The Road to Mecca, also known as Road to Mecca or Road to Makkah, is the autobiography of Muslim scholar, intellectual, political theorist and spiritual writer Muhammad Asad.
Reception
The book received critical acclaim upon publication, including reviews in prestigious New York City periodicals. One reviewer, writing in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, called it an “intensely interesting and moving book.”[2]
New York World-Telegram wrote:
As suffused with Arab lore as Sir Richard Burton and almost as adventuresome as T.E. Lawrence, Muhammad Asad offers a similar blend of daring action and thoughtful observation. In addition, he surpasses either of these great predecessors as a prose stylist and interpreter of the Islamic faith[3]
이미지에 나와 있는 장(Chapter)별 제목의 번역은 다음과 같습니다.
- Glossary (용어 사전)
- The Story of a Story (이야기 속의 이야기)
- I. Thirst (갈증)
- II. Beginning of the Road (길의 시작)
- III. Winds (바람)
- IV. Voices (목소리들)
- V. Spirit and Flesh (영혼과 육체)
- VI. Dreams (꿈)
- VII. Midway (중도)
- VIII. Jinns (진 / 이슬람 신화 속 영적 존재)
- IX. Persian Letter (페르시아의 편지)
- X. Dajjal (다잘 / 이슬람 종말론의 적그리스도)
- XI. Jihad (지하드)
- XII. End of the Road (길의 끝)
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Product description
Review
"['The Road to Mecca'] combines the adventure and scenic beauty of a good travel book, some unusually informed comments on near Eastern affairs, and a deeply thoughtful account of one man's finding of his own path." --Book of the Month Club, New York
"A book trenchant with adventure magnificently described, and a commentary upon the inner meaning of Arab and Muslim life, helpful to all who would achieve a more accurate understanding of the Arabs and their lands." --Christian Science Monitor
"A very rare and powerful book, raised completely above the ordinary by its candor and intelligence." --New York Post
About the Author
From his work as a journalist in the Middle East before his conversion, Muhammad Asad became an author, translator of Islamic literature, and international diplomat. His written works include his famed English translation of the Qur'an and translations of the Prophet's oral teachings.
Publication date : 18 July 2000
Edition : 8th Revised edition
Language : EnglishCustomers find this book to be a must-read with an interesting life story that takes readers through the author's struggles and evolution. The writing is beautifully crafted, with one customer noting how the author expresses everything in great detail and clarity. They appreciate the writing experience, with one review mentioning how it makes readers feel like they're walking side-by-side with the author during his journeys.5.0 out of 5 stars A classicReviewed in Australia on 22 January 2019Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseVery well written Autobiography, interesting insights and stories - couldn’t put it down!5.0 out of 5 stars In my top 3 favorite books of all timeReviewed in the United States on 23 March 2025Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA truly amazing and accomplished life lived. One of the most influential books I've read in my life and gave me a more enlightened perspective on my own faith. Muhammad Asad's writing and eloquence are unmatched and it comes across in what is essentially an autobiography. I keep going back every few years to read it because it really just is that good!5.0 out of 5 stars must haveReviewed in Canada on 14 January 2026Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommendedReviewed in Italy on 23 July 2020Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseIt Is such a great book , recommended every one to read thus book and delivered in time.5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic tale that has everything you could want in a travel journalReviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 March 2021Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThe best books in my opinion are those that touch upon so many different subjects but bring them all together cohesively. This book does just that. Theology, philosophy, politics, culture, geography, friendship... you won't be dissapointed.Muhammad Asad wrote in a beautiful and poignant manner, detailing his adventures in the near East in a way that makes you feel like you lived them yourself. It is one man's journey of self discovery, and everybody stands to benefit from his critical outlook. Once you get into it, it's very difficult to put it down, and when it ends you'll find yourself wishing that it didn't.5.0 out of 5 stars Islam's gift to Europe...Reviewed in Germany on 17 March 2011Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseSome call him "Europe's gift to Islam", but I don't think that is appropriate. Rather he should be called "Islam's gift to Europe". After I read this book I converted to Islam. His narration of Ad Dajjal is thought provoking, scaring but amazing at the same time. This book should be read by everyone who realizes "the hollowness of material progress for the sake of progress alone"...5.0 out of 5 stars Must readReviewed in India on 15 April 2023Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA book so LIVE , amazing read5.0 out of 5 stars Un gran libroReviewed in Mexico on 30 August 2023Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseAmo este libro, puesto que deja entender con claridad la cultura, vision y el espíritu árabe y hay muchos aspectos de ese tiempo que siguen vigentes. Una buena referencia para quien tiene curiosidad de adentrarse a ese mundo.Translate review to English5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Road to MeccaReviewed in Canada on 20 December 2013Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis book transported me to the PLACES the author was travelling through. The narration of each and every aspect of his life were so well described that I was LIVING his experiences. His style of writing is amazing. I have read other books written my him. Great Scholar as I have also read his interpretation of the Quran. this book is excellent reading for someone who cannot travel to all those places as the author has painted a very VIVID picture.4.0 out of 5 stars A nice classicReviewed in Germany on 9 September 2016Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA wonderful story, well written, a great classic to know the musli world better. A great book to discover a great culture.5.0 out of 5 stars Grippingly Interesting!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 December 2007Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis is a book about travel and the journey of one man through the geographical roads of the material earth, as well as the intellectual and spiritual odyssey he makes through the hills and plains of his own soul. Both journeys culminate in one place: Mecca - where he stays for some years having found the spiritual and intellectual contentment there which had eluded him in Europe. An interesting and inspiring way to learn more about Islam, in a way especially accessible to Westeners, as the author IS a Westerner who chose to accept the faith of Islam, and is thus able to articulate his faith's ideals in language understadable by his native Europeans. Also, this book is an alternative to normal introductory texts on Islam, as the basic precepts of the faith are clothed in the narrative discourse of the author's life himself. A good read, even if only as a book on travel and culture - highly recommended!5.0 out of 5 stars Its truly a great spiritual experienceReviewed in India on 21 December 2015Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseIts truly a great spiritual experience . u will love it . find a lot of peace in mind .5.0 out of 5 stars The search for inner peaceReviewed in the United States on 14 January 2002Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseMuhammed Assad was a gifted journalist. This gift makes the reading of his Near East adventures a highly entertaining experience. The son of wealthy Jewish parents, he came to Palestine in the early 1920's, became an Anti-Zionist and fell in love with the Arab world. He returned to Europe after many adventurous journeys, married a woman 14 years older then he was, became a Muslim, and went back East. The story is told through the memories entertained during a camel ride to Mecca in the early 1930's (although written about 20 years later).Asad was a fearless man (he once walked from Haifa to Damscus without a passport, and later dodged bullets while trying to advise the Sanusi rebels in Libya against fascist Italy). He had an enormous talent for languages - he could speak fluent Arabic and Persian, in addition to the European languages and Hebrew.He was immediately attracted to Islam. Even before becoming a Muslim he had nothing but praise for it. According to him, Islam is completely class -less, accommodating spiritual and physical needs perfectly.Asad's criticism of the Western value system seems relevant today at least as it was then. We might not share his conclusion and choose Islam, but we cant deny that there is something wrong in the Western way of life.The book DOES NOT include Asad's Indian and Pakistanian years. I do not know what book this information is from, and I would really want to get it, as I heard Asad WAS one of the people behind the estblishment of Pakistan.I recommand this truly extraordinary and enlightening book to everyone interested in what is really going on in the world.5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful transformative proseReviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2018Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThe desert is a place of change and this transformative travel account is a beautifully written piece of prose. Asad was a true intellectual giant of his age and his writings are as fresh and relevant today, in 2018, as they were in the early half of the twentieth century.5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting!Reviewed in the United States on 6 March 2011Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis is one of the best books written by a Muslim convert,and I have to say that I was blown away by the amount of enlightening comments and views that Mr.Asad has included in his journey to becoming a Muslim.It is so bewildering to read and understand how a religion like Islam,so profound and dignified, could change a person like Mr.Asad to change his religion and ,ultimately,his ideas about life,God and people.This book is interesting to read because the style of writing is easty to understand,the description he uses to include the reader in the events is quite vivid and the personal remarks about people,places and politics are worth considering.In my opinion,this is not only a book,it is a treasured narrative that seems like a running documentary about a foreigner discovering the Middle East with all its grandeur and tragedies.5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in India on 12 November 2014Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase5.0 out of 5 stars Takes you through the life of the author in a way you would not imagine.Reviewed in Canada on 23 August 2020Format: KindleVerified PurchaseTakes you through the life, struggles and evolution of the author. The descriptions in this boom are impeccable and truly well written.4.0 out of 5 stars the road to MeccaReviewed in Canada on 24 January 2011Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseVery nicely written biography of a man's journey in discovering Islam. I enjoyed it very much as an insight into the culture of the middle east of the day and its beauty. The descriptions of the desert and the effect it has on the people who live there were fascinating. I highly recommend reading it.4.0 out of 5 stars Four StarsReviewed in India on 2 December 2015Format: PaperbackVerified Purchasethe book took me through the ARABIAn culture and the 20th century politics thereat. The writer took my heart.4.0 out of 5 stars Four StarsReviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 August 2014Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase4.0 out of 5 stars A Minor ClassicReviewed in the United States on 30 March 2012Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseMuhammad Asad's book is indeed a minor classic within its field. Written by a European intellectual who embraced Islam as a young man, this book can help us to achieve a better understanding of a religion and a religious-cultural complex that has, to such a great extent, become a matter of controversy in our present time. Along with Nasr's more recent "Islam in the Modern World" it is a "must" to anyone who wishes to deepen his knowlede on the subject. I read the book already when I was very young, in a translation into my native Swedish, and I was happy to rediscover it in its original English now, some 50 years later.5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in Canada on 22 February 2018Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA wonderful book about a man's journey to Arabia and his discovery of Islam5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing readReviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 June 2024Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseIf you put aside the literary mastery aside from Mohammad Asad, the valuable content on offer alone is worth a read at least once!5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Journey Told in Beautiful LanguageReviewed in the United States on 6 December 2022Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseMuhammad Asad is a very gifted writer. I found so many wonderful examples of writing on almost every page. His story and journey is worth reading because there are so many lessons within it about life, spirituality, the nature of human beings, and history. I enjoyed it very much.5.0 out of 5 stars I love Muhammad AsadReviewed in Canada on 26 September 2014Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI love Muhammad Asad, his writing will engulf you in his story and you feel a pull to be there, where he is.5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Book!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 December 2014Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis is unquestionably a wonderful book! The author is a very clever and talented writer you find yourself reading a book that is valid for all times and generations. A book full of information and knowledge in different fields of life. In this book Mohamed Asad built a strong bridge to connect the westerns to the beautiful religion of islam. I really enjoyed reading this book very much and I definitely recommend it.5.0 out of 5 stars Great ReadingReviewed in the United States on 1 August 2013Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseInteresting story how I was introduced to this unusual book: our leader of “Islam 101” group in local mosque Pakistani by nationality mentioned Muhammad Asad name once. I found his biography in Wikipedia. I finished his book in three evenings, it was more interesting to me than Three Musketeers that I read in my childhood. His story is so unbelievable... He was born as Jew in Lvov, worked in Germany and finally became Muslim. "Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.” I am not Muslim, but have Muslim’s friends and read whole Quran twice; I’m Christian and like to have conversations with Muslims. It still amazed me how Jew converted to Islam became one of the founders of Pakistan. This book is great reading, full of adventures, stories about Arabs. Just enjoy reading. His another work is "The Message of the Qur'an", a translation and commentary of the sacred book of Islam, the Qur'an. I read it partially, somehow in my group his translation was not recommended for study.Saadia Khan Saadia I Khan5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing Spiritual journey, and travelogue of an Austrian Journalist, through Europe and the Middle East.Reviewed in the United States on 19 December 2014Format: KindleVerified PurchaseAn inspiring book of how a European man of Austrian and Jewish descent, found the faith of Islam. His spiritual journey, as well as the actual journeys he undertook, He travelled all over Europe and the middle East i.e. Arabia, Syria,Egypt,Turkey,Iran, Afghanistan & the Indo-Pak subcontinent etc. He has the ability to make people and places come to life, so that it feels like the reader is actually with him during his journeys. His personal life & experiences, his friendships with kings and leaders, as well as the poor and Beduins in Arabia, are sad & joyous, always soul stirring & quite amazing, like life itself. Overall, a remarkable book. A must read for all who want to understand the tensions between the West and the Muslim world today, as well as the fascinating history of the middle East and Europe in the twentieth century.5.0 out of 5 stars An adventureReviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 June 2017Format: KindleVerified PurchaseAn excellent account of Weiss' journey through life, and a life transforming physical and spiritual journey at a time when the centre of Islam, Arabia, was going through political unrest.5.0 out of 5 stars this is the best of readsReviewed in Canada on 11 January 2018Format: KindleVerified PurchaseNot often a book sweeps you away, this is the best of reads!5.0 out of 5 stars A must readReviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2019Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseAn amazing book. Much better than I expected. Asad takes you into a world full of wisdom, beauty and danger.5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in Canada on 14 November 2015Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase5.0 out of 5 stars Must ReadReviewed in the United States on 21 November 2012Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseIn this extraordinary and beautifully-written autobiography, Asad tells of his initial rejection of all institutional religions, his entree into Taoism, his fascinating travels as a diplomat, and finally his embrace of Islam. Can a modern/secular mind find it way into Islam and appreciate its truth? And if so how is this possible? As I was born in and raised into a Muslim society, I took it for granted that Islam was the true calling of God. At one point in my life, I did some soul searching into what I really believed and found that while I was strong in my faith, I needed help understanding more things about Islam. I found several books that helped but this bok expressed how I really felt. Asad's experience is the perfect testimony of the modern reason finding its way into Islam and at the same time reconstructing the message and significance of Islam for the modern Muslim. It helps us understand the relevance of Quranic message for modernity.5.0 out of 5 stars A man's search for purpose and inner peaceReviewed in the United States on 28 December 2023Format: KindleVerified PurchaseAn excellent book for any individual searching for the purpose of life and inner peace. The book is an English language master class. The words spark such vivid imagery. You feel as if you are walking side-by-side with the author. I just could not put this book down. Plan to re-read it soon.5.0 out of 5 stars great over viewReviewed in the United States on 7 April 2024Format: KindleVerified PurchaseA nice overview of the authors experiences in Arabia and how he viewed Arabs without any biases. Recommend reading for all intersex to know how Bedouin life morphed into the present Saudi Arabia.G Martin Qalbun Saleem Shafer5.0 out of 5 stars The Man behind the translationReviewed in the United States on 19 February 2020Format: KindleVerified PurchaseMuhammad Asad's translation I have learned is considered one of the best translations of Al-Qur'an.Reading this semi autobiographical book, gives the picture of the author and his passion to create the best translation that was possible in his era. Much of what he feels about the path of Islam in his time, the weakness of man, the willingness of man to no longer strive for the highest ideals set forth by the Qur'an, which is even more apparent now. There is no book like Al-Qur'an. His story, somehow for me makes Al-Qur'an even better.5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful self soul searching …Reviewed in the United States on 23 January 2020Format: KindleVerified PurchaseIntriguing and full of adventures. It gives a good historical background on the middle east a century ago. Emotional in a good way, and reasonable at the same time. The author succeeded in reflecting a good understanding of islam and its morals. The book shows Arabia in its virgin state and the start of the current Saudi Arabia. The author succeeded also in reflecting the Beduin culture and their habits and way of life. I highly recommend the book.4.0 out of 5 stars charm of the middle eastReviewed in the United States on 5 November 2015Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis book gives an interesting insight into the conditions of the middle east in late 1920's. A restless and very talented Viennese author joins his secular Jewish cousin at Palestine initially intended for just a half year or so, and fascinated by the Arabs. Based on his experience and knowledge, he started to write newspaper articles to supplement his living expenses in Cairo and ending up a reporter for Frankfurter Zeitung...5.0 out of 5 stars ExcellentReviewed in the United States on 4 December 2024Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting bookReviewed in the United States on 11 April 2024Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseVery interesting and instructive book.5.0 out of 5 stars Non-Muslim impressed by Muslim biographyReviewed in the United States on 17 June 2010Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI was required to read Asad's book "Road to Mecca" for a class. I'm not a Muslim and the book is not small and I dreaded it. That changed when I got into it. Amazing book! VERY well written, this personal journey of a European news investigator who spent years in Saudi Arabia and converted to Islam is full of adventure, history, intrigue, philosophy, culture and sociology and all manner of insights. It gives a rare deep view to Westerners of the world of the Middle East.5.0 out of 5 stars You will learn so muchReviewed in the United States on 4 March 2021Format: KindleVerified PurchaseIf the Islamic world/Arabian lands interest you this is a great book. I learned so much! It’s well written. I took longer to read just because it became a companion, I didn’t want to let it go.4.0 out of 5 stars RecommendedReviewed in the United States on 31 March 2020Format: KindleVerified PurchaseVery good, just a bit lengthy, with many anecdotes and overly detailed descriptions I could have done without. Still would recommend.5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book on Islam and History of The Middle EastReviewed in the United States on 14 October 2016Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThe book presents a unique perspective about Islam, the Qur'an, and the Middle East. The author, Muhammad Asad, was born in Europe in a Jewish family and converted to Islam after living among the Arabs for few years. His reading of the Qur'an and understanding of Islam is based on reasoning not on a dogma or blind faith.5.0 out of 5 stars Best true adventure storyReviewed in the United States on 26 December 2011Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis man, Leapold Weis, or Muhammad Asad was truly a great human being. The way he explained his thoughts as he went about telling his story is something to be experienced. You will have a hard time putting this book down until you've finished reading it from cover to cover. I highly recommend this for those interested in the middle eastern culture and religion.5.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed reading this bookReviewed in the United States on 26 April 2016Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI enjoyed reading this book, but it did take some effort as the author was very descriptive about his experiences and feelings. It made me want to have lived during that time to see some of the things he saw, as I know that the countries he visited are so very different today.5.0 out of 5 stars yet I knew I can never be like him! May the Creator be pleased with his ...Reviewed in the United States on 10 February 2018Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA man who was a true human, and his true spiritual journey through physical journey. It made me to be jealous of him, and his adventures, yet I know I can never be like him! May the Creator be pleased with M. Asad.5.0 out of 5 stars Great piece of historyReviewed in the United States on 13 September 2020Format: KindleVerified PurchaseRemarkable account of early 20th century Arabia. What Islam has done for the world is remarkable. Those Men were true Men.Syed Najib Syed Abd Bahari5.0 out of 5 stars Great storyteller of Mohd AsadReviewed in the United States on 23 May 2019Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseGreat storyteller of Mohd Asad on his spiritual journey to reach the house of God in Mecca. Inspiring and a lifetime dream to visit His house of Kaaba.Reviewed in the United States on 10 May 2017Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseWas a wonderful journey I took with the writer, a great writer, into the depth of their grappling with the existential. Worth your time people. Praise be to the Most High!5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most underrated books of all time...Reviewed in the United States on 9 October 2017Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA fascinating historical account of the middle and near east, written by an Austrian journalist. Gives one last glimpse of the region before oil took over and became king.5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent readReviewed in the United States on 31 March 2022Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase4.0 out of 5 stars Very interestingReviewed in the United States on 3 May 2013Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA very good book about the experience of conversion to Islam and a very interesting book about Islam from the personal view of one of the most important Muslim intellectuals of the 20th century.5.0 out of 5 stars A Great ExperienceReviewed in the United States on 16 October 2015Format: KindleVerified PurchaseIt's an outstanding Journey to MAKKAH by the Author who embrased to Islam. Muhammad Assad writes about his Experience. It is a must read for Muslim as well as Non Muslim5.0 out of 5 stars Indiana Jones on intellectual overdrive.Reviewed in the United States on 11 August 2015Format: KindleVerified PurchaseA glimpse into the last romantic era of Arabia-- before big oil and modern materialism. An epic tale of the crossroads of the past and the modern.5.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading!!!Reviewed in the United States on 3 May 2015Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseExcellent book! Author expresses everything in great detail and clarity. Selection of words is extremely impressive. More importantly, the book clearly conveys the core message of religion.4.0 out of 5 stars nice bookReviewed in the United States on 2 January 2013Format: PaperbackVerified Purchasenice book about one of Islam pillars. i recommend it for muslims and none muslims, everyone would enjoy this book.5.0 out of 5 stars Traveler of the worldReviewed in the United States on 16 March 2019Format: KindleVerified PurchaseCan’t beat a book on Muhammad Saad, what a badass5.0 out of 5 stars MesmerisingReviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 July 2015Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThis is possibly the most interesting life story I have ever read. It makes me feel we are not living but rather dead ... Walking dead...5.0 out of 5 stars Get it you don’t regretReviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 January 2020Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseA fascinating story and very enjoyable to read
In this extraordinary and beautifully-written autobiography, Asad tells of his initial rejection of all institutional religions, his entree into Taoism, his fascinating travels as a diplomat, and finally his embrace of Islam.First published August 1, 19541032 people are currently reading14951 people want to readمحمد أسد (ليوبولد فايس سابقاً) ولد في الإمبراطورية النمساوية الهنجارية عام 1900، وتوفي في إسبانيا عام 1992م. وهو كاتب وصحفي ومفكر ولغوي وناقد اجتماعي ومصلح ومترجم ودبلوماسي ورحالة مسلم (يهودي سابقاً) درس الفلسفة في جامعة فيينا؛ وقد عمل مراسلاً صحفياً وبعد منحه الجنسية الباكستانية تولى عدة مناصب منها منصب مبعوث باكستان إلى الأمم المتحدة في نيويورك. وطاف العالم، ثم استقر في إسبانيا وتوفي فيها ودفن في غرناطة. ويعتبر محمد أسد أحد أكثر مسلمي أوروبا في القرن العشرين تأثيراً.لقب العائلة "فايس" اسم يعني باللغة الألمانية اللون الأبيض، وهذه إشارة واضحة للأصول الألمانية للعائلة، وكتابة „WEISS“ بتكرار حرف “ S „ في نهاية الاسم بدلا من „WEIß“ دليل واضح على الأصول اليهودية للعائلة. واسم والده "كيفا" وكان محامياً، وجده لأبيه كان حاخاماً، فهو الحاخام الأورثوذوكسي "بنيامين أرجيا فايس". وقد تولّى جده الحاخامية في "تشارنوفيتش" في منطقة بوكوفينا. درس الفلسفة والفن في جامعة فيينا ثم اتجه للصحافة فبرع فيها، وغدا مراسلاً صحفياً في الشرق العربي والإسلامي ثم زار القاهرة فالتقى بالإمام مصطفى المراغي، فحاوره حول الأديان، فانتهى إلى الاعتقاد بأن "الروح والجسد في الإسلام هما بمنزلة وجهين توأمين للحياة الإنسانية التي أبدعها الله" ثم بدأ بتعلم اللغة العربية في أروقة الأزهر، وهو لم يزل بعدُ يهودياً.انتقل للعيش في القدس بعد تلقيه دعوة من أحد أقاربه اليهود للإقامه معه في القدس في الوقت الذي كانت فيه فلسطين تحت الانتداب البريطاني، وكتب هناك عدة مقالات مهمة أبرزت قلق العرب من. المشروع الصهيوني. ثم انخرط في دراسة متعمقة للإسلام، حتى قرر التحول من اليهودية إلى الإسلام في 1926 وهو في برلين وبعد عدة أسابيع من ذلك اعلنت زوجته إسلامها.قام بالترحال إلى العديد من البلدان، إذ زار مصر والسعودية وإيران وأفغانستان وجمهوريات السوفييت الجنوبية. وزار عمر المختار ليبحث معه إيجاد طرق لتمويل المقاومة ضد الإيطاليين كما انتقل إلى شبه القارة الهندية التي كانت تحت الاحتلال الإنجليزي، وهناك التقى بالشاعر الكبير والمفكر محمد إقبال عام 1932 والذي اقترح فكرة تأسيس دولة إسلامية مستقلة في الهند (والتي أصبحت لاحقاً باكستان)، وقد أقنعه محمد إقبال بالبقاء والعمل على مساعدة المسلمين لتأسيس تلك الدولة.ومع اندلاع الحرب العالمية الثانية عام 1939 اعتقل والدا محمد أسد، وقتلا في وقت لاحق في الهولوكوست على يد النازيين. كما أن محمد أسد نفسه اعتقل على يد الإنجليز وسجن ثلاث سنوات باعتباره عدواً.فور استقلال باكستان عام 1947 وتقديراً لجهوده وتأييده لإقامة دولة إسلامية منفصلة في شبه القارة الهندية، فقد تم منح محمد أسد الجنسية الباكستانية وتم تعيينه مديراً لدائرة إعادة الإعمار الإسلامي. وفي وقت لاحق التحق بوزارة الشؤون الخارجية رئيساً لوحدة شؤون الشرق الأوسط عام 1949، ثم تقرر تعيينه بمنصب مبعوث باكستان إلى الأمم المتحدة في نيويورك عام 1952. إلا ّ أنه سرعان ما تخلى عن هذا المنصب ليتفرغ لكتابة سيرته الذاتية (حتى سن 32) الطريق إلى مكة الذي ترجم للعربية باسم (الطريق إلى الإسلام).كان ليوبولد فايس رجل التساؤل والبحث عن الحقيقة، وكان يشعر بالأسى والدهشة لظاهرة الفجوة الكبيرة بين واقع المسلمين المتخلف وبين حقائق دينهم المشعّة، وفي يوم راح يحاور بعض المسلمين منافحاً عن الإسلام، ومحمّلاً المسلمين تبعة تخلفهم عن الشهود الحضاري، لأنهم تخلّفوا عن الإسلام ففاجأه أحد المسلمين الطيبين بهذا التعليق: "فأنت مسلم، ولكنك لا تدري !". فضحك فايس قائلاً : "لست مسلماً، ولكنني شاهدت في الإسلام من الجمال ما يجعلني أغضب عندما أرى أتباعه يضيّعونه"!!. ولكن هذه الكلمة هزّت أعماقه، ووضعته أمام نفسه التي يهرب منها، وظلت تلاحقه من بعد حتى أثبت القدر صدق قائلها الطيب، حين نطق (محمد أسد) بالشهادتين.قام محمد أسد بعد إسلامه بأداء فريضة الحج، كما شارك في الجهاد مع عمر المختار، ثم سافر إلى باكستان فالتقى شاعر الإسلام محمد إقبال، ثم عمل رئيساً لمعهد الدراسات الإسلامية في لاهور حيث قام بتأليف الكتب التي رفعته إلى مصاف ألمع المفكرين الإسلاميين في العصر الحديث.Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest SourcesLost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the PastNo God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of IslamThe Autobiography of Malcolm XSafiur Rahman MubarakpuriReclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's ShacklesDestiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic EyesMuhammad: A Biography of the ProphetSaladin: The Life, the Legend and the Islamic EmpireNo one you know has read this book. Recommend it to a friend!Displaying 1 - 10 of 871 reviewsProfile Image for Yazeed AlMogren.أحد أروع كتب السير الذاتية التي قرأتها في حياتي.بسبب موقف مع أحد أصدقاءه يبدأ الصحفي النمساوي محمد أسد (ليوبولد فايس سابقًا) كتابة سيرته الذاتية ليخبرنا عن رحلاته وكيف تحوّل الى الإسلام، استغرقت كتابه هذا الكتاب سنتين تحدث فيها عن بداية حياته ونشأته في اوروبا وكيف كان يريد تحقيق حلمه بأن يكون صحفيًا لامعًا، أتاح له تحقيق هذا الحلم بالسفر الى سوريا وفلسطين ومصر والأردن والسعودية وايران والهند والكويت وافغانستان، قابل في هذه الرحلات العديد من الملوك والسفراء والسياسيين امثال ملك ايران رضا بهلوي والملك عبدالعزيز آل سعود.تحدث عن دخول الإسلام الى قلبه وكيف كانت نظرته الى هذا الدين وأخذ يقارن بين الإسلام وبين ديانته اليهودية وكيف تتناقض في بعض الأحكام الذي عجز عقله أن يستوعبها، أسلم بقناعة تامة بعد عدة مواقف وحوارات شاهدها أثناء وجوده في البلاد العربية وكتب عن العديد من الأحداث السياسية التي كانت تصنع العالم العربي في ذلك الوقت وقد شارك في بعضها كجهادة مع الليبيين ضد الإيطاليين وبعض مهمات التجسس التي كلفها به الملك عبدالعزيز آل سعود.وجدت الحيادية في آراءه تجاه المسلمين وتجاه الإسلام وتجاه الملوك والشعوب، بقدر ما أظهر محاسن بعضهم بقدر ما أظهر عيوبهم، لم يكن يقف في صف أحد بل وقف مع رفع راية الإسلام والمسلمين في كل البلاد، المُحير أن هذا الكتاب بروعة كلماته وحسن آراءه لم يكتبه عالم دين أو أديب بل صحفي أراد أن يوثق تجاربه الشخصية لذلك أعتبره مهمًا لمن أراد أن يطّلع على تاريخ تلك الفترة التي غالبًا لم تؤرخ بطريقة محايدة وأعتبره مناسبًا لمن أراد أن يقرأ تجارب شخص كان يهودي سابقًا وفهمه للإسلام ومناسبًا أيضًا للإهداء للأوربيين لما أحتوى من نظرة شخص أوروبي للإسلام ولإظهار بعض تاريخ العالم العربي لهم.كُتب هذا الكتاب بالإنجليزية ومن ثم تُرجم للعديد من اللغات وتعتبر نسخة منشورات الجمل بترجمة رفعت السيد علي هي الأفضل والأحدث "ولم يُحذف منها شيء"Profile Image for Ibrahim Abdulla.يمكن أن أسمي القراءة لمن اعتنق الإسلام -خصوصاً من مسلمي أوروبا أو أمريكا- بأنها قراءة من خارج الصندوق، فأشخاص مثل محمد أسد، روجيه غاوردي، جيفري لانغ، حمزة يوسف، وغيرهم (آمنوا) عن قناعة ومبدأ، فالتغير إلى ديانة أخرى مجازفة ومغامرة بحد ذاتها، و تغير لنمط الحياة بأكمله؛ لهذا فإن أعمالهم غالباً ما تكون مؤثرة لأنها تخرج صادقة من القلب .أول ما شد انتباهي في الكتاب هو أسلوب ليوبولد السردي الساحر؛ فأن تجعل من عملية إخراج الدلو من البئر عملية طواف نفسي، وصياح البدو أغاني جميلة، والصحاري المقفرة أماكن خيالية، عمل لايؤديه إلا فنان مُلهم، وأذكر في ذلك بيجوفيتش الذي يقول بأن الفن ابن الدين، فالفن الجميل غالباً ما يخرج من رحم الدين، أعتقد بأن أسد كان يستطيع أن يكون روائياً فذاً لو أراد.محمد أسد يجعل رحلته إلى مكة نافذة إلى رحلة في كوامن نفسه، فهو يرتكز على أحداث بسيطة في طريق مكة ليعود بنا بشكل ذكريات غير منظمة إلى مناطق مختلفة في حياته للبحث عن إجابات لأسئلته، منذ ولادته حتى وصوله إلى مكة، في رحلة تاريخية، اجتماعية، سياسية، فنية، ودينية.الكتاب أعمق من أن يكون سيرة ذاتية عادية، ورحلة رجل اعتنق الإسلام إلى مكة، بل هي رؤية إنسانية للحياة، ومعراج روحي لأدراك كنه الوجود، في ظروف استثنائية جداً (يهودي أوروبي يعتنق الإسلام ويعيش مع البدو، يعمل سفيراً لباكستان في الأمم المتحدة، يقابل و يكون صداقات مع شخصيات مهمة في وقته مثل الملك عبدالعزيز وعمر المختار!)، البحث الذي استقر على رؤية ثنائية (الروح/المادة) ككلٌ واحد لا ينفصل، والإجابة المفقودة لسؤال الوجود، هذه الفلسفة التي كانت أهم الأسباب التي جعلته يرسو على شاطئ الإسلام.The more I try to make sense of my path so far as a Muslim, the more the experiences seem to expand themselves in front of me and escape words. I cannot pin down what I'm living, seeing, realizing into language. I can only approximate, and at times try to make sense of it through the writings of others.The idea of Islam being a consummation of all primordial divine truth, (and therefore not a "late" religion, but ONE religion) is the concept that has spoken to me most as of late. In this light, the particular message of this book is one of return through "new" beginnings. Or as we in Islam describe our conversion process, it is a RE-version to the primordial Religion - through submission (Islam) to the ultimate.Muhammad Asad narrates his story through a method of weaving in and out of past and present events related to his journey to the Arab and Persian worlds. Immersed in this back and forth narrative is his spiritual progression and viewpoints on Islam derived from his esoteric experience of the divine as related to his outer experience of "brotherhood". In this way, Asad's style is a beautiful metaphor for Islam as a faith, and for the way that The Qur'an itself is written. What we know as existence or creation intersects at all points of the physical, spiritual and mental, and with this life-altering paradigm of unity in all areas, we can see where the many strains of reality constantly cross one another, and in Islam, are inseparable parts of a totality.Asad describes a restlessness in this book that I've felt since my teens, and that compelled him as a European to travel to the Arab world and ultimately embrace Islam. It was a cultural shift, an acceptance of a new way of life that was exemplified through physical emigration. This resonated profoundly when I first looked at this book. Asad's conception of this restlessness is not a need for adventure per se, but more of a desire to get to the root of things, and therefore the need to experience. It's also not a sensual addiction, it's just a drive to get to the authentic. I'm there, and looking back, I've always been there. Islam to me offers an opportunity of full immersion into not only a faith (and "faith" has meant "dualism" in my past), but a complete life. Tawhid. Unity. Sociological and cultural acceptance. Discovering through a journey - physical, mental and spiritual. Asad describes it best on p. 374: "Longing need no longer remain small and hidden; it has found its awakening, a blinding sunrise of fulfillment."Profile Image for أحمد أبازيد Ahmad Abazeid.أحمد أبازيد Ahmad Abazeidرحلة روح .. و قصّة حضارة .. و متعة لا تنتهي ..Profile Image for Alp Eren Topal.There are enough reviews by other people, which does the justice to the book. Yet I just want to add that Leopold Weis/Muhammad Asad's life is the testimony to one thing:Can a modern/secular mind find it way into Islam and appreciate its truth? And if so how is this possible?As I was born in and raised into a Muslim society, I took it for granted that Islam was the true calling of God. Yet after I have started studyin social sciences and Western society, the question above has become increasingly pressing for me. Because the answer to this question would help me decide whether Islam was really universal in its essence or I was living a truth-regime.Esed's experience is the perfect testimony of the modern reason finding its way into Islam and at the same time reconstructing the message and significance of Islam for the modern Muslim. It helps us understand the relevance of Quranic message for Modernity.Finally I'd like to say that vividness of the experiences in the book occasionally made me cry; something I experience so rarely. Towards the end, the cry "Lebbeyk!" was echoing in my own heart.هو ليس الطريق إلى مكة فحسب!هو الطريق إلى ذاك الهاتف البعيد من أقاصي الروح!أوليست أرواحنا تائهة في جنبات هذا العالم الكثيف تلتمس قبساً من نورٍ يضمن لها سلامة الوصول إلى الغاية ..؟هذا الكتاب هو سيرة للنمساوي الصحفي والكاتب والمفكر ليوبولد فايس والذي غيّر اسمه لمحمد أسد بعد إسلامه ..يحكي لنا رحلته من الغرب إلى الشرق وما بينهما، وعن تجاربه المثيرة والتقائه شخصيات لامعة-سياسية،ثورية، دينية وغيرها- في الشرق الأوسط على امتداد ما يزيد عن خمسٍ وعشرين عاماً..!يبثّ لنا في جنبات هذا الكتاب تلك التقلّبات النفسية الخاصة به والتي تعتري الإنسان في مراحل حياته المتباينة بحثاً عن شيءٍ ما قد نسميه السلام!يكتب عن حياته وعن كونه وُلد لأبوين يهوديين في أوروبا،النمسا تحديداً، وعن الإخفاقات التي كانت تتْرى في محاولةٍ للبحث عن دين يتواطئ مع شعلة الفكر المتّقدة في نفس الشاب الصغير الذي كانه.يروي لنا قصص رحلاته في العشرينات من القرن المنصرم في شبه الجزيرة العربية والسهل الخصيب وبلاد فارس وتركيا وأفريقيا، وعن النداءات الخفيّة التي تتالت على الروح من مغامرة إلى أخرى كاشفة عن نقاب الحيرة التي اعترته سنيناً طويلة..!بلغةٍ عذبة شفيفة يذوب لها الفؤاد وتخشع لها الأحاسيس يصف لنا محمد أسد مغامراته الصحراوية بحواس متّقدة تلتقط موجات الصحراء السادرة في اللازمان، يعيننا على فهم شعوره المتباين ببن معجب وخائف وألِق، بمفاهيم فكرية بليغة تخضعك لوقفة تأمل وتفكير عميقين!لا تجد هذا الكاتب يميل إلى تملّق الشخصيات العظيمة التي قابلها ونال شرف الصداقة معها، بل إنه يعمد إلى نقدها نقداً هادفاً صادقاً يمثّل رؤيته وانتماؤه الفكري..تحدّث عن ابن سعود (الملك عبد العزيز) في مرحلة ما قبل الثورة النفطية وفي خضمّ الثورات المتفاوتة من قبائل شبه الجزيرة.تحدث عن علي رضا والسنوسي وعمر المختار وآخرين يجعلك حديثه عنهم في موضع المغبط المندهش من نصيب هذا الصحفي الذي أقبل على الشرق لنقل مآسيه وإخفاقاته، إلا أنه يقع أسيراً في حبه وعالقةٌ روحه في سماء دينه من حيث لم يدري حتى! فكما قال له صديقه الأفغاني حين رأى في عقليته الفذّة ونقده اللاذع للعالم الإسلامي وتجاوب روحه لمبادئ الدعوة المحمدية-هذا طبعا قبل أن يدين بالإسلام ببضع شهور- : ( ولكن..أنت مسلم! إلا أنك لا تعلم ذلك..!)تبدأ الرواية/السيرة وتنتهي برحلة صحراوية خطيرة ومبهرة مع زيد الشمّري مرافقه الشخصي في السراء والضراء، حاثّين الخطى على جمالهم إلى مكة حيث تصدح هناك أصواتٌ هاتفة أن : لبيك اللهم لبيك!في الحقيقة، هذا الكتاب من أجمل ما قرأت..!Profile Image for Nawal Al-Qussyer.يالله جمال هذا الكتاب لا يوصف. سأعود لادراج مراجعة شاملةchanged-the-way-i-see-the-worldThe Road to Mecca represents a most interesting & exceedingly interior pilgrimage tale of Leopold Weiss, born in 1900 in what is today Lvov, Ukraine (previously Lemberg in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), descendent of a long line of rabbis.The book is in fact the autobiography of Muhammad Asad and the story of this most radical transformation is quite stunning, a conversion of faith enmeshed in a long pattern of travel & work as a journalist by the erstwhile Weiss, whose rather affluent family moved to Vienna when Leopold was still fairly young.Curiously, his grandfather wanted Leopold's dad to follow his path as a rabbi, though he chose to become a lawyer with a distinctly secular stance. Meanwhile, it was hoped that Leopold would complete his university degree in Vienna & become a lawyer like his own father, the source of another familial disappointment, as Leonard failed to complete his studies, dropping out to become a journalist, over time based primarily in the Middle East & the Arabian Peninsula & working for the Frankfurter Zeitung & other newspapers.Leopold's many constructive encounters while seeking something "more meaningful" in life, include a brief stint in Berlin with early filmmaker F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu based on Bram Stoker's Dracula), explorations by camel & train across Syria & Iraq and time with members of the House of Saud, including King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud in what became Saudi Arabia.Over time, the outsider who had once attended Hebrew school, though more for its cultural content, while even developing a fluency in Aramaic, experiences a gradual but rather complete transformation.There is also a memorable intersection involving a discussion of theology with a Jesuit priest on a ship bound for Egypt & Turkey and another with the chairman of the Zionist Committee of Action in Palestine, where although of Jewish origin, the author feels a "strong objection to Zionism", taking issue with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.Beyond that, he counters Dr. Chaim Weismann's claim to Palestine, attempting to point out that long before the Hebrews came to the area as "conquerors to Palestine, there were many Semitic & non-Semitic tribes settled there--including the Amorites, Edomites, Philistines, Moabites & Hittites, with the descendants of many of these peoples still resident in the area."Gradually, the man who began life as Leopold Weiss experiences a metamorphosis, converting to Islam & becoming in the process Mohammad Asad. In time, some began to refer to him as "a Jewish Lawrence of Arabia".Islam did not seem so much a religion in the popular sense of the word as, rather, a way of life; not so much a system of theology as a programme of personal & social behavior based on the consciousness of God.Nowhere in the Koran could I find any reference to a need for "salvation" or a mention of original or inherited sin; sin meant no more than a lapse from the innate, positive qualities with which God was said to have endowed every human being. There was also no trace of any dualism in the consideration of man's nature: body & soul seem to be taken as one integral whole.I found Asad's commentary on the Crusades of considerable interest, calling this a "defining moment for western civilization, a wave of intoxication that brought tribes & classes together, providing a shared cultural awareness + a sense of unity but also causing intellectual damage--the poisoning of the western mind."Reading about the transformation of Leopold Weiss in becoming Mohammad Asad from an author who has such a keen sense of Islamic history and cultures made The Road to Mecca a fascinating book. Asad indicates that he decided to become a Muslim "not because I lived among them so long; rather I decided to live among them because I had embraced Islam." Asad goes on to comment...Throughout the years I have spent in the Middle East--as a sympathetic outsider from 1922 to 1926 and then as a Muslim sharing the aims & hopes of the Islamic community ever since--I have witnessed the steady encroachment of Muslim cultural life & political independence + European public opinion that labels any resistance to this incursion as xenophobia.The West's main argument is always that the political disruption & Western intervention is not merely aimed at protecting "legitimate" Western interests but also at securing progress for the indigenous peoples themselves.This was of course before WWII & the discovery of oil further changed the dynamics of that intervention, eventually leading to independence for many of the countries where Mohammad Asad lived.The author later spent time as a compiler of Muslim history, writing books on the nature of the Koran & Islam, still later serving as Pakistan's Ambassador to the United Nations when that country became independent, splitting from the Indian subcontinent in 1947.I can not begin to capture the many roads that Asad traveled in The Road to Mecca but the book is extremely thoughtful, quite personally revealing & very well-written.Curiously, at some point I thought of the intriguing novel by Kurban Said, Ali & Nino, a novel that featured a Jewish fellow in Azerbaijan who converts to Islam, marrying a Georgian Christian woman, a book that was first published in Vienna just before the outbreak of WWII. And yes, Asad does make it to Mecca and speaks candidly about his experiences there.It may be that someone who was raised a Jew within a Christian landscape prior to WWI & perhaps survived WWII & the Holocaust because he changed both his residence & his identity is particularly empowered to provide insight into Islam, a quality that someone who has known no other faith can not.The sister & father of the former Leopold Weiss, among many other Jews living in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss or the German annexation of Austria, perished in the Holocaust, along with countless others.I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in Islamic history or in reading about a unique search for personal identity.*Interspersed are many black & white photographs which add context to Asad's story.**Within my review, the first photo image is of Leopold Weiss as a young man, the second after his transformation to become Muhammad Asad. An additional image of the Koran beside the Hebrew Bible & its Christian equivalent is followed by a poster on a donkey-cart of Muhammad Asad in his administrative capacity in Pakistan.Profile Image for غيث الحوسني.قسوة الترحال المتوارية وراء الأسلوب الطافح بالفتنة.كل تلك الأعوام من الانغمار في العالم الإسلامي لدى محمد أسد النمساوي اليهودي والمسلم بعد ذلك، هو طريقةً للاحتفاظ بمنظومة المشاعر والتفكير كي تبقى متأهبةً حتى لا تختزل الحياة في بعدٍ واحد هو الضياع .... ضيع نفسك تجدها، كانت الكتابة لديه شكلا من أشكال تحويل المعرفة إلى احتفال دائم كما يقول رولان بارت حيث يجعل من العرضي الزائل لحظة خالدة في التاريخ الإنساني.Profile Image for منال الحسيني.من أكثر الكتب المؤثرة التي قرأتها في حياتي، كتاب رائع مكتوب بشفافية عالية وباسلوب صادق وعفوي يلمس العقل والقلب معاًDisplaying 1 - 10 of 871 reviewsThe Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asadmartinkramer.org/sandbox/reader/archives/the-road-f rom-mecca-muhammad-asad/"The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss),"in The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. MartinKramer (Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and AfricanStudies, 1999), pp. 225-47.Ìn August 1954, there appeared in America a remarkable book, written by an author namedMuhammad Asad and bearing the title The Road to Mecca. The book, a combination ofmemoir and travelogue, told the story of a convert to Ìslam who had crossed the spiritualdeserts of Europe and the sand deserts of Arabia, on a trek that brought him ultimately tothe oasis of Ìslamic belief . The book immediately won critical acclaim, most notably in theprestige press of New York, where Simon and Schuster had published it. One reviewer,writing in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review, called it an "intensely interesting and Another reviewer, on the pages of The New York Times, placed the book inthe pantheon of Arabian travel literature: "Not since Freya Stark,¨ he wrote, "has anyonewritten so happily about Arabia as the Galician now known as Muhammad Asad.¨Muhammad Asad (1900-92) was a converted Jew, named Leopold Weiss at birth. He was noordinary convert. Asad not only sought personal f ulf illment in his adopted f aith. He tried toaf f ect the course of contemporary Ìslam, as an author, activist, diplomat, and translator ofthe Qur'an. Muhammad Asad died in February 1992 at the age of ninety-one, so that hiscareer may be said to have paralleled the emergence of every trend in contemporaryAs yet, however, there is no biography of Asad, and considerable obstacles await all whowould attempt one. The most f ormidable of these is that the principal source f or Asad's lif eremains Asad. No doubt this obstacle might be overcome, and this essay makes use ofseveral additional sources f or Asad's lif e. But the purpose here is more modest. Ìt is todraw a very general sketch of Asad's lif e, and to place some emphasis upon the Jewishdimension of Muhammad Asad. For while Asad obviously distanced himself f rom Judaism,he adhered to a set of ideals that suf f used the Jewish milieu f rom which he emerged. Hisf ailure to impart these ideals to contemporary Ìslam, and a repetitious pattern of rejectionby his Muslim coreligionists, made of him a wandering Muslim, whose road f rom Meccatraversed an uncomprehending Ìslam bef ore winding back to the ref uge of the West.Leopold Weiss was born on 12 July 1900, in the town of Lvov (Lemberg) in eastern Galicia,then a part of the Habsburg Empire (Lvov is today in Ukraine). By the turn of the century,Jews f ormed a quarter to a third of the population of Lvov, a town inhabited mostly byPoles and Ukrainians. The Jewish community had grown and prospered over the previouscentury, expanding f rom commerce into industry and banking. Weiss's mother, Malka, wasthe daughter of a wealthy local banker, Menahem Mendel Feigenbaum. The f amily livedcomf ortably, and, wrote Weiss, lived f or the children.From Weiss's own account, his roots in Judaism were deeper on his f ather's side. Hispaternal grandf ather, Benjamin Weiss, had been one of a succession of Orthodox rabbis inCzernovitz in Bukovina. Weiss remembered his grandf ather as a white-bearded man wholoved chess, mathematics and astronomy, but who still held rabbinic learning in the highestregard, and so wished his son to enter the rabbinate. Weiss's f ather, Akiva, did studyTalmud by day, but by night he secretly learned the curriculum of the humanistic gymnasium.Akiva Weiss eventually announced his open break f rom rabbinics, a rebellion that wouldpresage his son's own very dif f erent break. But Akiva did not realize his dream of studyingphysics, because circumstances compelled him to take up the more practical prof ession ofa barrister. He practiced f irst in Lvov, then in Vienna, where the Weiss f amily settled bef oreWeiss testif ies that his parents had little religious f aith. For them, Judaism had become, inhis words, "the wooden ritual of those who clung by habit÷and only by habit÷to theirreligious heritage.¨ He later came to suspect that his f ather regarded all religion asoutmoded superstition. But in def erence to f amily tradition and to his grandf athers, youngLeopold÷¨Poldi¨ to his f amily÷was made to spend long hours with a tutor, studying theHebrew Bible, Targum, Talmud, Mishna, and Gemarra. "By the age of thirteen,¨ he attested,"Ì not only could read Hebrew with great f luency but also spoke it f reely.¨ He studiedTargum "just as if Ì had been destined f or a rabbinical career,¨ and he could "discuss with agood deal of self -assurance the dif f erences between the Babylonian and JerusalemNonetheless, Weiss developed what he called "a supercilious f eeling¨ toward the premisesof Judaism. While he did not disagree with its moral precepts, it seemed to him that theGod of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud "was unduly concerned with the ritual by means ofwhich His worshippers were supposed to worship Him.¨ Moreover, this God seemed"strangely preoccupied with the destinies of one particular nation, the Hebrews.¨ Far f rombeing the creator and sustainer of mankind, the God of the Hebrews appeared to be atribal deity, "adjusting all creation to the requirements of a 'chosen people.'¨ Weiss'sstudies thus led him away f rom Judaism, although he later allowed that "they helped meunderstand the f undamental purpose of religion as such, whatever its f orm.¨But this early disillusionment with Judaism did not lead to the pursuit of spiritualalternatives. Ìn 1918, Weiss entered the University of Vienna. Days were given to the studyof art history; evenings were spent in caf és, listening to the disputations of Vienna'spsychoanalysts. ("The stimulus of Freud's ideas was as intoxicating to me as potent Nights were given to passions. ("Ì rather gloried, like so many others of mygeneration, in what was considered a 'rebellion against the hollow conventions.'¨)his studies progressed, the prospect of a lif e in academe lost appeal. Ìn 1920, Weissdef ied his f ather's wishes and lef t Vienna f or Berlin to seek a career in journalism. There hejoined the littérateurs at the Caf é des Westens, sold a f ew f ilm scripts, and landed a jobÌn the midst of this f airly unremarkable climb, Leopold Weiss took an unexpected detour.Early in 1922, a maternal uncle, Dorian Feigenbaum, invited Weiss to visit Jerusalem.Dorian, a psychoanalyst and pupil of Freud, had initiated Weiss to psychoanalysis a f ewyears earlier in Vienna. Now he headed a mental institution in Jerusalem. Weiss acceptedthe invitation, arriving in Egypt by ship and then in Palestine by train. Ìn Jerusalem, he livedin Dorian's house, situated inside the old city a f ew steps f rom the Jaf f a Gate. Ìt was f romthis base that Leopold Weiss would f irst explore the realities of Ìslam. But his explorationwould be pref aced by another discovery, of the immoralities of Zionism.This stand was not a f amily inheritance. Although Dorian did not consider himself a Zionist,Weiss had another uncle in Jerusalem who was very much an ardent Zionist. AryehFeigenbaum (1885-1981), an ophthalmologist, had immigrated to Palestine in 1913, andbecame a leading authority on trachoma whose Jerusalem clinics were f requented bythousands of Arabs and Jews. Ìn 1920, he f ounded the f irst Hebrew medical journal; f rom1922, he headed the ophthalmologic department at Hadassah Hospital.omitted all mention of his Zionist uncle f rom The Road to Mecca÷one of many suggestiveomissions, hinting that the distancing f rom f amily and Zionism was linked.But Weiss always presented his anti-Zionism as a simple moral imperative. "Ì conceivedf rom the outset a strong objection to Zionism,¨ Weiss would later af f irm. "Ì considered itimmoral that immigrants, assisted by a f oreign Great Power, should come f rom abroad withthe avowed intention of attaining to majority in the country and thus to dispossess thepeople whose country it had been since time immemorial.¨bolstered by a f lash of insight Weiss experienced near the Jaf f a Gate while observing abedouin Arab, "silhouetted against the silver-grey sky like a f igure f rom an old legend.¨Perhaps, he f antasized, this was "one of that handf ul of young warriors who hadaccompanied young David on his f light f rom the dark jealousy of Saul, his king?¨ Then, hesays, "Ì knew, with that clarity which sometimes bursts within us like lightening and lights upthe world f or the length of a heartbeat, that David and David's time, like Abraham andAbraham's time, were closer to their Arabian roots÷and so to the beduin of to-day÷than tothe Jew of today, who claims to be their descendant.¨Ìn Jerusalem, Weiss began to conf ront Zionist leaders with the Arab question at every turn.He raised it both with Menahem Ussishkin (1863-1941) and Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952),and soon gained a reputation as a sympathizer of the Arab cause. Weiss also credited anew f riend with assisting him greatly in Jerusalem: the Dutch poet and journalist JacobÌsraël de Haan (1881-1924). By this time, De Haan's strange career had already taken itsmany turns: he had gone f rom socialist agitator to religious mystic, f rom ardent Zionist tof ervent anti-Zionist. The Haganah later assassinated De Haan in 1924. De Haan f edWeiss's rejection of Zionism with grist, and also helped Weiss f ind journalistic work. And itwas through De Haan that Weiss met the Emir Abdallah (1882-1951) in the summer of 1923÷his f irst in a lif etime of meetings with Arab heads of state.Ìn Palestine, Weiss became a stringer f or the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he wrote againstZionism and f or the cause of Muslim and Arab nationalism, with a strong anti-British bias.He published a small book on the subject in 1924, and this so inspired the conf idence ofthe Frankfurter Zeitung that it commissioned him to travel more widely still, to collectinf ormation f or a f ull-scale book. Weiss made the trip, which lasted two years. At its outset,he f ound a new source of inspiration, during a stay in Cairo: Shaykh Mustaf a al-Maraghi(1881-1945), a brilliant ref ormist theologian who later became rector of al-Azhar.was Weiss's f irst contact with Ìslamic ref ormism, and it lef t a prof ound impression uponhim. Weiss concluded that the abysmal state of the Muslims could not be attributed toÌslam, as its Western critics claimed, but to a misreading of Ìslam. When properlyinterpreted, in a modern light, Ìslam could lead Muslims f orward, while of f ering spiritualsustenance that Judaism and Christianity had ceased to provide. Weiss spent the betterpart of the next two years traveling through Syria, Ìraq, Kurdistan, Ìran, Af ghanistan, andCentral Asia, growing ever more f ascinated by Ìslam in its myriad f orms.Upon concluding his travels, Weiss returned to Frankf urt to write his book. There he alsomarried Elsa, a widow, "probably the f inest representative of the pure 'Nordic' type Ì haveever encountered,¨ a woman f if teen years his senior, whom he had met bef ore his last He was now settled into a comf ortable routine. Yet he made no progress on hisbook: he was preoccupied and distracted, unable to put pen to paper in a summation of histravels. A quarrel with the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung over his writer's block culminatedin his resignation, and he moved to Berlin, where he took up Ìslamic studies and wrote as astringer f or lesser newspapers.Ìt was there, in September 1926, that Weiss experienced his second epiphany. He had hada f lash of insight near the Jaf f a Gate: the Arabs were the heirs of the biblical Hebrews, notthe Jews. Now, on the Berlin subway, he had another f lash. Watching the people on thistrain, in their f inery and prosperity, he noticed that none smiled. Although positioned at thepinnacle of Western material achievement, they were unhappy. Returning to his f lat, he casta glance at a copy of the Qur'an he had been reading, and his eye settled upon the versethat reads: "You are obsessed by greed f or more and more / Until you go down to yourgraves.¨ And then later, in the same verse: "Nay, if you but knew it with the knowledge ofcertainty, / You would indeed see the hell you are in.¨ All doubt that the Qur'an was a God-inspired book vanished, wrote Weiss. He went to the leader of the Berlin Ìslamic Society,declared his adherence to Ìslam, and took the name Muhammad Asad.Why the conversion? Ìn 1934, Asad wrote that he had no satisf actory answer. He could notsay which aspect of Ìslam appealed to him more than another, except that Ìslam seemed tohim "harmoniously conceived. nothing is superf luous and nothing lacking, with the result ofan absolute balance and solid composure.¨ But he still f ound it dif f icult to analyze hismotives. "Af ter all, it was a matter of love; and love is composed of many things: of ourdesires and our loneliness, of our high aims and our shortcomings, of our strength and our Ìn the Feigenbaum f amily, it was more commonly thought that Asad'sconversion stemmed f rom a hatred of his f ather, generalized to a contempt f or the f aithand people of his birth. Asad wrote to his f ather inf orming him of his conversion, but got noSome months later my sister wrote, telling me that he considered me dead.Thereupon I sent him another letter, assuring him that my acceptance of Islam didnot change anything in my attitude toward him or my love for him; that, on thecontrary, Islam enjoined upon me to love and honour my parents above all otherpeople. But this letter also remained unanswered.Asad's wif e Elsa converted to Ìslam a f ew weeks later, and in January 1927 they lef t f orMecca, accompanied by Elsa's son f rom her previous marriage. On arrival, Weiss made hisf irst pilgrimage; a moving passage at the end of The Road to Mecca describes hiscircumambulation of Ka'ba. Tragically, Elsa died nine days later, of a tropical disease, andher parents reclaimed her son a year later.So began Asad's Saudi period, which would f orm him as a Muslim. His six years in SaudiArabia are recounted in The Road to Mecca in selective detail. Asad portrayed himself as amember of the inner circle of King Ìbn Saud (1880-1953), dividing his time between religiousstudy in Medina and palace politics in Riyadh. This intimacy with Ìbn Saud can be conf irmedin broad lines by an independent source. Ìn late 1928, an Ìraqi named Abdallah Damluji, whohad been an adviser to Ìbn Saud, submitted a report to the British on "Bolshevik and Sovietpenetration¨ of the Hijaz. Ìt represents perhaps the most succinct conf irmation of the roleplayed by Asad in Saudi Arabia:Before concluding, I must bring attention to the person known as Asadullah vonWeiss, formerly an Austrian Jew, now a Muslim, who resides presently near theholy shrine in Mecca. This Austrian Leopold von Weiss came to the Hijaz twoyears ago, claiming he had become a Muslim out of love for this religion and inpure belief in it. I do not know why, but his words were accepted withoutopposition, and he entered Mecca without impediment. He did so at a time whenno one like him was allowed to do the same, the Hijaz government having recentlypassing a law providing that those like him must wait two years undersurveillance, so that the government can be certain of their Islam before theirentry into Mecca. Since that time, Leopold von Weiss has remained in Mecca,wandering the country and mixing with people of every class and with governmentpersons. He then traveled to Medina, and stayed there and in its environs forseveral months. Then he was able÷I have no idea how÷to travel to Riyadh withKing Ibn Saud last year, and he stayed in Riyadh for five months, seeing andhearing all that happened, mingling with the people and speaking with persons ofthe government. He does not seem to me to be a learned or professional man. Hisapparent purpose is to obtain news from the King, and especially from ShaykhYusuf Yasin, secretary to the King [and editor of the official newspaper Umm al-Qura]. Asadullah uses this news to produce articles for some German andAustrian newspapers, in reply to the distasteful things written by some Europeannewspapers on the Hijazi-Najdi court. This is the occupation of the Austrian JewLeopold von Weiss, now Haj Asadullah the Muslim. What is the real missionwhich makes him endure the greatest discomforts and the worst conditions oflife? On what basis rests the close intimacy between him and Shaykh YusufYasin? Is there some connection between von Weiss and the Bolshevik consulatein Jidda? These are mysteries about which it is difficult to know the truth.For British intelligence of the time, Bolshevism was an obsession, and Damluji's insinuationcan be discounted. But f rom this account, it is clear that Asad did have exceptional accessto the court of Ìbn Saud. Ìt is also clear that his status was not that of an adviser, but of aprivileged observer, admitted to the court as part of the earliest Saudi ef f orts at publicrelations. Ìbn Saud kept Asad close to him because this usef ul convert wrote f latteringarticles about him f or various newspapers in continental Europe. (These newspapers, Asadwrote, "provide me with my livelihood.¨)According to Asad, he did f inally become a secret agent of sorts: Ìbn Saud employed himon a clandestine mission to Kuwait in 1929, to trace the f unds and guns that were f lowing toFaysal al-Dawish, a rebel against Ìbn Saud's rule. Asad determined that Britain was behindthe rebellion, and wrote so f or the f oreign papers, much to Ìbn Saud's satisf action.also began to settle down. He married twice in Saudi Arabia: f irst in 1928 to a woman f romthe Mutayr tribe, and in 1930, f ollowing a divorce, to Munira, f rom a branch of the Shammar.They established a household in Medina, and she bore him a son, Talal. Arabia was hishome, so he worked to persuade himself : the Arabian sky was "my sky,¨ the same sky that"vaulted over the long trek of my ancestors, those wandering herdsmen-warriors¨÷¨thatsmall beduin tribe of Hebrews.¨Arabia's sky enchanted Asad÷but Arabia's ruler did not. Asad had shared the hope that ÌbnSaud would "bring about a revival of the Ìslamic idea in its f ullest sense.¨ But as Ìbn Saudconsolidated his power, lamented Asad, "it became evident that Ìbn Saud was no more thana king÷a king aiming no higher than so many other autocratic Eastern rulers bef ore him.¨Asad's indictment grew long, and he later made it public in The Road to Mecca. True, ÌbnSaud had established order, but he did so "by harsh laws and punitive measures and not byinculcating in his people a sense of civic responsibility.¨ He had "done nothing to build up anequitable, progressive society.¨ "He indulges and allows those around him to indulge in themost extravagant and senseless luxuries.¨ He had "neglected the education even of his ownsons and thus lef t them poorly equipped f or the tasks that lie bef ore them.¨ And he wasincapable of self -examination, while the "innumerable hangers-on who live of f his bountycertainly do nothing to counteract this unf ortunate tendency.¨ Asad's f inal verdict was thatÌbn Saud's lif e constituted a "tragic waste¨:Belying the tremendous promise of his younger years, when he appeared to be adreamer of stirring dreams, he has broken÷perhaps without realizing it himself÷the spirit of a high-strung nation that had been wont to look up to him as to a God-sent leader. They had expected too much of him to bear the disappointment oftheir expectations with equanimity; and some of the best among the people ofNajd now speak in bitter terms of what they consider a betrayal of their trust.Ìbn Saud, in sum, was "an eagle who never really took to wing,¨ a king who never rosebeyond "a benevolent tribal chief tain on an immensely enlarged scale.¨Disappointed with Ìbn Saud, Asad commenced a quest f or the ruler, state, or society whichwould embody his ideal Ìslam. He brief ly pinned his hopes on the Sanusi movement inLike so many other Muslims, I had for years pinned my hopes on Ibn Saud as thepotential leader of an Islamic revival; and now that these hopes had proved futile,I could see in the entire Muslim world only one movement that genuinely strovefor the fulfillment of the ideal of an Islamic society: the Sanusi movement, nowfighting a last-ditch battle for survival.According to Asad, he went on a secret mission to Cyrenaica on behalf of the GrandSanusi, Sayyid Ahmad (1873-1932), then in exile in Saudi Arabia, to transmit plans f orcontinuing the anti-Ìtalian struggle to the remnant of the Sanusi f orces. But the mission, inJanuary 1931, was a f utile one: Ìtalian f orces crushed the last of the Sanusi resistance laterBy this time, Asad had f allen f rom f avor. He gave no explanation in The Road to Mecca f orhis break with Ìbn Saud, except his personal disappointment with the monarch. But otherexplanations also gained circulation. Some claimed that his last marriage proved hisundoing: members of his wif e's f amily were suspected of intrigues against Ìbn Saud. Otherspointed to his Jewish origins as a growing liability af ter 1929, when Arab-Jewish tensions inPalestine exploded in violence. What is certain is that he lef t Saudi Arabia in 1932, with thedeclared aim of traveling through Ìndia, Turkestan, China, and Ìndonesia.Asad began with a "lecture tour¨ to Ìndia. According to British intelligence sources, Asad hadlinked up with an Amritsar activist, one Ìsma'il Ghaznavi, and intended to tour Ìndia "with aview to get into touch with all important workers.¨ Asad arrived in Karachi by ship in June1932, and lef t promptly f or Amritsar. There and in neighboring Lahore, he involved himselfwith the local community of Kashmiri Muslims, and in 1933 he made an appearance inSrinagar, where an intelligence report again had him spreading Bolshevik ideas.For Asad, the real attraction of Kashmir would have resided in its predicament as contestedground, where a British-backed maharaja ruled a discontented Muslim population. Beginningin 1931, Kashmiri Muslims in Punjab organized an extensive "agitation¨ in support of theMuslims in Kashmir. Hundreds of bands of Muslim volunteers crossed illegally f rom Punjabinto Kashmir, and thousands were arrested. By early 1932, the disturbances had subsided,but the Kashmir government remained ever-wary. Just what Asad did in Kashmir isuncertain. But on learning of his presence, the Kashmir government immediately wanted him"externed,¨ although the police had no evidence to substantiate the intelligence report, andthere appeared to be legal obstacles to "externing¨ a European national.With or without such prompting, Asad soon retreated f rom Kashmir to Lahore. There he metthe poet-philosopher Muhammad Ìqbal (1876-1938), himself of Kashmiri descent, whopersuaded Asad to remain in Ìndia and work "to elucidate the intellectual premises of the From this point f orward, Asad would be a Muslim intellectual,thinking, lecturing and writing on Ìslamic culture and law. Ìn March 1934 he published apamphlet entitled Islam at the Crossroads, his f irst venture into Ìslamic thought. This workcan only be described as a diatribe against the materialism of the West÷as Asad put it, acase of "Ìslam versus Western civilization.¨ Here Asad developed themes which wouldbecome widespread later in Ìslamic f undamentalist thought. Asad drew a straight linebetween the Crusades and modern imperialism, and held Western orientalists to blame f ortheir distortions of Ìslam. This text went through repeated printings and editions in Ìndiaand Pakistan. More importantly, however, it appeared in an Arabic translation in Beirut in1946. Under the Arabic title al-Islam 'ala muftariq al-turuq, it was published in numerouseditions through the 1940s and 1950s. This translation had a crucial inf luence upon the earlywritings of the Ìslamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), who drew extensively upon Asadin developing the idea of "Crusaderism.¨Ìn 1936, Asad f ound a new benef actor. The Nizam of Hyderabad had established a journalunder his patronage entitled Islamic Culture, f irst edited by "Mohammed¨ MarmadukePickthall (1875-1936), a British convert to Ìslam. Pickthall, best known f or his Englishtranslation of the Qur'an, died in 1936, at which point Asad assumed the editorship of thejournal. This placed Asad in touch with a wide range of orientalist and Ìndian Muslimscholarship, and he himself began to write scholarly pieces and translate texts.But another obligation began to assert itself ÷an obligation f rom the past. Ìn The Road toMecca, Asad wrote that his relationship with his f ather was resumed in 1935, af ter his f atherhad come to "understand and appreciate the reasons f or my conversion to Ìslam.¨ Althoughthey never met in person again, wrote Asad, they corresponded continuously until 1942.However, Asad did return to Europe in the spring of 1939, with the intention of saving hisendangered f amily. Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, enf orcing the NurembergLaws in May. The lif e of Viennese Jewry became a succession of conf iscations,persecutions, pogroms, and deportations. Ìn October 1938, Asad resigned the editorship ofIslamic Culture, and then lef t Ìndia. Ìn April 1939, his Austrian passport was visaed in Viennaf or entry to Britain and British Ìndia. Af terwards he arrived in London, where he asked thatthis visa be extended: "Ì beg you to give me a prolongation of this visa till the end of thisyear as my parents will come in about 4 to 5 months. Ì have to settle many things f or ("Parents¨ was Asad's shorthand f or his f ather and stepmother; his own motherhad died in 1919.) This evidence hints that Asad made an eleventh-hour attempt at rescuinghis Jewish f amily bef ore returning to Ìndia in the summer of 1939.But whatever the scope of these ef f orts, they ended abruptly with the German invasion ofPoland and the British declaration of war against Germany in September 1939. Asad wasdetained immediately in Ìndia as an enemy national, and he spent the next six years ininternment camps with Germans, Austrians, and Ìtalians who had been collected f rom allover British-ruled Asia. Asad's camp, he wrote, was peopled by "both Nazis and anti-Nazisas well as Fascists and anti-Fascists.¨ During his internment, he established contact withhis uncle in Jerusalem, Aryeh Feigenbaum, who sent him f ood, clothes, and money.was only released in August 1945. By then, the worst had bef allen his f amily in Europe: hisf ather, stepmother, and a sister were deported f rom Vienna in 1942, and they perished inAsad never wrote of his long years of detention. He was the only Muslim in his camp, and itseems he deliberately detached himself f rom his surroundings and the war, by thinking onlyof the "cultural chaos¨ into which Muslims had been plunged. "Ì can still see myself pacingday-in and day-out over the great length of our barrack room,¨ asking himself why Muslimshad f ailed to reach an "unambiguously agreed-upon concept of the Law.¨allow Europe's war to become his war, or the suf f ering of the Jews to become his suf f ering,as he moved ever more resolutely to a consolidation of his Muslim identity.Upon Asad's release, he wholly identif ied with the cause of Pakistan, which he saw notsimply as a ref uge, but as the f ramework f or an ideal Ìslamic polity. Ìn 1947, Asad becamedirector of the Department of Ìslamic Reconstruction in the new state, and he gave himselfover to f ormulating proposals f or its constitution. Asad's purpose in these proposals isclear: it is to establish an Ìslamic state as a liberal, multiparty parliamentary democracy. Ìnthe 1930s and 1940s, the idea of the Ìslamic state, in the hands of many ideologues, hadbeen presented as antithetical to democracy, and similar to the totalitarian states ofcentral Europe. Asad's work challenged that trend, f inding evidence in the Ìslamic sourcesf or elections, parliamentary legislation, and political parties.But his own proposals, published in March 1948 as Islamic Constitution-Making, were neverimplemented. "Only very f ew, if any, of my suggestions have been utilized in the (nowabolished) Constitution of the Ìslamic Republic of Pakistan; perhaps only in the Preamble,adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949, can an echo of those suggestions be Pakistan, he later said, did not work out as Ìqbal and he had hoped it would. Thenew state had been "an historical necessity,¨ and without it, "Muslims would have beensubmerged in the much more developed and intellectually and economically stronger Hindusociety.¨ But "unf ortunately it did not quite develop in the way we wanted it to. Ìqbal's visionof Pakistan was quite dif f erent to that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah [1876-1948, f irst governor-general of Pakistan], who did not in the beginning want a separation.¨state f or Muslims, but its secular f ounders put aside its mission as an Ìslamic state. Ìn1949, Asad lef t domestic politics to join Pakistan's f oreign service, eventually rising to theposition of head of the Middle East Division of the f oreign ministry. His transf ormation wasnow complete, down to his Pakistani achkan and black f ur cap. Ìn the beginning of 1952,af ter twenty years of continuous residence in the subcontinent, he came to New York, asPakistan's minister plenipotentiary to the United Nations.So began Asad's road back to the West÷a choice that would bring him f ame and sever hislinks to living Ìslam. He came to New York alone, without his wif e and son, and lived in apenthouse in Manhattan, attended by a servant-driver. He soon f ound a new love, astriking contrast to his Arabian wif e of over twenty years: Pola "Hamida,¨ an Americanwoman of Polish Catholic descent who had converted to Ìslam. Asad's marriage to Muniranow came undone, and he married Pola Hamida bef ore a civil judge in New York inNovember 1952. He would remain with her f or the next f orty years, and this marriage to aWestern convert presaged his evolving pref erence f or an ideal Ìslam, distinct f rom the bornMuslims who practiced it.For some months in New York, Asad also reestablished a tie to his f amily in Ìsrael. At thetime, Aryeh Feigenbaum's daughter, Hemdah (1916-87), was living in New York with herhusband, Harry (Zvi) Zinder (1909-91), press of f icer at Ìsrael's inf ormation of f ice (and laterdirector of the Voice of Ìsrael). Zinder later told an Ìsraeli journalist the story of how Asadwould dine with him in out-of -the-way restaurants, or visit the Zinders' home in Forest Hills.Asad even attended the bar mitvah of the Zinders' son, and the Zinders attended hismarriage to Pola Hamida. Zinder reported the contents of his table talk with Asad back toJerusalem. Asad, he noted, remained an unequivocal enemy of Ìsrael, but it might bepossible to sof ten his animosity, and it would be worth the ef f ort, given Asad's solidstanding in the Pakistani f oreign ministry. According to Zinder, the Mossad responded byproposing that he try to recruit Asad f or pay, a proposal Zinder rejected "with both hands.¨"Ì knew he would ref use any payment,¨ said Zinder years later, "that he would be enragedby the idea, and that he would sever all contact with me.¨ Ìn time, the contact weakenedanyway; according to Zinder, Pola Hamida disapproved of Asad maintaining close ties withhis f amily in particular, and Jews in general. Still, according to Zinder, Asad continued f orsome years to correspond with Hemdah on f amily matters.There could be no doubt f rom Asad's writing, and f rom Zinder's testimony, that Asadremained a f ervent anti-Zionist. Yet f or many years, Asad lef t the systematic indictment ofthe modern-day state of Ìsrael to others. Ìn 1947 he was f ully preoccupied with the partitionof Ìndia, and of f ered no published comment on the partition of Palestine and the creationof Ìsrael. Ìn the years that f ollowed the 1967 war, he spoke out more f requently, especiallyon Jerusalem. "We cannot ever reconcile ourselves to the view, so complacently acceptedin the West, that Jerusalem is to be the capital of the State of Ìsrael,¨ he wrote. "Ìn aconceivably f ree Palestine÷a state in which Jews, Christians and Muslims could live sideby side in f ull political and cultural equality÷the Muslim community should be specif icallyentrusted with the custody of Jerusalem as a city open to all three communities.¨given the f ever of anti-Ìsrael passion in the Arab world af ter 1967, Asad's criticism couldonly be described as restrained. As Pakistan was f ar removed f rom the conf lict, morewould not have been expected of him.But Asad f ailed to meet other Pakistani expectations. One of Asad's colleagues on thePakistani delegation made a scandal of his romance with Pola Hamida, and Pakistan'sprime minister, Khwaja Nizamuddin, reportedly reacted strongly against the marriage. At theend of 1952, Asad of f ered his resignation, in the expectation his position would beconf irmed. To his surprise, his resignation was accepted. Ìt was not a clean break, andwhen Nizamuddin f ell f rom power in the spring of 1953, the prospect of Asad's return toPakistani service seemed real. But no of f er materialized, and Asad was now pressed f orf unds. Acting upon the advice of an American f riend, he proposed to write his story f or theNew York publisher Simon and Schuster, which of f ered him a contract and an advance.Asad thus began work on the book that would make him f amous. The Road to Mecca, writtenin New York, appeared in 1954, and won widespread praise f or its combination of spiritualsearching and desert adventure. As a testimony of conversion to Ìslam, The Road to Meccais still unsurpassed, and its continued re-publication in Western languages attests to itspower, f or both general readers and sympathizers of Ìslam. An example of its inf luencemay be f ound in the testimony of a twenty-one-year-old American Jewish woman namedMargaret Marcus (b. 1934). Asad's book f ound a place on the shelves of the public library inMamaroneck, New York, near her home. Her parents would not let her take out the book, soshe read it in the library over and over: "What he could do, Ì thought Ì could also do, onlyhow much harder f or a single woman than f or a man! But Ì vowed to Allah that at the f irstopportunity, Ì would f ollow his example.¨ The young woman later converted to Ìslam, tookthe name Maryam Jameelah, and moved to Pakistan, where she became one of the best-known ideologues of Ìslamic f undamentalism, f amous f or her methodical indictments of theOne Western convert, however, took a dim view of Asad's book: H. St. John ("Abdullah¨)Philby (1885-1960). Philby, too, had converted to Ìslam in 1930, assuming Asad's place asthe convert in the court of Ìbn Saud. He, too, had dabbled in exploration and politics, andhe had strong views on Asad's attempts at both. Ìn his review of The Road to Mecca, Philbyaccused "Herr Weiss¨ of "vagueness and unusual naiveté.¨ According to Philby, Asad was nomore than a journalist in search of a story, a man without any f lair f or geographical work orHis bazar scenes, religious festivals, desert sunsets, et hoc genus omne of localcolor suggest a patchwork of newspaper articles or cuttings strung together for anew[s] story, in which the leit-motiv is provided by his own gropings toward anÌn his most damaging insinuation, Philby wrote that there was "no independentcontemporary evidence¨ that Asad had undertaken "secret missions¨ f or Ìbn Saud or theÌf the book's value as a record of politics and exploration was doubtf ul, then at least itserved as a f aithf ul personal memoir. Or did it? On many points, noted Judd Teller (1912-72) in a review in Commentary, Asad had nothing to say on matters that demanded a say inthe personal memoir of any European Jew. One of these was Asad's experience ofEurope's anti-Semitism, nowhere mentioned by the author.Yet he was born in Galicia, where the Jews were caught up as scapegoats in thepower struggles of the anti-Semitic Ukrainians and Poles and the dubiouslytolerant Austrian government. He was brought up in Vienna, when it was thecapital of European anti-Semitism. He left Berlin for his first visit to Palestine inthe year when racist-nationalists assassinated Walter Rathenau. Did all this leaveBoth Philby and Teller complained of the absence of another crucial point: Asad gave noreason f or his decision to leave Arabia. (Teller speculated that it stemmed f rom heightenedJewish-Arab tensions in Palestine.) These criticisms suggested what is now obvious: TheRoad to Mecca cannot be read as a document of historical truth about Arabia, Ìbn Saud, oreven the author's lif e. Ìt is an impressionistic self -portrait that suggests more than it tells.The f ace of its subject is in half -shadow.But the omissions and elisions of the book did not detract f rom its commercial success. TheRoad to Mecca was translated f rom English into the major languages of Europe, and theroyalties must have represented a windf all. The book also created demand f or Asad'sservices as a lecturer, and his reputation in the West reached its pinnacle.But in Muslim lands, especially among Muslim activists, his choices raised troublingquestions. The Pakistani ideologue Maulana Maududi (1903-79), in a letter written in 1961,I have great respect for [Asad's] exposition of Islamic ideas and especially hiscriticism of Western culture and its materialistic philosophies. I am sorry to say,however, that although in the early days of his conversion, he was a staunch,practicing Muslim, gradually he drifted close to the ways of the so-called"progressive" Muslim just like the "reformed" Jews. Recently his divorce from hisArab wife and marriage to a modern American girl hastened this process ofdeviation more definitely..Once a man begins to live the life of a true Muslim, allhis capabilities lose their "market value." It is the same sad story with MuhammadAsad, who had always been accustomed to a high and modern standard of livingand after embracing Islam, had to face the severest financial difficulties. As aresult, he was forced to make one compromise after another.Asad, the critic of Western materialism, stood accused of succumbing to it; Asad, who f irstsought answers in Ìslam, now was suspected of questioning it. The disappointment Asadhad come to f eel f or the actual practitioners of Ìslam had become mutual.Asad relocated to Geneva with Pola Hamida. There he began to contemplate a new project,ambitious in scope and signif icance: a new English translation of the Qur'an. Asad had notbeen satisf ied with Marmaduke Pickthall's widely used translation, since Pickthall'sknowledge of Arabic had been "limited.¨ As Asad later wrote:Familiarity with the bedouin speech of Central and Eastern Arabia÷in addition, ofcourse, to academic knowledge of classical Arabic÷is the only way for a non-Arab of our time to achieve an intimate understanding of the diction of the Qur'an.And because none of the scholars who have previously translated the Qur'an intoEuropean languages has ever fulfilled this prerequisite, their translations haveremained but distant, and faulty, echoes of its meaning and spirit.Asad began work on the translation in 1960. Such a large-scale project required the supportof a patron, and he eventually appeared in the f orm of Saudi Arabia's King Faysal (r. 1964-75). Asad had known Faysal since 1927. He reestablished a link in 1951, when he paid hisf irst visit to Saudi Arabia in eighteen years, and he nurtured the tie as Faysal began hisascent to the throne. Asad became one of Faysal's most f ervent enthusiasts, seeing in hima vast improvement over Ìbn Saud. "Whenever Ì ref lect on the manner in which King Faysalrules over his realm,¨ wrote Asad, "it appears to me as the f ulf ilment of every promise whichthe lif e of his f ather had held out and lef t open.¨ Still, Faysal was a dutif ul son, and thispraise could not cancel out Asad's stinging indictment of Ìbn Saud, made in The Road toMecca. As it happened, however, this obstacle was not insurmountable: in later editions ofthe book, Asad completely excised his enumeration of Ìbn Saud's f ailings, replacing themwith a f ew pages of banal ruminations on the desert.Faysal renewed Asad's Saudi patronage. Ìn 1963, Fayal had the Muslim World League inMecca subscribe in advance to Asad's planned translation, which he began to compile inSwitzerland. Asad published a limited edition of the f irst nine surahs in 1964. At about thattime, he moved to Tangier, settling in a comf ortable villa surrounded by cypress trees andbougainvillaea, where he worked to complete the translation. Ìn 1980, he published the f ulltranslation and commentary in Gibraltar, under the title The Message of the Qur'an.Asad's translation opened with this dedication: "For people who think.¨ The spirit of thetranslation is resolutely modernist, and Asad expressed his prof ound debt to the ref ormistcommentator Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905). As another convert later wrote: "Ìn itsintellectual engagement with the text and in the intimate, subtle and prof oundunderstanding of the pure classical Arabic of the Koran, Asad's interpretation is of a powerand intelligence without rival in English.¨ There are many English-speaking Muslims whowill attest to the appeal of this translation, and who rely upon it daily.But the translation created a controversy among some Muslim clerics who disputed Asad'smodernist and allegorical interpretations of some verses. Critics accused him of denyingthe existence of angels, the permissibility of concubinage, and the bodily ascent of Jesus Ìn private, there were those who insinuated that the translation reintroducedisra'iliyyat, "Jewish distortions¨ akin to those allegedly introduced by the f irst Jewishconverts to Ìslam. Ìn 1974, even bef ore the translation was published in f ull, it was banned Asad was lef t to f inish the work on his own, supported f inancially by hisf riends. Fortunately, Asad had many, including Shaykh Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani (b. 1930), theSaudi minister of oil and natural resources and "my brother-in-spirit,¨ to whom Asad devoteda collection of his essays a f ew years later.The rejection of his translation was only one sign of the growing climate of intolerance thatf urther disillusioned Asad. "Khomeini is worse than the Shah,¨ he told journalists af ter theÌranian revolution. "He has nothing in common with Ìslam.¨ According to another journalist,Asad took a dim view of f undamentalist chaos, the intolerance of extremists, and the patterabout "Ìslamic science¨ and "Ìslamic education.¨ The Muslims, he opined, had been "lowdown f or so many centuries that now they think they have to assert themselves by sayingwe are dif f erent. They are human beings. They are not dif f erent.¨ Ìn particular, hechampioned the rights of women and opposed the f undamentalist campaign f or the hijab."Many people think that if you put a veil over a woman's f ace and cover her, that is the wayto Ìslam. Ìt is not. Ìn the time of the Prophet Muhammad, no hijab existed except f or theProphet's wives and it is a wrong inf erence to say that this holds good f or all MuslimHis own early indictment of the West, Islam at the Crossroads, which f ound such an echoamong f undamentalists, he himself came to regard as a "harsh book.¨ Likewise, the once-powerf ul romance of the Arabs no longer held him in its grip. Ìn 1981, he told a journalistthat "it is possible that if Ì would come into contact with Arabs today f or the f irst time, Ìwould no longer be attracted by them.¨ Asad still remained enamored of Ìslam. Yet thisideal Ìslam was nowhere to be f ound in existing Ìslam, and could just as well be practised inEurope. Ìt is said that Pakistan's president f rom 1978, General Zia ul-Haq (1924-88) tried topersuade Asad to return to Pakistan, but without result. Ìn 1982, Asad lef t Tangier f orSintra, outside of Lisbon. He later moved to Mijas on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain.He remained articulate and lucid in interviews given as late as 1988.he reportedly began work on a sequel to The Road to Mecca, tentatively entitledHomecoming of the Heart. The title is said to have alluded to his contemplated return toSaudi Arabia at the invitation of Prince Salman (b. 1936), governor of Riyadh and one of ÌbnSaud's sons. Ìt is not clear whether such a return was a realistic prospect, or whether thetitle hinted at a more spiritual homecoming. For Asad had neither completed this work norreturned to Arabia when he died on 20 February 1992, at the age of 91. He was buried in thesmall Muslim cemetery in Granada.Few in the Muslim world took notice of Asad's passing. He had argued f or a rational Ìslam;he had sought to reconcile Ìslamic teachings and democracy; he had tried to make theQur'an speak to modern minds. His project, in f act, encapsulated ideals that drove theref orm of Judaism, which by his parents' generation had largely served to ease Jews out oftheir f aith altogether. Ìslam provided the last chance to achieve that ideal÷the ref orm of areligion of law so that it could be made to live in a modern age, as a liberal f orce ofUnlike so many other Western converts to Ìslam, Asad chose also to live in Muslimsocieties, and worked to give Ìslam direction. But by advocating this ref orm, Asad remaineda f oreign body in contemporary Ìslam, a transplant rejected time and again by his hosts.Saudi Arabia declined to keep him as a journalist; Pakistan, which he served as an of f icialand diplomat, also broke with him; and the self -appointed guardians of Muslim orthodoxyshunned him as a Qur'an translator and commentator. Paradoxically, Asad won genuineacclaim in the West. There he f ound minds open to his ideas, and opportunities to publishand lecture. And there he ultimately f ound ref uge f rom the late twentieth-century reality ofAsad's road to Mecca was the shorter journey, made headlong in the enthusiasm of youth.His road f rom Mecca was the longer journey, made painstakingly in an awareness of thecontradiction between the promise of Ìslam and its contemporary practice÷and his ownequivocal position in it. For all Asad's f ervor and belief , his Muslim answer never satisf iedhis Jewish question, put most poignantly by Asad to Asad: "Why is it that, even af ter f indingmy place among the people who believe in the things Ì myself have come to believe, Ì have S.C. Chew, review of The Road to Mecca in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 15 Robert Payne, review of The Road to Mecca in New York Times, 15 August 1954. Details on the f amily in Lodewijk Brunt, "Een Jood in Arabie; over het leven vanMuhammad Asad,¨ in Neveh Ya'akov: Jubilee Volume Presented to Dr. Jaap Meijer on theOccasion of his Seventieth Birthday, eds. Lea Dasberg and Jonathan N. Cohen (Assen: Van Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 55.Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. "Feigenbaum, Aryeh¨; Haviv Kena'an, "Prof . A. Feigenbaum÷Hasid ha-dugmah ha-ishit,¨ Ha'aretz, 7 August 1964. The omission is all the more striking inthat, at one point in The Road to Mecca, Asad writes that the eyes of Jerusalem's Arabs"seemed to remain clear and untouched by age÷unless they happened to be af f ected bytrachoma, that evil 'Egyptian' eye disease which is the curse of all countries east of theMediterranean.¨ Road to Mecca, 92. Leopold Weiss, Unromantisches Morgenland; aus dem tagebuch einer reise (Frankf urt:Frankf urter societäts-drukerei, 1924). The book is summarized by Wolf Kaiser, Palästina-Erez Israel: Deutschsprachige Reisebeschreibungen jüdischer Autoren von derJahrhundertwende bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1992), 267-83. Kaiseralso discusses some of the contemporary criticism of reviewers. Asad wrote of his bookthat, "although its anti-Zionist attitude and unusual predilection f or the Arabs causedsomething of a f lutter in the German press, Ì am af raid it did not sell very well.¨ Asad, Road Asad, Road to Mecca, 188. Qur'an, 102 (Surat al-Takathur). The translation is Asad's. Muhammad Asad, Islam at the Crossroads (1934; reprint, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashaf , Asad, Road to Mecca, 311. Arabic report (with translation) by Dr. Abdullah Damluji, no date, included in despatchf rom Political Secretary of High Commissioner f or Ìraq (Baghdad) to Consul (Jiddah), 18December 1928, Public Records Of f ice (London), FO967/22. Damluji had lef t Ìbn Saud'sservice in September 1928 and returned to Ìraq. Ìbid., chap. viii, "Jinns.¨ On the Dawish af f air, see Joseph Kostiner, The Making of SaudiArabia 1916-1936 (New York: Oxf ord University Press, 1993), 117-40. Asad, Road to Mecca., 49. Ìbid., 177-81, f or these assessments of Ìbn Saud. Ìbid., chap. xi, "Jihad.¨ "History sheet of Herr Leopold Weiss Alias Mohmmad Asad Ullah Vyce. An AustrianConvert to Mohammadanism,¨ prepared by the Ìntelligence Bureau of the Government ofÌndia, included in letter f rom E.J.D. Colvin, Political Secretary, His Highness' GovernmentJammu and Kashmir (Jammu) to Lieut.-Col. L.E. Lang, Resident in Kashmir (Sialkot), 30January 1934, Ìndia Of f ice Records, R/1/1/4670. Ìn The Road to Mecca, Asad dates his lastArabian journey to the late summer of 1932, which would place his f inal arrival in Ìndia at a C.Ì.D. report of 20 November 1933, Ìndia Of f ice Records, R/1/1/4670. On the Kashmir "agitation¨ of 1931-32, see David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab andthe Making of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of Calif ornia Press, 1988), 96-99. Lieut-Col. L.E. Lang, Resident in Kashmir (Sialkot) to B. J. Glancy, Political Secretary,Government of Ìndia, Foreign and Political Department (New Delhi), 31 January 1934, ÌndiaOf f ice Records, R/1/1/4670. On the journal, see Peter Clark, Marmaduke Pickhtall: British Muslim (London: Quartet For a sample of his work, see his article "Towards a Resurrection of Thought,¨ IslamicCulture (Hyderabad) 11 (1937): 7-16. Asad, Road to Mecca, 311 n. Ìndia Of f ice Records, L/P&J/7/2678. This includes an extract, f rom Weiss's passport, ofa visa f or the United Kingdom and British Ìndia, granted at Vienna and issued on 24 April1939. The authorization f or the visa came directly f rom the Government of Ìndia in New Weiss, undated note to Ìndia Of f ice in London, received at Ìndia Of f ice on 8 June 1939;Ìndia Of f ice Records, L/P&J/7/2678. Weiss gave his London address as 119, Old Church Muhammad Asad, This Law of Ours and Other Essays (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1987), 1. Yossi Melman, "Goralo ha-Yehudi shel Muhammad Asad,¨ Ha'aretz, 21 April 1989. Asad, This Law of Ours, 1. Muhammad Asad, The Principles of State and Government in Islam (new ed.; Gilbraltar: Daral-Andalus, 1980), xi. This book built upon his Islamic Constitution-Making. Mushtak Parker, "Death of a Muslim Mentor,¨ Middle East, May 1992, 29. Melman, "Goralo ha-Yehudi,¨ quoting a despatch by Harry Zinder. Ìbid., quoting a despatch by Harry Zinder. Asad, This Law of Ours, 169, 173. Harry Zinder (New York) to Abba Eban, 30 April 1953, Ìsrael State Archives, ÌSA/R693/Box Maryam Jameelah, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945-1962) (Lahore:Muhammad Yusuf Khan, 1989), 109.Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, s.v. "Jameelah, Maryam.¨ H. St. John B. Philby, review of The Road to Mecca, in Middle East Journal 9 (winter 1955): Judd Teller, review of The Road to Mecca, in Commentary 18 (September 1954): 280. Maududi (Lahore) to Margaret Marcus [Maryam Jameelah], 25 February 1961, in MaryamJameelah, Correspondence between Maulana Maudoodi and Maryam Jameelah (Delhi:Crescent Publishing, 1969), 15.The Message of the Qur'an, Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (Gilbraltar: Dar al- From the 1973 postscript to the 4th rev. ed. of The Road to Mecca (Gibraltar: Dar al- Cf . 177-81 of the original 1954 ed. with 177-81 of the 4th rev. ed. of 1980. Parker, "Death of a Muslim Mentor,¨ 28-29. Asad dealt with all these accusations in Arabia, The Islamic World Review (October 1981), Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Leiden: Brill, 1990), Asad, This Law of Ours, dedication page. Quoted by Lisbeth Rocher and Fatima Cherqaoui, D'une foi l'autre: Les conversions àl'Islam en Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 64. Mushtak Parker, "Death of a Muslim Mentor.¨ Malise Ruthven, "Muhammad Asad, Ambassador of Ìslam,¨ Arabia: The Islamic WorldReview (September 1981): 60, 62. See the video "A Tribute to Muhammad Asad,¨ f ilmed in 1988 and distributed by ÌslamicPublications Ìnternational of Teaneck, New Jersey. Details on these last years are provided by Mushtak Parker, "Death of a Muslim Mentor.¨The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. Martin Kramer (Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1999), pp. 225-47. (Here for version as published.) Reprinted in Europe’s Gift to Islam: Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss), ed. M. Ikram Chaghatai (Lahore: The Truth Society and Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2006), vol. 1, pp. 239-61.
===
In August 1954, there appeared in America a remarkable book, written by an author named Muhammad Asad and bearing the title The Road to Mecca. The book, a combination of memoir and travelogue, told the story of a convert to Islam who had crossed the spiritual deserts of Europe and the sand deserts of Arabia, on a trek that brought him ultimately to the oasis of Islamic belief. The book immediately won critical acclaim, most notably in the prestige press of New York, where Simon and Schuster had published it. One reviewer, writing in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review, called it an “intensely interesting and moving book.”1 Another reviewer, on the pages of The New York Times, placed the book in the pantheon of Arabian travel literature: “Not since Freya Stark,” he wrote, “has anyone written so happily about Arabia as the Galician now known as Muhammad Asad.”2
Muhammad Asad (1900-92) was a converted Jew, named Leopold Weiss at birth. He was no ordinary convert. Asad not only sought personal fulfillment in his adopted faith. He tried to affect the course of contemporary Islam, as an author, activist, diplomat, and translator of the Qur’an. Muhammad Asad died in February 1992 at the age of ninety-one, so that his career may be said to have paralleled the emergence of every trend in contemporary Islam.
As yet, however, there is no biography of Asad, and considerable obstacles await all who would attempt one. The most formidable of these is that the principal source for Asad’s life remains Asad. No doubt this obstacle might be overcome, and this essay makes use of several additional sources for Asad’s life. But the purpose here is more modest. It is to draw a very general sketch of Asad’s life, and to place some emphasis upon the Jewish dimension of Muhammad Asad. For while Asad obviously distanced himself from Judaism, he adhered to a set of ideals that suffused the Jewish milieu from which he emerged. His failure to impart these ideals to contemporary Islam, and a repetitious pattern of rejection by his Muslim coreligionists, made of him a wandering Muslim, whose road from Mecca traversed an uncomprehending Islam before winding back to the refuge of the West.
The Drift from Judaism
Leopold Weiss was born on 12 July 1900, in the town of Lvov (Lemberg) in eastern Galicia, then a part of the Habsburg Empire (Lvov is today in Ukraine). By the turn of the century, Jews formed a quarter to a third of the population of Lvov, a town inhabited mostly by Poles and Ukrainians. The Jewish community had grown and prospered over the previous century, expanding from commerce into industry and banking. Weiss’s mother, Malka, was the daughter of a wealthy local banker, Menahem Mendel Feigenbaum. The family lived comfortably, and, wrote Weiss, lived for the children.3
From Weiss’s own account, his roots in Judaism were deeper on his father’s side. His paternal grandfather, Benjamin Weiss, had been one of a succession of Orthodox rabbis in Czernovitz in Bukovina. Weiss remembered his grandfather as a white-bearded man who loved chess, mathematics and astronomy, but who still held rabbinic learning in the highest regard, and so wished his son to enter the rabbinate. Weiss’s father, Akiva, did study Talmud by day, but by night he secretly learned the curriculum of the humanistic gymnasium. Akiva Weiss eventually announced his open break from rabbinics, a rebellion that would presage his son’s own very different break. But Akiva did not realize his dream of studying physics, because circumstances compelled him to take up the more practical profession of a barrister. He practiced first in Lvov, then in Vienna, where the Weiss family settled before the First World War.
Weiss testifies that his parents had little religious faith. For them, Judaism had become, in his words, “the wooden ritual of those who clung by habit—and only by habit—to their religious heritage.” He later came to suspect that his father regarded all religion as outmoded superstition. But in deference to family tradition and to his grandfathers, young Leopold—”Poldi” to his family—was made to spend long hours with a tutor, studying the Hebrew Bible, Targum, Talmud, Mishna, and Gemarra. “By the age of thirteen,” he attested, “I not only could read Hebrew with great fluency but also spoke it freely.” He studied Targum “just as if I had been destined for a rabbinical career,” and he could “discuss with a good deal of self-assurance the differences between the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds.”4
Nonetheless, Weiss developed what he called “a supercilious feeling” toward the premises of Judaism. While he did not disagree with its moral precepts, it seemed to him that the God of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud “was unduly concerned with the ritual by means of which His worshippers were supposed to worship Him.” Moreover, this God seemed “strangely preoccupied with the destinies of one particular nation, the Hebrews.” Far from being the creator and sustainer of mankind, the God of the Hebrews appeared to be a tribal deity, “adjusting all creation to the requirements of a ‘chosen people.'” Weiss’s studies thus led him away from Judaism, although he later allowed that “they helped me understand the fundamental purpose of religion as such, whatever its form.”5
But this early disillusionment with Judaism did not lead to the pursuit of spiritual alternatives. In 1918, Weiss entered the University of Vienna. Days were given to the study of art history; evenings were spent in cafés, listening to the disputations of Vienna’s psychoanalysts. (“The stimulus of Freud’s ideas was as intoxicating to me as potent wine.”)6 Nights were given to passions. (“I rather gloried, like so many others of my generation, in what was considered a ‘rebellion against the hollow conventions.'”)7 But as his studies progressed, the prospect of a life in academe lost appeal. In 1920, Weiss defied his father’s wishes and left Vienna for Berlin to seek a career in journalism. There he joined the littérateurs at the Café des Westens, sold a few film scripts, and landed a job with a news agency.
Eastern Exposure
In the midst of this fairly unremarkable climb, Leopold Weiss took an unexpected detour. Early in 1922, a maternal uncle, Dorian Feigenbaum, invited Weiss to visit Jerusalem. Dorian, a psychoanalyst and pupil of Freud, had initiated Weiss to psychoanalysis a few years earlier in Vienna. Now he headed a mental institution in Jerusalem. Weiss accepted the invitation, arriving in Egypt by ship and then in Palestine by train. In Jerusalem, he lived in Dorian’s house, situated inside the old city a few steps from the Jaffa Gate. It was from this base that Leopold Weiss would first explore the realities of Islam. But his exploration would be prefaced by another discovery, of the immoralities of Zionism.
This stand was not a family inheritance. Although Dorian did not consider himself a Zionist, Weiss had another uncle in Jerusalem who was very much an ardent Zionist. Aryeh Feigenbaum (1885-1981), an ophthalmologist, had immigrated to Palestine in 1913, and became a leading authority on trachoma whose Jerusalem clinics were frequented by thousands of Arabs and Jews. In 1920, he founded the first Hebrew medical journal; from 1922, he headed the ophthalmologic department at Hadassah Hospital.8 Weiss later omitted all mention of his Zionist uncle from The Road to Mecca—one of many suggestive omissions, hinting that the distancing from family and Zionism was linked.
But Weiss always presented his anti-Zionism as a simple moral imperative. “I conceived from the outset a strong objection to Zionism,” Weiss would later affirm. “I considered it immoral that immigrants, assisted by a foreign Great Power, should come from abroad with the avowed intention of attaining to majority in the country and thus to dispossess the people whose country it had been since time immemorial.”9 This moral position was bolstered by a flash of insight Weiss experienced near the Jaffa Gate while observing a bedouin Arab, “silhouetted against the silver-grey sky like a figure from an old legend.” Perhaps, he fantasized, this was “one of that handful of young warriors who had accompanied young David on his flight from the dark jealousy of Saul, his king?” Then, he says, “I knew, with that clarity which sometimes bursts within us like lightening and lights up the world for the length of a heartbeat, that David and David’s time, like Abraham and Abraham’s time, were closer to their Arabian roots—and so to the beduin of to-day—than to the Jew of today, who claims to be their descendant.”10
In Jerusalem, Weiss began to confront Zionist leaders with the Arab question at every turn. He raised it both with Menahem Ussishkin (1863-1941) and Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), and soon gained a reputation as a sympathizer of the Arab cause. Weiss also credited a new friend with assisting him greatly in Jerusalem: the Dutch poet and journalist Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924). By this time, De Haan’s strange career had already taken its many turns: he had gone from socialist agitator to religious mystic, from ardent Zionist to fervent anti-Zionist. The Haganah later assassinated De Haan in 1924. De Haan fed Weiss’s rejection of Zionism with grist, and also helped Weiss find journalistic work. And it was through De Haan that Weiss met the Emir Abdallah (1882-1951) in the summer of 1923—his first in a lifetime of meetings with Arab heads of state.
In Palestine, Weiss became a stringer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he wrote against Zionism and for the cause of Muslim and Arab nationalism, with a strong anti-British bias. He published a small book on the subject in 1924,11 and this so inspired the confidence of the Frankfurter Zeitung that it commissioned him to travel more widely still, to collect information for a full-scale book. Weiss made the trip, which lasted two years. At its outset, he found a new source of inspiration, during a stay in Cairo: Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi (1881-1945), a brilliant reformist theologian who later became rector of al-Azhar.12 This was Weiss’s first contact with Islamic reformism, and it left a profound impression upon him. Weiss concluded that the abysmal state of the Muslims could not be attributed to Islam, as its Western critics claimed, but to a misreading of Islam. When properly interpreted, in a modern light, Islam could lead Muslims forward, while offering spiritual sustenance that Judaism and Christianity had ceased to provide. Weiss spent the better part of the next two years traveling through Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, growing ever more fascinated by Islam in its myriad forms.
The Conversion
Upon concluding his travels, Weiss returned to Frankfurt to write his book. There he also married Elsa, a widow, “probably the finest representative of the pure ‘Nordic’ type I have ever encountered,” a woman fifteen years his senior, whom he had met before his last travels.13 He was now settled into a comfortable routine. Yet he made no progress on his book: he was preoccupied and distracted, unable to put pen to paper in a summation of his travels. A quarrel with the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung over his writer’s block culminated in his resignation, and he moved to Berlin, where he took up Islamic studies and wrote as a stringer for lesser newspapers.
It was there, in September 1926, that Weiss experienced his second epiphany. He had had a flash of insight near the Jaffa Gate: the Arabs were the heirs of the biblical Hebrews, not the Jews. Now, on the Berlin subway, he had another flash. Watching the people on this train, in their finery and prosperity, he noticed that none smiled. Although positioned at the pinnacle of Western material achievement, they were unhappy. Returning to his flat, he cast a glance at a copy of the Qur’an he had been reading, and his eye settled upon the verse that reads: “You are obsessed by greed for more and more / Until you go down to your graves.” And then later, in the same verse: “Nay, if you but knew it with the knowledge of certainty, / You would indeed see the hell you are in.”14 All doubt that the Qur’an was a God-inspired book vanished, wrote Weiss. He went to the leader of the Berlin Islamic Society, declared his adherence to Islam, and took the name Muhammad Asad.
Why the conversion? In 1934, Asad wrote that he had no satisfactory answer. He could not say which aspect of Islam appealed to him more than another, except that Islam seemed to him “harmoniously conceived… nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking, with the result of an absolute balance and solid composure.” But he still found it difficult to analyze his motives. “After all, it was a matter of love; and love is composed of many things: of our desires and our loneliness, of our high aims and our shortcomings, of our strength and our weakness.”15 In the Feigenbaum family, it was more commonly thought that Asad’s conversion stemmed from a hatred of his father, generalized to a contempt for the faith and people of his birth. Asad wrote to his father informing him of his conversion, but got no answer.
Some months later my sister wrote, telling me that he considered me dead…Thereupon I sent him another letter, assuring him that my acceptance of Islam did not change anything in my attitude toward him or my love for him; that, on the contrary, Islam enjoined upon me to love and honour my parents above all other people… But this letter also remained unanswered.16
Asad’s wife Elsa converted to Islam a few weeks later, and in January 1927 they left for Mecca, accompanied by Elsa’s son from her previous marriage. On arrival, Weiss made his first pilgrimage; a moving passage at the end of The Road to Mecca describes his circumambulation of Ka’ba. Tragically, Elsa died nine days later, of a tropical disease, and her parents reclaimed her son a year later.
Asad of Arabia
So began Asad’s Saudi period, which would form him as a Muslim. His six years in Saudi Arabia are recounted in The Road to Mecca in selective detail. Asad portrayed himself as a member of the inner circle of King Ibn Saud (1880-1953), dividing his time between religious study in Medina and palace politics in Riyadh. This intimacy with Ibn Saud can be confirmed in broad lines by an independent source. In late 1928, an Iraqi named Abdallah Damluji, who had been an adviser to Ibn Saud, submitted a report to the British on “Bolshevik and Soviet penetration” of the Hijaz. It represents perhaps the most succinct confirmation of the role played by Asad in Saudi Arabia:
Before concluding, I must bring attention to the person known as Asadullah von Weiss, formerly an Austrian Jew, now a Muslim, who resides presently near the holy shrine in Mecca. This Austrian Leopold von Weiss came to the Hijaz two years ago, claiming he had become a Muslim out of love for this religion and in pure belief in it. I do not know why, but his words were accepted without opposition, and he entered Mecca without impediment. He did so at a time when no one like him was allowed to do the same, the Hijaz government having recently passing a law providing that those like him must wait two years under surveillance, so that the government can be certain of their Islam before their entry into Mecca. Since that time, Leopold von Weiss has remained in Mecca, wandering the country and mixing with people of every class and with government persons. He then traveled to Medina, and stayed there and in its environs for several months. Then he was able—I have no idea how—to travel to Riyadh with King Ibn Saud last year, and he stayed in Riyadh for five months, seeing and hearing all that happened, mingling with the people and speaking with persons of the government. He does not seem to me to be a learned or professional man. His apparent purpose is to obtain news from the King, and especially from Shaykh Yusuf Yasin, secretary to the King [and editor of the official newspaper Umm al-Qura]. Asadullah uses this news to produce articles for some German and Austrian newspapers, in reply to the distasteful things written by some European newspapers on the Hijazi-Najdi court. This is the occupation of the Austrian Jew Leopold von Weiss, now Haj Asadullah the Muslim. What is the real mission which makes him endure the greatest discomforts and the worst conditions of life? On what basis rests the close intimacy between him and Shaykh Yusuf Yasin? Is there some connection between von Weiss and the Bolshevik consulate in Jidda? These are mysteries about which it is difficult to know the truth.17
For British intelligence of the time, Bolshevism was an obsession, and Damluji’s insinuation can be discounted. But from this account, it is clear that Asad did have exceptional access to the court of Ibn Saud. It is also clear that his status was not that of an adviser, but of a privileged observer, admitted to the court as part of the earliest Saudi efforts at public relations. Ibn Saud kept Asad close to him because this useful convert wrote flattering articles about him for various newspapers in continental Europe. (These newspapers, Asad wrote, “provide me with my livelihood.”)18
According to Asad, he did finally become a secret agent of sorts: Ibn Saud employed him on a clandestine mission to Kuwait in 1929, to trace the funds and guns that were flowing to Faysal al-Dawish, a rebel against Ibn Saud’s rule. Asad determined that Britain was behind the rebellion, and wrote so for the foreign papers, much to Ibn Saud’s satisfaction.19 Asad also began to settle down. He married twice in Saudi Arabia: first in 1928 to a woman from the Mutayr tribe, and in 1930, following a divorce, to Munira, from a branch of the Shammar. They established a household in Medina, and she bore him a son, Talal. Arabia was his home, so he worked to persuade himself: the Arabian sky was “my sky,” the same sky that “vaulted over the long trek of my ancestors, those wandering herdsmen-warriors”—”that small beduin tribe of Hebrews.”20
Arabia’s sky enchanted Asad—but Arabia’s ruler did not. Asad had shared the hope that Ibn Saud would “bring about a revival of the Islamic idea in its fullest sense.” But as Ibn Saud consolidated his power, lamented Asad, “it became evident that Ibn Saud was no more than a king—a king aiming no higher than so many other autocratic Eastern rulers before him.” Asad’s indictment grew long, and he later made it public in The Road to Mecca. True, Ibn Saud had established order, but he did so “by harsh laws and punitive measures and not by inculcating in his people a sense of civic responsibility.” He had “done nothing to build up an equitable, progressive society.” “He indulges and allows those around him to indulge in the most extravagant and senseless luxuries.” He had “neglected the education even of his own sons and thus left them poorly equipped for the tasks that lie before them.” And he was incapable of self-examination, while the “innumerable hangers-on who live off his bounty certainly do nothing to counteract this unfortunate tendency.” Asad’s final verdict was that Ibn Saud’s life constituted a “tragic waste”:
Belying the tremendous promise of his younger years, when he appeared to be a dreamer of stirring dreams, he has broken—perhaps without realizing it himself—the spirit of a high-strung nation that had been wont to look up to him as to a God-sent leader. They had expected too much of him to bear the disappointment of their expectations with equanimity; and some of the best among the people of Najd now speak in bitter terms of what they consider a betrayal of their trust.
Ibn Saud, in sum, was “an eagle who never really took to wing,” a king who never rose beyond “a benevolent tribal chieftain on an immensely enlarged scale.”21
Disappointed with Ibn Saud, Asad commenced a quest for the ruler, state, or society which would embody his ideal Islam. He briefly pinned his hopes on the Sanusi movement in Cyrenaica:
Like so many other Muslims, I had for years pinned my hopes on Ibn Saud as the potential leader of an Islamic revival; and now that these hopes had proved futile, I could see in the entire Muslim world only one movement that genuinely strove for the fulfillment of the ideal of an Islamic society: the Sanusi movement, now fighting a last-ditch battle for survival.22
According to Asad, he went on a secret mission to Cyrenaica on behalf of the Grand Sanusi, Sayyid Ahmad (1873-1932), then in exile in Saudi Arabia, to transmit plans for continuing the anti-Italian struggle to the remnant of the Sanusi forces. But the mission, in January 1931, was a futile one: Italian forces crushed the last of the Sanusi resistance later that year.23
By this time, Asad had fallen from favor. He gave no explanation in The Road to Mecca for his break with Ibn Saud, except his personal disappointment with the monarch. But other explanations also gained circulation. Some claimed that his last marriage proved his undoing: members of his wife’s family were suspected of intrigues against Ibn Saud. Others pointed to his Jewish origins as a growing liability after 1929, when Arab-Jewish tensions in Palestine exploded in violence. What is certain is that he left Saudi Arabia in 1932, with the declared aim of traveling through India, Turkestan, China, and Indonesia.
Passage to India
Asad began with a “lecture tour” to India. According to British intelligence sources, Asad had linked up with an Amritsar activist, one Isma’il Ghaznavi, and intended to tour India “with a view to get into touch with all important workers.” Asad arrived in Karachi by ship in June 1932, and left promptly for Amritsar.24 There and in neighboring Lahore, he involved himself with the local community of Kashmiri Muslims, and in 1933 he made an appearance in Srinagar, where an intelligence report again had him spreading Bolshevik ideas.25
For Asad, the real attraction of Kashmir would have resided in its predicament as contested ground, where a British-backed maharaja ruled a discontented Muslim population. Beginning in 1931, Kashmiri Muslims in Punjab organized an extensive “agitation” in support of the Muslims in Kashmir. Hundreds of bands of Muslim volunteers crossed illegally from Punjab into Kashmir, and thousands were arrested. By early 1932, the disturbances had subsided, but the Kashmir government remained ever-wary.26 Just what Asad did in Kashmir is uncertain. But on learning of his presence, the Kashmir government immediately wanted him “externed,” although the police had no evidence to substantiate the intelligence report, and there appeared to be legal obstacles to “externing” a European national.27
With or without such prompting, Asad soon retreated from Kashmir to Lahore. There he met the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), himself of Kashmiri descent, who persuaded Asad to remain in India and work “to elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic state.”28 From this point forward, Asad would be a Muslim intellectual, thinking, lecturing and writing on Islamic culture and law. In March 1934 he published a pamphlet entitled Islam at the Crossroads, his first venture into Islamic thought. This work can only be described as a diatribe against the materialism of the West—as Asad put it, a case of “Islam versus Western civilization.” Here Asad developed themes which would become widespread later in Islamic fundamentalist thought. Asad drew a straight line between the Crusades and modern imperialism, and held Western orientalists to blame for their distortions of Islam. This text went through repeated printings and editions in India and Pakistan. More importantly, however, it appeared in an Arabic translation in Beirut in 1946. Under the Arabic title al-Islam ‘ala muftariq al-turuq, it was published in numerous editions through the 1940s and 1950s. This translation had a crucial influence upon the early writings of the Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), who drew extensively upon Asad in developing the idea of “Crusaderism.”
In 1936, Asad found a new benefactor. The Nizam of Hyderabad had established a journal under his patronage entitled Islamic Culture, first edited by “Mohammed” Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936), a British convert to Islam.29 Pickthall, best known for his English translation of the Qur’an, died in 1936, at which point Asad assumed the editorship of the journal. This placed Asad in touch with a wide range of orientalist and Indian Muslim scholarship, and he himself began to write scholarly pieces and translate texts.30
Intrusion of War
But another obligation began to assert itself—an obligation from the past. In The Road to Mecca, Asad wrote that his relationship with his father was resumed in 1935, after his father had come to “understand and appreciate the reasons for my conversion to Islam.” Although they never met in person again, wrote Asad, they corresponded continuously until 1942.31 However, Asad did return to Europe in the spring of 1939, with the intention of saving his endangered family. Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, enforcing the Nuremberg Laws in May. The life of Viennese Jewry became a succession of confiscations, persecutions, pogroms, and deportations. In October 1938, Asad resigned the editorship of Islamic Culture, and then left India. In April 1939, his Austrian passport was visaed in Vienna for entry to Britain and British India.32 Afterwards he arrived in London, where he asked that this visa be extended: “I beg you to give me a prolongation of this visa till the end of this year as my parents will come in about 4 to 5 months. I have to settle many things for them.”33 (“Parents” was Asad’s shorthand for his father and stepmother; his own mother had died in 1919.) This evidence hints that Asad made an eleventh-hour attempt at rescuing his Jewish family before returning to India in the summer of 1939.
But whatever the scope of these efforts, they ended abruptly with the German invasion of Poland and the British declaration of war against Germany in September 1939. Asad was detained immediately in India as an enemy national, and he spent the next six years in internment camps with Germans, Austrians, and Italians who had been collected from all over British-ruled Asia. Asad’s camp, he wrote, was peopled by “both Nazis and anti-Nazis as well as Fascists and anti-Fascists.”34 During his internment, he established contact with his uncle in Jerusalem, Aryeh Feigenbaum, who sent him food, clothes, and money.35 Asad was only released in August 1945. By then, the worst had befallen his family in Europe: his father, stepmother, and a sister were deported from Vienna in 1942, and they perished in the camps.
Asad never wrote of his long years of detention. He was the only Muslim in his camp, and it seems he deliberately detached himself from his surroundings and the war, by thinking only of the “cultural chaos” into which Muslims had been plunged. “I can still see myself pacing day-in and day-out over the great length of our barrack room,” asking himself why Muslims had failed to reach an “unambiguously agreed-upon concept of the Law.”36 He would not allow Europe’s war to become his war, or the suffering of the Jews to become his suffering, as he moved ever more resolutely to a consolidation of his Muslim identity.
Upon Asad’s release, he wholly identified with the cause of Pakistan, which he saw not simply as a refuge, but as the framework for an ideal Islamic polity. In 1947, Asad became director of the Department of Islamic Reconstruction in the new state, and he gave himself over to formulating proposals for its constitution. Asad’s purpose in these proposals is clear: it is to establish an Islamic state as a liberal, multiparty parliamentary democracy. In the 1930s and 1940s, the idea of the Islamic state, in the hands of many ideologues, had been presented as antithetical to democracy, and similar to the totalitarian states of central Europe. Asad’s work challenged that trend, finding evidence in the Islamic sources for elections, parliamentary legislation, and political parties.
But his own proposals, published in March 1948 as Islamic Constitution-Making, were never implemented. “Only very few, if any, of my suggestions have been utilized in the (now abolished) Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan; perhaps only in the Preamble, adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949, can an echo of those suggestions be found.”37 Pakistan, he later said, did not work out as Iqbal and he had hoped it would. The new state had been “an historical necessity,” and without it, “Muslims would have been submerged in the much more developed and intellectually and economically stronger Hindu society.” But “unfortunately it did not quite develop in the way we wanted it to. Iqbal’s vision of Pakistan was quite different to that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah [1876-1948, first governor-general of Pakistan], who did not in the beginning want a separation.”38 Pakistan became a state for Muslims, but its secular founders put aside its mission as an Islamic state. In 1949, Asad left domestic politics to join Pakistan’s foreign service, eventually rising to the position of head of the Middle East Division of the foreign ministry. His transformation was now complete, down to his Pakistani achkan and black fur cap. In the beginning of 1952, after twenty years of continuous residence in the subcontinent, he came to New York, as Pakistan’s minister plenipotentiary to the United Nations.
The West Again
So began Asad’s road back to the West—a choice that would bring him fame and sever his links to living Islam. He came to New York alone, without his wife and son, and lived in a penthouse in Manhattan, attended by a servant-driver.39 He soon found a new love, a striking contrast to his Arabian wife of over twenty years: Pola “Hamida,” an American woman of Polish Catholic descent who had converted to Islam. Asad’s marriage to Munira now came undone, and he married Pola Hamida before a civil judge in New York in November 1952. He would remain with her for the next forty years, and this marriage to a Western convert presaged his evolving preference for an ideal Islam, distinct from the born Muslims who practiced it.
For some months in New York, Asad also reestablished a tie to his family in Israel. At the time, Aryeh Feigenbaum’s daughter, Hemdah (1916-87), was living in New York with her husband, Harry (Zvi) Zinder (1909-91), press officer at Israel’s information office (and later director of the Voice of Israel). Zinder later told an Israeli journalist the story of how Asad would dine with him in out-of-the-way restaurants, or visit the Zinders’ home in Forest Hills. Asad even attended the bar mitvah of the Zinders’ son, and the Zinders attended his marriage to Pola Hamida. Zinder reported the contents of his table talk with Asad back to Jerusalem. Asad, he noted, remained an unequivocal enemy of Israel, but it might be possible to soften his animosity, and it would be worth the effort, given Asad’s solid standing in the Pakistani foreign ministry. According to Zinder, the Mossad responded by proposing that he try to recruit Asad for pay, a proposal Zinder rejected “with both hands.” “I knew he would refuse any payment,” said Zinder years later, “that he would be enraged by the idea, and that he would sever all contact with me.” In time, the contact weakened anyway; according to Zinder, Pola Hamida disapproved of Asad maintaining close ties with his family in particular, and Jews in general. Still, according to Zinder, Asad continued for some years to correspond with Hemdah on family matters.40
There could be no doubt from Asad’s writing, and from Zinder’s testimony, that Asad remained a fervent anti-Zionist. Yet for many years, Asad left the systematic indictment of the modern-day state of Israel to others. In 1947 he was fully preoccupied with the partition of India, and offered no published comment on the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel. In the years that followed the 1967 war, he spoke out more frequently, especially on Jerusalem. “We cannot ever reconcile ourselves to the view, so complacently accepted in the West, that Jerusalem is to be the capital of the State of Israel,” he wrote. “In a conceivably free Palestine—a state in which Jews, Christians and Muslims could live side by side in full political and cultural equality—the Muslim community should be specifically entrusted with the custody of Jerusalem as a city open to all three communities.”41 But given the fever of anti-Israel passion in the Arab world after 1967, Asad’s criticism could only be described as restrained. As Pakistan was far removed from the conflict, more would not have been expected of him.
But Asad failed to meet other Pakistani expectations. One of Asad’s colleagues on the Pakistani delegation made a scandal of his romance with Pola Hamida, and Pakistan’s prime minister, Khwaja Nizamuddin, reportedly reacted strongly against the marriage. At the end of 1952, Asad offered his resignation, in the expectation his position would be confirmed. To his surprise, his resignation was accepted. It was not a clean break, and when Nizamuddin fell from power in the spring of 1953, the prospect of Asad’s return to Pakistani service seemed real. But no offer materialized, and Asad was now pressed for funds. Acting upon the advice of an American friend, he proposed to write his story for the New York publisher Simon and Schuster, which offered him a contract and an advance.42
Asad thus began work on the book that would make him famous. The Road to Mecca, written in New York, appeared in 1954, and won widespread praise for its combination of spiritual searching and desert adventure. As a testimony of conversion to Islam, The Road to Mecca is still unsurpassed, and its continued re-publication in Western languages attests to its power, for both general readers and sympathizers of Islam. An example of its influence may be found in the testimony of a twenty-one-year-old American Jewish woman named Margaret Marcus (b. 1934). Asad’s book found a place on the shelves of the public library in Mamaroneck, New York, near her home. Her parents would not let her take out the book, so she read it in the library over and over: “What he could do, I thought I could also do, only how much harder for a single woman than for a man! But I vowed to Allah that at the first opportunity, I would follow his example.”43 The young woman later converted to Islam, took the name Maryam Jameelah, and moved to Pakistan, where she became one of the best-known ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism, famous for her methodical indictments of the West.44
One Western convert, however, took a dim view of Asad’s book: H. St. John (“Abdullah”) Philby (1885-1960). Philby, too, had converted to Islam in 1930, assuming Asad’s place as the convert in the court of Ibn Saud. He, too, had dabbled in exploration and politics, and he had strong views on Asad’s attempts at both. In his review of The Road to Mecca, Philby accused “Herr Weiss” of “vagueness and unusual naiveté.” According to Philby, Asad was no more than a journalist in search of a story, a man without any flair for geographical work or political analysis.
His bazar scenes, religious festivals, desert sunsets, et hoc genus omne of local color suggest a patchwork of newspaper articles or cuttings strung together for a new[s] story, in which the leit-motiv is provided by his own gropings toward an emotional dénouement.
In his most damaging insinuation, Philby wrote that there was “no independent contemporary evidence” that Asad had undertaken “secret missions” for Ibn Saud or the Grand Sanusi.45
If the book’s value as a record of politics and exploration was doubtful, then at least it served as a faithful personal memoir. Or did it? On many points, noted Judd Teller (1912-72) in a review in Commentary, Asad had nothing to say on matters that demanded a say in the personal memoir of any European Jew. One of these was Asad’s experience of Europe’s anti-Semitism, nowhere mentioned by the author.
Yet he was born in Galicia, where the Jews were caught up as scapegoats in the power struggles of the anti-Semitic Ukrainians and Poles and the dubiously tolerant Austrian government. He was brought up in Vienna, when it was the capital of European anti-Semitism. He left Berlin for his first visit to Palestine in the year when racist-nationalists assassinated Walter Rathenau. Did all this leave him untouched?46
Both Philby and Teller complained of the absence of another crucial point: Asad gave no reason for his decision to leave Arabia. (Teller speculated that it stemmed from heightened Jewish-Arab tensions in Palestine.) These criticisms suggested what is now obvious: The Road to Mecca cannot be read as a document of historical truth about Arabia, Ibn Saud, or even the author’s life. It is an impressionistic self-portrait that suggests more than it tells. The face of its subject is in half-shadow.
But the omissions and elisions of the book did not detract from its commercial success. The Road to Mecca was translated from English into the major languages of Europe, and the royalties must have represented a windfall. The book also created demand for Asad’s services as a lecturer, and his reputation in the West reached its pinnacle.
But in Muslim lands, especially among Muslim activists, his choices raised troubling questions. The Pakistani ideologue Maulana Maududi (1903-79), in a letter written in 1961, expressed misgivings:
I have great respect for [Asad’s] exposition of Islamic ideas and especially his criticism of Western culture and its materialistic philosophies. I am sorry to say, however, that although in the early days of his conversion, he was a staunch, practicing Muslim, gradually he drifted close to the ways of the so-called “progressive” Muslim just like the “reformed” Jews. Recently his divorce from his Arab wife and marriage to a modern American girl hastened this process of deviation more definitely….Once a man begins to live the life of a true Muslim, all his capabilities lose their “market value.” It is the same sad story with Muhammad Asad, who had always been accustomed to a high and modern standard of living and after embracing Islam, had to face the severest financial difficulties. As a result, he was forced to make one compromise after another.47
Asad, the critic of Western materialism, stood accused of succumbing to it; Asad, who first sought answers in Islam, now was suspected of questioning it. The disappointment Asad had come to feel for the actual practitioners of Islam had become mutual.
Translator of the Qur’an
Asad relocated to Geneva with Pola Hamida. There he began to contemplate a new project, ambitious in scope and significance: a new English translation of the Qur’an. Asad had not been satisfied with Marmaduke Pickthall’s widely used translation, since Pickthall’s knowledge of Arabic had been “limited.” As Asad later wrote:
Familiarity with the bedouin speech of Central and Eastern Arabia—in addition, of course, to academic knowledge of classical Arabic—is the only way for a non-Arab of our time to achieve an intimate understanding of the diction of the Qur’an. And because none of the scholars who have previously translated the Qur’an into European languages has ever fulfilled this prerequisite, their translations have remained but distant, and faulty, echoes of its meaning and spirit.48
Asad began work on the translation in 1960. Such a large-scale project required the support of a patron, and he eventually appeared in the form of Saudi Arabia’s King Faysal (r. 1964-75). Asad had known Faysal since 1927. He reestablished a link in 1951, when he paid his first visit to Saudi Arabia in eighteen years, and he nurtured the tie as Faysal began his ascent to the throne. Asad became one of Faysal’s most fervent enthusiasts, seeing in him a vast improvement over Ibn Saud. “Whenever I reflect on the manner in which King Faysal rules over his realm,” wrote Asad, “it appears to me as the fulfilment of every promise which the life of his father had held out and left open.”49 Still, Faysal was a dutiful son, and this praise could not cancel out Asad’s stinging indictment of Ibn Saud, made in The Road to Mecca. As it happened, however, this obstacle was not insurmountable: in later editions of the book, Asad completely excised his enumeration of Ibn Saud’s failings, replacing them with a few pages of banal ruminations on the desert.50
Faysal renewed Asad’s Saudi patronage. In 1963, Faysal had the Muslim World League in Mecca subscribe in advance to Asad’s planned translation, which he began to compile in Switzerland. Asad published a limited edition of the first nine surahs in 1964. At about that time, he moved to Tangier, settling in a comfortable villa surrounded by cypress trees and bougainvillaea, where he worked to complete the translation. In 1980, he published the full translation and commentary in Gibraltar, under the title The Message of the Qur’an.
Asad’s translation opened with this dedication: “For people who think.” The spirit of the translation is resolutely modernist, and Asad expressed his profound debt to the reformist commentator Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905). As another convert later wrote: “In its intellectual engagement with the text and in the intimate, subtle and profound understanding of the pure classical Arabic of the Koran, Asad’s interpretation is of a power and intelligence without rival in English.”51 There are many English-speaking Muslims who will attest to the appeal of this translation, and who rely upon it daily.
But the translation created a controversy among some Muslim clerics who disputed Asad’s modernist and allegorical interpretations of some verses. Critics accused him of denying the existence of angels, the permissibility of concubinage, and the bodily ascent of Jesus to heaven.52 In private, there were those who insinuated that the translation reintroduced isra’iliyyat, “Jewish distortions” akin to those allegedly introduced by the first Jewish converts to Islam. In 1974, even before the translation was published in full, it was banned in Saudi Arabia.53 Asad was left to finish the work on his own, supported financially by his friends. Fortunately, Asad had many, including Shaykh Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani (b. 1930), the Saudi minister of oil and natural resources and “my brother-in-spirit,” to whom Asad devoted a collection of his essays a few years later.54
The rejection of his translation was only one sign of the growing climate of intolerance that further disillusioned Asad. “Khomeini is worse than the Shah,” he told journalists after the Iranian revolution. “He has nothing in common with Islam.”55 According to another journalist, Asad took a dim view of fundamentalist chaos, the intolerance of extremists, and the patter about “Islamic science” and “Islamic education.” The Muslims, he opined, had been “low down for so many centuries that now they think they have to assert themselves by saying we are different. They are human beings. They are not different.” In particular, he championed the rights of women and opposed the fundamentalist campaign for the hijab. “Many people think that if you put a veil over a woman’s face and cover her, that is the way to Islam. It is not. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad, no hijab existed except for the Prophet’s wives and it is a wrong inference to say that this holds good for all Muslim women.”56
His own early indictment of the West, Islam at the Crossroads, which found such an echo among fundamentalists, he himself came to regard as a “harsh book.” Likewise, the once-powerful romance of the Arabs no longer held him in its grip. In 1981, he told a journalist that “it is possible that if I would come into contact with Arabs today for the first time, I would no longer be attracted by them.”57 Asad still remained enamored of Islam. Yet this ideal Islam was nowhere to be found in existing Islam, and could just as well be practised in Europe. It is said that Pakistan’s president from 1978, General Zia ul-Haq (1924-88) tried to persuade Asad to return to Pakistan, but without result. In 1982, Asad left Tangier for Sintra, outside of Lisbon. He later moved to Mijas on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain. He remained articulate and lucid in interviews given as late as 1988.58 In these last years, he reportedly began work on a sequel to The Road to Mecca, tentatively entitled Homecoming of the Heart. The title is said to have alluded to his contemplated return to Saudi Arabia at the invitation of Prince Salman (b. 1936), governor of Riyadh and one of Ibn Saud’s sons. It is not clear whether such a return was a realistic prospect, or whether the title hinted at a more spiritual homecoming. For Asad had neither completed this work nor returned to Arabia when he died on 20 February 1992, at the age of 91. He was buried in the small Muslim cemetery in Granada.59
“Struck no root”
Few in the Muslim world took notice of Asad’s passing. He had argued for a rational Islam; he had sought to reconcile Islamic teachings and democracy; he had tried to make the Qur’an speak to modern minds. His project, in fact, encapsulated ideals that drove the reform of Judaism, which by his parents’ generation had largely served to ease Jews out of their faith altogether. Islam provided the last chance to achieve that ideal—the reform of a religion of law so that it could be made to live in a modern age, as a liberal force of continuing faith.
Unlike so many other Western converts to Islam, Asad chose also to live in Muslim societies, and worked to give Islam direction. But by advocating this reform, Asad remained a foreign body in contemporary Islam, a transplant rejected time and again by his hosts. Saudi Arabia declined to keep him as a journalist; Pakistan, which he served as an official and diplomat, also broke with him; and the self-appointed guardians of Muslim orthodoxy shunned him as a Qur’an translator and commentator. Paradoxically, Asad won genuine acclaim in the West. There he found minds open to his ideas, and opportunities to publish and lecture. And there he ultimately found refuge from the late twentieth-century reality of Islam.
Asad’s road to Mecca was the shorter journey, made headlong in the enthusiasm of youth. His road from Mecca was the longer journey, made painstakingly in an awareness of the contradiction between the promise of Islam and its contemporary practice—and his own equivocal position in it. For all Asad’s fervor and belief, his Muslim answer never satisfied his Jewish question, put most poignantly by Asad to Asad: “Why is it that, even after finding my place among the people who believe in the things I myself have come to believe, I have struck no root?”60===
Notes
1 S.C. Chew, review of The Road to Mecca in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 15 August 1954.
2 Robert Payne, review of The Road to Mecca in New York Times, 15 August 1954.
3 Details on the family in Lodewijk Brunt, “Een Jood in Arabie; over het leven van Muhammad Asad,” in Neveh Ya’akov: Jubilee Volume Presented to Dr. Jaap Meijer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, eds. Lea Dasberg and Jonathan N. Cohen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1982), 182.
4 Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 55.
5 Ibid., 55-56.
6 Ibid., 58-59.
7 Ibid., 60.
8 Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. “Feigenbaum, Aryeh”; Haviv Kena’an, “Prof. A. Feigenbaum—Hasid ha-dugmah ha-ishit,” Ha’aretz, 7 August 1964. The omission is all the more striking in that, at one point in The Road to Mecca, Asad writes that the eyes of Jerusalem’s Arabs “seemed to remain clear and untouched by age—unless they happened to be affected by trachoma, that evil ‘Egyptian’ eye disease which is the curse of all countries east of the Mediterranean.” Road to Mecca, 92.
9 Asad, Road to Mecca, 93.
10 Ibid, 91.
11 Leopold Weiss, Unromantisches Morgenland; aus dem tagebuch einer reise (Frankfurt: Frankfurter societäts-drukerei, 1924). The book is summarized by Wolf Kaiser, Palästina-Erez Israel: Deutschsprachige Reisebeschreibungen jüdischer Autoren von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1992), 267-83. Kaiser also discusses some of the contemporary criticism of reviewers. Asad wrote of his book that, “although its anti-Zionist attitude and unusual predilection for the Arabs caused something of a flutter in the German press, I am afraid it did not sell very well.” Asad, Road to Mecca, 185.
12 Asad, Road to Mecca, 188.
13 Ibid., 142.
14 Qur’an, 102 (Surat al-Takathur). The translation is Asad’s.
15 Muhammad Asad, Islam at the Crossroads (1934; reprint, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashaf, 1991), 4.
16 Asad, Road to Mecca, 311.
17 Arabic report (with translation) by Dr. Abdullah Damluji, no date, included in despatch from Political Secretary of High Commissioner for Iraq (Baghdad) to Consul (Jiddah), 18 December 1928, Public Records Office (London), FO967/22. Damluji had left Ibn Saud’s service in September 1928 and returned to Iraq.
18 Asad, Road to Mecca, 48.
19 Ibid., chap. viii, “Jinns.” On the Dawish affair, see Joseph Kostiner, The Making of Saudi Arabia 1916-1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 117-40.
20 Asad, Road to Mecca., 49.
21 Ibid., 177-81, for these assessments of Ibn Saud.
22 Ibid, 325.
23 Ibid., chap. xi, “Jihad.”
24 “History sheet of Herr Leopold Weiss Alias Mohmmad Asad Ullah Vyce. An Austrian Convert to Mohammadanism,” prepared by the Intelligence Bureau of the Government of India, included in letter from E.J.D. Colvin, Political Secretary, His Highness’ Government Jammu and Kashmir (Jammu) to Lieut.-Col. L.E. Lang, Resident in Kashmir (Sialkot), 30 January 1934, India Office Records, R/1/1/4670. In The Road to Mecca, Asad dates his last Arabian journey to the late summer of 1932, which would place his final arrival in India at a later date than June.
25 C.I.D. report of 20 November 1933, India Office Records, R/1/1/4670.
26 On the Kashmir “agitation” of 1931-32, see David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 96-99.
27 Lieut-Col. L.E. Lang, Resident in Kashmir (Sialkot) to B. J. Glancy, Political Secretary, Government of India, Foreign and Political Department (New Delhi), 31 January 1934, India Office Records, R/1/1/4670.
28 Asad, Road to Mecca, 2.
29 On the journal, see Peter Clark, Marmaduke Pickhtall: British Muslim (London: Quartet Books, 1986), 61-62.
30 For a sample of his work, see his article “Towards a Resurrection of Thought,” Islamic Culture (Hyderabad) 11 (1937): 7-16.
31 Asad, Road to Mecca, 311 n.
32 India Office Records, L/P&J/7/2678. This includes an extract, from Weiss’s passport, of a visa for the United Kingdom and British India, granted at Vienna and issued on 24 April 1939. The authorization for the visa came directly from the Government of India in New Delhi, 9 February 1939.
33 Weiss, undated note to India Office in London, received at India Office on 8 June 1939; India Office Records, L/P&J/7/2678. Weiss gave his London address as 119, Old Church Street, Chelsea, S.W. 3. [Update: For more on this visit, go here.]
34 Muhammad Asad, This Law of Ours and Other Essays (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1987), 1.
35 Yossi Melman, “Goralo ha-Yehudi shel Muhammad Asad,” Ha’aretz, 21 April 1989.
36 Asad, This Law of Ours, 1.
37 Muhammad Asad, The Principles of State and Government in Islam (new ed.; Gilbraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1980), xi. This book built upon his Islamic Constitution-Making.
38 Mushtak Parker, “Death of a Muslim Mentor,” Middle East, May 1992, 29.
39 Melman, “Goralo ha-Yehudi,” quoting a despatch by Harry Zinder.
40 Ibid., quoting a despatch by Harry Zinder.
41 Asad, This Law of Ours, 169, 173.
42 Harry Zinder (New York) to Abba Eban, 30 April 1953, Israel State Archives, ISA/R693/Box 96, File 14.
43 Maryam Jameelah, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945-1962) (Lahore: Muhammad Yusuf Khan, 1989), 109.
44 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, s.v. “Jameelah, Maryam.”
45 H. St. John B. Philby, review of The Road to Mecca, in Middle East Journal 9 (winter 1955): 81-82.
46 Judd Teller, review of The Road to Mecca, in Commentary 18 (September 1954): 280.
47 Maududi (Lahore) to Margaret Marcus [Maryam Jameelah], 25 February 1961, in Maryam Jameelah, Correspondence between Maulana Maudoodi and Maryam Jameelah (Delhi: Crescent Publishing, 1969), 15.
48 The Message of the Qur’an, Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (Gilbraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1980), iv-v.
49 From the 1973 postscript to the 4th rev. ed. of The Road to Mecca (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus), 378.
50 Cf. 177-81 of the original 1954 ed. with 177-81 of the 4th rev. ed. of 1980.
51 Parker, “Death of a Muslim Mentor,” 28-29.
52 Asad dealt with all these accusations in Arabia, The Islamic World Review (October 1981), 4.
53 Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 334 n. 59.
54 Asad, This Law of Ours, dedication page.
55 Quoted by Lisbeth Rocher and Fatima Cherqaoui, D’une foi l’autre: Les conversions à l’Islam en Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 64.
56 Mushtak Parker, “Death of a Muslim Mentor.”
57 Malise Ruthven, “Muhammad Asad, Ambassador of Islam,” Arabia: The Islamic World Review (September 1981): 60, 62.
58 See the video “A Tribute to Muhammad Asad,” filmed in 1988 and distributed by Islamic Publications International of Teaneck, New Jersey.
59 Details on these last years are provided by Mushtak Parker, “Death of a Muslim Mentor.”
60 Asad, The Road to Mecca, 47.
About Martin Kramer
I am a historian of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University (and past director of its Middle East center), and the Walter P. Stern Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
I was the founding president of Shalem College, a liberal arts school in Jerusalem, and first chair of its Middle East and Islamic studies program. I have been a visiting professor or fellow at Brandeis, Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Pepperdine, and the Wilson Center. I earned my undergrad and doctoral degrees from Princeton, where I wrote my thesis under the supervision of Bernard Lewis.
I am the author or editor of eight books.The most academic: Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslims Congresses
The best known: Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America
The most recent: The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East
This website includes a wide sample of my published work on a broad array of topics. It is also home to my blog Sandbox. Click here to subscribe to new blog posts by e-mail, or subscribe to the feed.
Contact me via the form below.이 책은 1932년 늦여름, 저자가 동행인 자이드와 함께 아라비아 사막을 가로질러 메카로 향하는 23일간의 낙타 여정을 기본 축으로 삼는다
메카로 가는 길 (The Road to Mecca) 요약
1. 사막의 여정과 회상
이 책은 1932년 늦여름, 저자가 동행인 자이드와 함께 아라비아 사막을 가로질러 메카로 향하는 23일간의 낙타 여정을 기본 축으로 삼는다. 끝없이 펼쳐진 사막의 고독과 침묵 속에서 저자는 자신의 지난 삶을 촘촘히 회상한다. 유럽의 유대인 지식인 레오폴드 바이스가 어떻게 아랍의 사막을 사랑하게 되었고, 마침내 무함마드 아사드라는 이름의 무슬림으로 거듭났는지에 대한 정신적 영적 연대기가 사막의 물리적 여정과 교차하며 전개된다.
2. 유럽에서의 뿌리 상실과 지적 방황
저자는 오스트리아-헝가리 제국의 유대인 가문에서 태어나 헤브라이어 성경과 탈무드를 배우며 자랐다. 그러나 1차 세계대전 이후 유럽 사회를 지배하던 지적 회의주의와 도덕적 공백, 그리고 물질주의적 가치관에 깊은 환멸을 느꼈다. 빈 대학에서 철학과 역사를 공부하고 베를린에서 저널리스트로 활동하면서도, 근대 서구 문명이 이룩한 풍요의 이면에 숨겨진 인간 소외와 영적 갈증을 채울 길을 찾지 못해 방황했다.
3. 아랍 세계와의 만남과 문화적 충격
1922년, 예루살렘에 사는 외삼촌의 초대로 시작된 중동 여행은 그의 인생을 뒤바꾸는 계기가 되었다. 그는 그곳에서 시오니즘이 원주민인 아랍인들에게 행하는 도덕적 부당함을 목격하는 동시에, 아랍인들의 삶에서 서구 사회가 상실한 독특한 가치를 발견했다. 그것은 물질적 소유에 집착하지 않는 내면의 평화, 영혼과 육체가 분리되지 않은 삶의 통합성, 그리고 일상에 깊이 뿌리내린 신앙이었다. 프랭크푸르터 자이퉁의 특파원이 되어 카이로, 다마스쿠스, 바그다드, 페르시아, 아프가니스탄 등 이슬람 세계 전역을 탐해하며 그의 관점은 더욱 깊어졌다.
4. 코란의 발견과 개종
그는 아랍인들의 삶을 지탱하는 근원이 무엇인지 탐구하기 시작했고, 그것이 바로 코란의 가르침임을 깨달았다. 코란은 서구 기독교처럼 영혼과 육체, 성과 속을 대립시키지 않고 삶의 모든 영역을 하나의 유기적 전체로 통합하는 종교였다. 1926년 베를린 지하철에서 물질적 풍요 속에서도 영혼이 죽어 있는 현대인들의 불행한 얼굴을 본 직후, 코란의 타카투르 수라(물질적 탐욕을 경고하는 구절)를 읽고 이것이 인간의 저작이 아닌 신의 계시임을 확신하게 된다. 그는 즉시 이슬람으로 개종했다.
5. 사막이 준 영적 지혜와 종장
개종 후 메카로 성지순례를 떠난 아사드는 사우디아라비아의 이븐 사우드 국왕과 깊은 우정을 나누며 사막의 베두인들과 동고동락했다. 사막은 그에게 신 앞에서의 절대적 고독과 인간의 왜소함을 가르쳐 주는 영적 훈련소였다. 이 책은 메카의 성스러운 카바 신전에 도착해 전 세계 무슬림들이 인종과 계급을 초월하여 하나의 형제애로 결속되는 장엄한 광경을 목격하는 것으로 끝을 맺는다.
평론: 근대성의 문턱에서 사막의 일신교를 사유하다
무함마드 아사드의 <메카로 가는 길>은 20세기 이슬람 문학의 이정표이자, 서구 중심적 근대성에 대한 가장 우아하고 날카로운 지적 반론이다. 이 책은 한 이방인이 낯선 종교에 귀의하는 단순한 개종기를 넘어, 영적 파산 상태에 직면한 서구 문명에 대한 처절한 문화 비평이자 보편적 진리를 찾아 나선 세계인의 위대한 여정이다.
저자가 이슬람을 선택한 과정은 감정적 매료나 현실 도피가 아니었다. 그것은 철저히 합리적이고 지적인 사유의 결과였다. 아사드가 보기에 근대 서구는 기술적, 물질적 정점에 도달했으나 영혼의 나침반을 상실한 상태였다. 반면 사막의 아랍인들은 비록 물질적으로는 빈곤했을지언정, 신과 자연, 그리고 자기 자신과 완벽한 조화를 이루고 있었다. 아사드는 이슬람이 과학과 이성, 육체적 삶의 기쁨을 부정하지 않으면서도 인간에게 영적 구심점을 제공하는 가장 균형 잡힌 생활 양식임을 간파했다.
이 책의 문학적 가치는 사막이라는 공간을 영적 캔버스로 변모시킨 뛰어난 서사력에 있다. 낙타를 타고 사막을 걷는 물리적 이동은 저자의 내면 깊은 곳으로 걸어 들어가는 정신적 탐색과 절묘하게 중첩된다. 사막의 잔혹한 더위와 갈증, 그리고 그 끝에 만나는 오아시스는 영적 방황 끝에 다다른 이슬람이라는 안식처의 은유다. 또한, 서구 유대인 지식인의 눈으로 포착한 베두인 문화와 이븐 사우드 국왕의 인간적 면모는 오리엔탈리즘적 편견을 걷어내고 이슬람 사회의 역동성과 도덕적 깊이를 생생하게 증명한다.
결론적으로 <메카로 가는 길>은 귀속감과 정체성의 문제를 거시적 관점에서 재정의한다. 아사드는 자신이 태어난 유럽의 민족적, 종교적 울타리에 갇히기를 거부하고, 인류 보편의 도덕적 가치와 영적 진실이 살아 숨 쉬는 곳을 향해 스스로 망명을 선택했다. 지리적 경계와 문화적 장벽을 뛰어넘어 오직 영혼의 자유와 신 앞에서의 정직함을 추구한 그의 삶은, 물질적 풍요 속에서 여전히 방향을 잃고 방황하는 현대인들에게 삶의 진정한 중심이 어디에 있는지를 묵직하게 되묻는다.
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