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Fathi Osman, Scholar of Islam, Dies at 82

Fathi Osman, an influential scholar who articulated a liberal version of Islam and published an authoritative guide to the Koran for non-Arabic readers, died on Sept. 11 at his home in Montrose, Calif. He was 82....

“He had two major projects,” said Reuven Firestone, a professor of medieval Jewish and Islamic studies at Hebrew Union College and a senior fellow of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. “The first was to make the case to non-Muslims that Islam is a complex civilization and should not be seen as a flat ‘other.’ The second, directed to Muslims, was to demonstrate through his scholarship that Islam is flexible and can accommodate modernity and still remain authentic to Islamic values and practices.”...

Mohamed Fathi Osman was born on March 17, 1928, in Minya, Egypt. He earned a degree in history from Cairo University in 1948, a law degree from Alexandria University in 1960 and a master’s degree in Islamic-Byzantine relations from Cairo University in 1962....
Read entire article at NYT