Muhammad al-Nuwayhi (1917-1980) was an Egyptian literary scholar. He was Professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University. Muhammad al-Nuwayhi was a student of . Al-Nuwayhi argued that Islam, properly understood, was a progressive religion compatible with modernity. Its distortion into fundamentalism had been caused by a special class of people monopolizing the interpretation of religion and inappropriately turning religious sources into timeless regulations.