cause, even as many other Bosnian Muslims later developed a distinct Bosniak identity. In the early 20th century, some Bosnian Muslims, especially elites, saw aligning with Croatian nationalism as a way to protect themselves against Serbian political dominance. With Turkey no longer a viable protector and Bosnian independence politically impossible, Croatian nationalists’ promotion of Bosnian Muslims as "Muslim Croats," descendants of medieval Croats who had converted to Islam, offered a political future and social inclusion rather than outsider status. For some Bosnian Muslims, this overture helped to overcome feelings of marginalization after the Ottoman collapse, by allowing them to be embraced as part of a European nation.
Postwar years, 1945–1947 According to his apparent autobiography, Muftić worked at the Institute of Hygiene in Zagreb between 1945 and 1947. Other sources have suggested that he found himself as a refugee in Italy after World War II, but it is unclear if he left Yugoslavia in 1945 or 1947. Italy had a significant population of political, religious, and ethnic refugees from Yugoslavia in the immediate postwar years. Bosnian Muslim refugees had then attracted the attention of several Arab countries, who viewed them both as fellow Muslims in need and as experienced veterans. In March 1948, agents from Arab countries were actively recruiting men between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two for military service in refugee camps in Italy, offering to finance their journey to Arab countries. Amin al-Husseini had a central role in this effort. A significant number of Bosnian Muslims arrived in Arab countries in the immediate postwar years.
Palestine War, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, 1947/1948–1960 Although the circumstances of Muftić’s departure from Yugoslavia are uncertain, it is clear that he had reached Egypt no later than 1948. In Egypt Muftić quickly embedded himself in Islamist circles tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Muftić volunteered for service in the Arab Liberation Army in the Palestine war, where he served as a military doctor. He likely met Said Ramadan, the commander of the Muslim Brotherhood unit, during the Palestine War. Ian Johnson wrote that Muftić also had ties to Amin al-Husseini.
On 22 June 1952 Muftić married Isaad Mohammed Atia, a medical doctor and anaesthesiologist from a prominent Egyptian family with an interest in hypnosis. They co-authored two articles on hypnosis: The article "Hypnosis in the psychosomatic investigation of female homosexuality" in the British Journal of Medical Hypnotism in 1957, and the article "A new induction method: electrohypnosis" in the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry & Medicine in 1969. She also published in the Journal of the American Institute of Hypnosis after his death. Isaad Atia was already a doctor when the 1957 article was published; a 1973 article listed her credentials as "M.B., B.Ch., D.A." (that is, a medical doctor with a Diploma in Anaesthesia). They had one son, Nejad Muftić.
In Egypt, Muftić became a close and long-time confidant of Said Ramadan, who, according to several sources, was a cousin of his wife. Said Ramadan emerged as a major leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s, following the assassination of its founder, and his father-in-law, Hassan al-Banna.
Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s he worked for a number of research institutes and hospitals in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine. As of 1949 he worked for the Biological Laboratories of Saudi Arabia in Jeddah. As of 1953 he worked for the mycological section of AMA Laboratories in Heliopolis, Cairo.
Before 1955 he moved to Iraq, where he worked at the Middle Euphrat Hospital in Kufa around 1955, then at King Faisal Hospital in Nasiriyah around 1956–1957 and finally at the Royal Hospital in Basra around 1957–1958. In Iraq he was able to continue his research with support from the Iraqi Ministry of Health. Following the 1958 14 July Revolution that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq he returned to Egypt to work for the Galenus Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Giza near Cairo. In 1960 he was based in Gaza in Palestine, at the time part of the United Arab Republic.
It is unclear whether his frequent relocations were related to the conflict between the Egyptian government and the Muslim Brotherhood, that led many members of the brotherhood to seek sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, among them Said Ramadan. The Muslim Brotherhood's founder, Hassan al-Banna, reportedly a distant relative of Muftić's wife, was assassinated by the Egyptian secret police in 1949. Muftić was reportedly at one point accused of being a Soviet spy—or rather, a KGB asset—when living in Iraq. Both his opponents and associates repeatedly accused him of having ties to various intelligence services, from the Palestine War in the late 1940s and throughout the 1960s, and Vjekoslav Luburić claimed Muftić had admitted to him that he worked for British intelligence.
West Berlin, Lausanne/Geneva, London, Dublin 1960–1971