Maurice Bucaille (1920-98) was a French gastroenterologist and author and an advocate of the so-called "scientific accuracy" of the Qurʾān. Independent biographical sources on him are scarce. In his books, he hints at his studies in a Catholic high school and his early misconceptions about Islam. Encouraged by Muslim patients to read the Qurʾān, he began studying Arabic around 1970. In the mid-1970s, as a member of a medical commission, he examined the mummies of the thirteenth-century B.C.E. pharaohs conserved in the Egyptian Museum