The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad « Martin Kramer on the Middle East
The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad
Martin Kramer, “The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss),” inThe 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.
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.”28From 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 Muslimcommunity 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.52In 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.
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.
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Editorial Reviews
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"A very rare and powerful book, raised completely above the ordinary by its candor and intelligence." —New York Post
"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
"['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
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.
Product details
Paperback: 375 pages
Publisher: Fons Vitae; Eighth Edition, Eighth edition edition (January 1, 2000)
Language: English
Charles
TOP 100 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent Travelogue & Conversion Memoir
March 16, 2015
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This is a fascinating book—half travelogue and half conversion memoir. (Amazon also seems to have fixed the Kindle version, complained of in preview reviews—mine was excellent, down to the photos.)
Muhammad Asad was born a Jew, Leopold Weiss, in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in what is now Ukraine, the city of Lvov). He was prominent both in interactions with the West in the 20th Century, for example as Pakistani ambassador to the UN, and in theological work, including translation and exegesis of the Q’uran. Asad is regarded, and should be even more regarded in these days of Al Qaeda and ISIS, as a voice for a revitalized, mainstream (he would accurately reject the term “moderate”) Islam. But long before that, he was just a Westerner adrift and looking for spiritual answers.
Asad found those answers in Arabia. In many ways, The Road To Mecca is of the same genre as other travel books of Western men fascinated by Arabia in the first third of the 20th Century, such as Lawrence of Arabia, or lesser known figures such as Wilfred Thesiger (Arabian Sands). A certain type of Western man (a woman could not have had the opportunity) fell in love with the people and landscape of pre-petroleum Arabia, believing that the people had unique virtues (though they admitted the people were not composed only of virtues) and the land brought out the best in men. Some of this smacks of naïve love of the idealized noble savage, of course, and you see the same thing more commonly with Westerners and East Asian cultures like Tibet (hello, Richard Gere!). Conversion to Islam was not the norm, though, for Westerners entranced by Arabia and the Arabs. But Asad was simultaneously on a spiritual quest, and, like others before and since, after rejecting much else found what he was looking for in Islam.
Asad’s memoir is told in the form of flashbacks during a desert trip in 1927 with a traveling companion, ultimately to Mecca (not for his first time)—at the time he lived in Medina, so he had made the hajj pilgrimage several times already. In his book, he alternates descriptions of Arabian geography (as well as Syria, Iraq and Iran, and a little of the Maghreb), with descriptions of key Arabs and their personal and political doings (he knew Ibn Saud well, along with a host of lesser players, although not, apparently, the Hashemite kings of the Hejaz, deposed by Ibn Saud but later kings of Jordan to this day, and, briefly, Iraq). And all along in his book Asad is narrating his own life, and his own religious development, with apparently great honesty and clarity.
Asad rejected Judaism and became agnostic early, although he came from a rabbinical family. His main objection to Judaism is that he could not believe in a God that was focused nearly to exclusion on one people—he repeatedly and accurately contrasts Islam’s ability to embrace all kinds of people and form a new community from them with the exclusive aspects of Judaism. But Asad does not fall into the kind of crude anti-Judaic attitudes so common among modern Muslims, even though such an attitude is well supported in the Q’uran and the Sunnah, and is the historical norm in Islam. (Q’uranic verses such as 2:62, frequently quoted to make Islam seem universalist, “Surely those who believe, those of Jewry, the Christians and the Sabaeans . . . . whoever has faith in Allah and the Last Day, and works righteousness, their wage awaits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be upon them, and neither shall they sorrow” are not to the contrary—their exclusive interpretation in Islam has always been that those verses only apply to Jews before Jesus, and then to Christians before Muhammad, and have zero application today, after Muhammad. See The Reliance of the Traveler, the main Shafi’i “catechism,” at w4.4) He was, however, very opposed to Zionism and the founding of Israel, and friendly with Jews such as Jacob de Haan, a Dutch Jew assassinate by the Haganah in 1924 for favoring negotiations with Arab leaders.
Asad also seems to have considered Christianity, or so he asserts. If I had an objection to this book (although to object to someone else’s reasons for his personal conversion is obviously pretty silly), it is that he does not seem to understand Christianity at all, in that he ascribes to Christianity critical doctrines not actually found there, and ascribes his rejection of Christianity to his aversion to those (bogus) doctrines. The core “doctrine,” to which he returns repeatedly, is that Christianity (supposedly) believes matter and the body evil, and the spirit good. He contrasts this to Islam’s holistic approach, in which nothing Allah has made can be bad, and each human’s physical body and spirit are both key concerns of Islam.
But of course this is a false view of Christianity. More precisely, it is a heretical view. It is the view of the early Gnostics, the Manichees, and the Albigensians, all rejected by mainstream Christianity. They posited dualism—that, as Asad says, the body is bad and the spirit good. But mainstream Christianity holds the opposite—like Islam, it holds that all what God has created is good, though of course Islam and Christianity both hold it can be mis-used. Asad appears to have missed the key doctrine of Christianity of the resurrection of the body, found in both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed. There is a difference between Christianity and Islam, in that Islam does not recognize original sin and Christianity does have non-heretical strains that emphasize spiritual precedence, such as the eremitic monks, but it is just not correct to posit the dualism that Asad appears to be believe to be central to Christianity.
Asad also falls into silly historical errors, such as supposing Islam’s view of the West is dictated by the Crusades, and that the Crusades were the formative moment of Western civilization, whereas in reality the Crusades were forgotten by Muslims (who won, after all) until their memory was resurrected for political purposes in the 19th Century, and were and are of minor importance in the West as well, except as a modern day tool for ignorant Americans to traduce Christianity and the West. He (in passing) also follows the common Muslim habit of erroneously ascribing important scientific inventions to Muslims, from algebra and trigonometry to “Arabic numerals” and the compass, in the usual effort to compensate for Muslim lack of scientific contributions in modern times (or, really, since the 11th Century, and even then mostly by non-Muslims under Muslim domination, and nearly all second-order scientific contributions). But these flaws are understandable and not at all germane to Asad’s basic narrative.
He also points out what are today interesting historical nuggets, such as that until the 19th Century Wahhabi “revival,” the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula were seen as the laxest Muslims at all, and are now the most religious (not always to everyone’s benefit, then or now—Asad, while recognizing certain virtues, notes that it made them “proud, haughty men who regard themselves as the only true representatives of Islam and all other Muslim peoples as heretics”). Finally, he inadvertently confirms a variety of Western views of Islamic cultures as retrograde in certain areas as entirely correct, as when he notes how a family desperately tried and succeeded in hoodwinking him into marrying an 11-year old virgin. (He divorced her when he discovered her age on their wedding night, and did not consummate the marriage.) “[Her mother] was stupefied [by his demand to immediately divorce the girl]. She had never heard of a man who refused so choice a morsel—an eleven-year-old virgin—and must have thought that there was something radically wrong with me.”
Presumably this doesn’t really matter for Asad’s personal conversion. He was attracted to the community of believers in Islam; the fact that Islam provides answers to nearly every question in life, particularly those not directly related to spiritual matters, but to all matters of life (in this Islam is not dissimilar to such Christian groups as Opus Dei or Third Order Franciscans, though the comparison probably shouldn’t be stretched); the harmony of Muslim belief; and the peace Islam brought to the people he knew. He says himself that what he had was “a longing to find my own restful place in the world,” and he found it in Islam. One thing to keep in mind, of course, was that the 1920s were a time when many in the West, after the First World War, despaired of any future for the west. As Asad says: “A world in upheaval and convulsion: that was our Western world.” Islam offered a world united in itself, without any upheaval and convulsion, if properly ordered according to its own principles.
Asad is broad-minded, tolerant, and fascinating. Those are not characteristics in good odor among many strains of modern Islam, which tends in many cases to be anything but modern. His translation/exegesis of the Q’uran, The Message of the Koran, is banned in Saudi Arabia for supposed Mu’tazili tendencies (perceived as undermining the alleged divine nature of the Q’uran) and a willingness to strongly endorse ijtihad, or continued analysis and reasoning, in exegesis of the Q’uran. But whatever your theological predilection, these characteristics are what make Asad’s memoir very much worth reading.
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KEN TELLS ALL
5.0 out of 5 starsThe Road to Mecca
May 4, 2010
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This is a very well written book done in the form of a very descriptive autobiography. The author looks with his mind through his eyes at people & the world around him in a very passionate way. The inner thoughts of his life and adventures are really captivating. It starts with him remembering the dissatisfied young man he was in Austria. He leaves it to seek adventure and ends up in the Middle East & converts to Islam in 1926. Great story which includes his views about the world and those he met along the way. I was not really in tune with all his personal views but understood his basic feelings. He was born in 1900 & lived in Austria. His birth name was Leopold Weiss. His religious ancestry consisted of a long line of orthodox Rabbis except for his father who was a lawyer. His parents were not religious and this I believe led to his lack of spirituality and turning from Judaism to Islam. His view of Islam became an obsession. He loved everything about the people who lived it and its teachings. I however didn't understand how he seemed to always know all the great and powerful people who taught & ruled on the Arabian peninsula. He was the personal friend & adviser of Islamic Kings, Amirs, Sheiks, Scholars, etc . If so, one might see why he was so taken by the religion. He never the less presents himself as a humble man in tune with the simple life and seeking adventure and his place in life. Really a great book even though he presents a one sided praise of Islam and a disgust for the western civilization. Islam could be a wonderful religion if not for the fanatics who control it. He himself hints to this during his writings but does not understand that he also has become one of them. Very interesting story of a european secular Jew who found his calling with Islam and its people.
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Sergey Shyndriayev
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat Reading
August 1, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Interesting 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.
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5.0 out of 5 starsMust Read
November 20, 2012
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
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. 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.
3 people found this helpful
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nadav haber
5.0 out of 5 starsThe search for inner peace
January 14, 2002
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Muhammed 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.
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Mr. Bobo
5.0 out of 5 starsyet I knew I can never be like him! May the Creator be pleased with his ...
February 10, 2018
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A man who was true human, and his true spiritual journey through physical journey. It made me jealous of him, and his adventures, yet I knew I can never be like him! May the Creator be pleased with his M. Asad.
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k iwasa
4.0 out of 5 starscharm of the middle east
November 4, 2015
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This 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...
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P.K. Ryan
5.0 out of 5 starsRoad to Mecca
March 30, 2011
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This was a great travelogue/autobiography of one man's spiritual journey into a completely foreign world and his subsequent embrace of that world. Asad, born as Leopold Weiss, was from a Jewish family in early 20th century Austria-Hungary and during his work as a journalist he travelled extensively throughout the Muslim world. He subsequently fell in love with Arab culture and converted to Islam. His dissatisfaction with Western society is something that precedes his Middle Eastern journeys, only he never suspected where this would ultimately lead him.
"I was not unhappy: but my inability to share the diverse social, economic and political hopes of those around me-of any group among them-grew in time into a vague sense of not quite belonging to them, accompanied, vaguely again, by a desire to belong-to whom? - to be a part of something- of what?"
Coming from a Jewish background, it is not remarkable that Asad would feel alienated from European society and feel an affinity for Arabia. That being said, there is something universal in his story, about his search for meaning, for peace of mind, for some place to call home. In fact, his personal insights strike a chord with me greatly (I am a white American), and I found myself significantly relating on an intellectual and emotional level. Anyways, this is also a great depiction of the early 20th century Muslim world as Asad rubs elbows with Kings and peasants alike. Definitely worth a read.
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W. Chambers
3.0 out of 5 starsThe Book is Magnificent - the Kindle Version is Terrible
October 5, 2013
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
This book is an amazing spiritual and historical record of a very insightful European who rejects the culture of the West and embraces the culture of the East along with Islam. I won't repeat some of the five star reviews who wrote about how life changing this book can be. I just want to warn anyone away from the Kindle version of this book which is a terrible digital conversion with typos, shortened lines, and some places just gibberish on every page! The chapter headings are completely messed up and the really good photos of the main people referred to in the book are missing even though they are referred to in the text. I had to find a copy in a library to finish reading it because the mistakes were so distracting. Amazon really needs to redo the Kindle version of the book as it is more than worth reading if it was done correctly.
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Ree
5.0 out of 5 starsOne of the most underrated books of all time...
October 9, 2017
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A 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.
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The Road to Mecca
by Muhammad Asad
4.45 · Rating details · 3,884 ratings · 493 reviews
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.
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Paperback, 375 pages
Published January 1st 2000 by Fons Vitae (first published 1954)
Original TitleThe Road to Mecca
ISBN 1887752374 (ISBN13: 9781887752374)
Edition LanguageEnglish
URLhttp://muhammad-asad.com/Road-to-Mecca.pdf
Other Editions (38)
الطريق إلى مكة
الطريق إلى مكة
The Road to Makkah
الطريق الي مكة
الطريق إلى الإسلام
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COMMUNITY REVIEWS
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4.45 · Rating details · 3,884 ratings · 493 reviews
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Yazeed AlMogren
Jul 15, 2015 Yazeed AlMogren rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
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 وا ...more
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Ibrahim Abdulla
Dec 15, 2012 Ibrahim Abdulla rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
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 خيا ...more
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أحمد أبازيد Ahmad Abazed
Feb 03, 2012 أحمد أبازيد Ahmad Abazed rated it really liked it · review of another edition
هذا كتابٌ لا يندم قارئه
!
رحلة روح .. و قصّة حضارة .. و متعة لا تنتهي ..
أوصي به
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منال الحسيني
May 25, 2018 منال الحسيني rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
من أكثر الكتب المؤثرة التي قرأتها في حياتي، كتاب رائع مكتوب بشفافية عالية وباسلوب صادق وعفوي يلمس العقل والقلب معاً
أنصح بقراءته بشدة
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Alp Eren Topal
Aug 12, 2011 Alp Eren Topal rated it it was amazing
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. (less)
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وضحى
Mar 23, 2012 وضحى rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
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 ..؟
هي حتماً كذلك..!
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 ت ...more
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Tim
Oct 09, 2013 Tim rated it it was amazing
Shelves: islam, islam-autobio
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." (less)
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Nawal Al-Qussyer
Jul 25, 2016 Nawal Al-Qussyer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: changed-the-way-i-see-the-world
يالله جمال هذا الكتاب لا يوصف. سأعود لادراج مراجعة شاملة
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Sooma Ahmad
Jun 02, 2018 Sooma Ahmad rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
رحله في البحث عن الذات والايمان .. كتاب ممتع جدا انصح فيه .
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غيث حسن
Jul 06, 2017 غيث حسن rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
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.
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وليد
Jun 01, 2013 وليد rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
على كل من يريد قراءة الكتاب , أن ينتبه لهذه الأخطاء :
قبيلة شمّار : شمّر
قبيلة الصلوبة : الصلبة.
قبيلة عنازا : عنزة
قبيلة الروالا : الرولة
ميناء ربيغ : ميناء رابغ
درية : الدرعية
ابن مسعد : ابن مساعد
ابن راشد : ابن رشيد
فيصل الداويش : فيصل الدويش
وادي تايما : أظنه يقصد " وادي تيماء "
وادي بيشا : وادي بيشة
سلطان بن بوجاد : سلطان بن بجاد
.
.
منطقة البالوش: منطقة البلوش.
.
.
أما عن هذه السيرة العظيمة فهي لعمري تستحق وتستحق. لم أكتف منها تماماً , لا بد من قراءتها مرة ومرات أخرى .
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Monzer ۞
May 15, 2016 Monzer ۞ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
دمع عيني حجة لك يا اسد , رحمك الله !
اجمل كتاب اقرؤه في عام 2016 ....
-المراجعة قريبا -
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نورة عبدالملك
Apr 02, 2019 نورة عبدالملك rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
محمد أسد ذو الأصول النمساوية، والجذور اليهودية، أضاع نفسه ليجدها في الصحراء العربية، كلما ازداد تيها في مفازات الصحراء اقترب من المعنى، وكلما التقى الموت وهبه الحياة، وعندما ارتحل عن مسقط رأسه وجد الوطن، وحينما أطلق روحه عرف الحرية، ولما ابتعد عن زيف المدينة وصل إلى الهدف، لقد تجرد من أي شيء، ليصل لكل شيء.
هذا ما كنت أردده طوال القراءة.
أقرأ النص، ثم أعيد قراءته بصوت أعلى تلذذاً بعباراته، الوصف ساحر بشكل مهيب، سامحه الله فلغته الأدبية تركتني حيرى أمامها، ماذا أقتبس وماذا أدع؟ لذا فقد حاولت أن أتمس ...more
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harun
May 05, 2007 harun rated it it was amazing
Recommends it for: those seeking religion
When I first read this book it instilled in me a wonderous vision. When I read it again it filled me with a critical history. When I picked it up a few years later, I read it as a man searching. In this, it's great.
This book changed the direction of my life. It was not because I was lost, for I still am lost today, but it showed me that people do change the worlds in changing themselves.
The book is an autobiographical account of an Austrian Jew named Leopold Weiss who through time and experience becomes Muhammad Asad. This is a vignette of his life from his childhood in Europe to his work in Jerusalem and his wandering in Arabia at the behest of then King AbdulAziz Ibn al-Saud.
Asad is a journalist, and his book is a wonderful anecdote. The stories are great, but moreso is the weightiness of his message. It's written in an old world style when there was a heroism to that which people did. The house of Saud is characterized as one rarely sees them... human. But amidst its history, religion, and talks of self, there is this idea of journeying towards something.
I like this book the same reason I like Kerouac , but it means more simply on part with its religious undertone, and the nature of the man.
Asad's book leaves him after Arabia, but, in life, he goes on to serve in the U.N., translate an authoritative scholaraly version of the Quran, and befriend kings, ministers, and people who shaped the 20th century.
This less review than hero-worship, but if the first chapter doesn't grab you. I'd say nothing I review will. (less)
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Asmaa M
Jan 18, 2017 Asmaa M rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: سير-ذاتية, فكر, دين
هذا الكتاب من الكتب التّي يصدق عنها ما قاله العقاد يوما أنّها تجعلُك تعيش حيواتٍ في حياة واحدة، وتُضيف لعمرك أعمارًا.
رحلة في أعماق الرّوح.
flag15 likes · Like · comment · see review
Lamia Al-Qahtani
Jul 10, 2013 Lamia Al-Qahtani rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
أسلوب أدبي جميل يمتلكه محمد أسد وعقل واع وقلب مؤمن يرى بعين الفن ويصف بطريقة ساحرة الصحراء والبدو والقهوة واﻷهازيج واﻷغاني والموسيقى واﻷشجار والكثبان والجو.
وصف ساحر لكل ما مر به في طريقه إلى مكة من شمال نجد، وهي رحلة قصيرة يتكلم فيها عن طريقه إلى مكة ثم يذكره حدث ما بمغامرة حدثت له من قبل فيعود بنا لذكرى هذه الرحلة -فلاش باك- وقد كانت رحلة طويلة سافر فيها إلى الحجاز ونجد وبيشة التي كان أول أوروبي يدخلها والشام وفلسطين والعراق وإيران وتركيا والكويت وأفغانستان وباكستان وغيرها والتقى خلالها شخصيات ...more
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Sayaf
Apr 01, 2011 Sayaf rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: favorites
أؤمن بأن هناك تجارب كثيرة تستحق القراءة سواء لأناسٍ أحياء أم أموات ،
لكن مثل تجربة محمد أسد في هذا الكتاب لا أتوقع أننا سنجد مثلها الا القليل جداً ،
رؤية محمد أسد في هذا الكتاب تجاه الاسلام تحتاج لدراسة من قبل المسلمين اليوم ،
الكتاب ليس قصة اسلام فقط ، هو دراسة لمجتمع اسلامي ورؤية صحيحه للاسلام ،
من قبل شخص نمساوي دخل في الاسلام بعد ما كان يهودي الديانه ،
لو كان هناك نجمة سادسة لوضعت ست نجمات لهذا الكتاب فقط
flag12 likes · Like · comment · see review
Marmor Owais
Dec 25, 2013 Marmor Owais rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Recommended to Marmor by: Ghadasedik
Shelves: 2014-reads, changed-the-way-i-see-the-world
من أفضل ما قرأت علي الإطلاق، رحم الله محمد أسد
رجل عرف الإسلام بقلبه قبل أن ينطق به لسانه،
رجل أدرك الكثير من الحقائق ما زالت تستعصي علي
الفهم بالنسبة لنا، حقاً وصدقاً يهدي الله من يشاء.
هذا الكتاب يعد من أفضل ما قرأت لعدة أسباب ، فهي رحلة رجل بحث عن الإيمان، عرف كثير من الشعوب وتعرف علي كثير من الناس، تحدث عن الشخصية الإيرانية وفسرها بأسلوب ومنهج جديد .. إيران تبدو لي غامضة في كثير من الأحيان، في كل مرة تنجلي جزء من الحقيقة وليس كلها ولكني أحب القراءة عن إيران أعجبني تحليله لسيكولوجية المجتمع ال ...more
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Heba
Feb 01, 2017 Heba rated it really liked it · review of another edition
عشت بأجزاء منه ساعات لا أنساها!
لي عودة مع التفاصيل واقتباسات
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Najla Hammad
Mar 21, 2012 Najla Hammad rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
هذا الكتاب رائع رائع رائع!! من أروع الكتب التي قرأتها.
ندمت جدا على وجود هذا الكتاب على أرفف مكتبتي منذ زمن دون أن أطّلع عليه.
محمّد أسد، المفكر الصحفي النمساوي اليهودي الأصل، تحدث عن رحلته إلى بلاد العرب وعن إسلامه بسطور مزخرفة بالحب والفلسفة.
بيّن وجهة نظره كيهودي سابق، وأوروبي عن قضية فلسطين، وذكر اجتماعه بحاييم وايزمن - وهو من أهم زعماء الحركة الصهيونية بعد بلفور- وتحدث كثيرا عن كرم العرب المُذهل تجاه المسافر وعن علاقاتهم الإجتماعية.
وكأوروبي أيضا، نقل لنا وجهة نظر الأوروبيين تجاه العرب.
وفي هذا ...more
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Batool
Jul 26, 2015 Batool rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: سير-ذاتية
هذا الكتاب أكل نصف عمري، ليس حرفيًا بالطبع لكنني استغرقت ما يقارب الثلاثة أشهر لإنهائه. مدة طويلة جدًا بالنسبة لي وبالنسبة لكتاب سيرة ذاتية.
أحب السِير وأستطيع أن اقرأ السير في وقت خرافي فقط لأنني استمتع بعيش حياة مختلفة تمامًا.
محمد أسد أو كما كان ليوبولد فايس، هرب من خواء الغرب كما يقول للجزيرة العربية بعد أن بحث جيدًا في الديانات ليدخل نهاية في الإسلام.
الكتاب عمومًا مميز وأسلوب محمد في السرد جيد جدًا. لكنّي أعتذر لكل الأصدقاء هنا. لم أجد الكتاب الفايف ستار كما وصفوه!
رجل ذكي ليوبولد لكن وجدت ...more
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Safa Rawashdeh
Jul 28, 2018 Safa Rawashdeh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
كتاب ممتع لا تمل من قراءة صفحاته ، أسلوب السرد لطيف وخفيف ومليئ بالأفكار القيّمة . خفّة الكتابة غمرتني بشعور إني علي أنا أيضاً أن أكتب عن ما مررت به ، فالعبرة ليست في عظمة الأحداث بل في قرءتنا لها وتفسيرها .
تحدث الكاتب عن كل شيئ ، قصة كاملة لحياته وتاريخه الذي عاصره .
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Abdullah Abdulrahman
Feb 12, 2013 Abdullah Abdulrahman rated it really liked it · review of another edition
دائماً هناك شيء مثير في حديث من هو من خارج بيئة ما لا ينتمي إليها في أصواله عن بيئة مختلفة كلياً, أو لأكون أكثر وضوحاً عقيدة أخرى جديدة عليه.. نعيش نحن كمسلمون في الإسلام بالوراثة, بينما عاش "محمد أسد" الإسلام بقناعاته وإيمانه الثابت من الداخل به, فقد رأى بعينيه وقلبه وعقله أن هذة العقيدة هي العقيدة الحسنه, هي الروح التي يبني عليها الإنسان إيمانه التام ويشعر بإكتمال روحه فيها من الداخل. حديثه ووجهة نظره حول العرب وطبيعة الشعوب الإسلامية كان حديثاً شيقاً بشكل كبير, خلق من خلاله نمط جديد من أنماط ...more
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Murtaza
Aug 04, 2013 Murtaza rated it it was amazing
Shelves: favorites
Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss) was an Austrian convert from Judaism to Islam in the early 20th century. His life took him across the Muslim world and into the orbit of some of its most important contemporary historical figures. This book is part travelogue, part biography, and part exploration of his journey towards Islam.
Asad was a personal adviser to King Abdulaziz bin Saud during the period in which the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was formed, and his reflections and observations of Arabia before this period are quite remarkable. As he himself states at the book's outset he is describing a world which no longer exists (and this book is decades old already); so this book has an incredible time-capsule like feel.
He travels through Iran, Iraq, Palestine and North Africa as well and provides his insights into what life was like there before the tumult of modernity fully engulfed these places years later. Throughout his travels he provides broader reflections on his view of Islam as a Westerner, and explains in sequential detail his decision to ultimately adopt the faith and a completely new identity as a Muslim.
Asad had an utterly incredible life (I won't recap it all here), starting as a young aspiring journalist in Vienna and ending up as Pakistan's first ambassador to the UN upon the creation of that state. The writing is riveting, and his ruminations on spirituality and culture are a moving accompaniment to a story which would have been enthralling for its content alone.
Especially interesting to me were his observations of Islam, but particularly of Muslims 'fitra'(the Islamic concept of human nature) and the synthesis of spirituality and action in their lives. The honesty and clarity of his writing about the religion was moving and brilliant. He covers ostensibly heavy topics in a manner which makes them flow effortlessly.
This book has a really timeless quality, and as I mentioned it is a wonderful time-capsule of these countries and of a world which exists only in fragments today. On top of all this the book is a page-turner, fantastically written and exciting. Unreservedly recommended to anyone. (less)
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عبدالرحمن الراشد
Sep 04, 2013 عبدالرحمن الراشد rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
وأنا أطوي الصفحة الأخيرة من الكتاب قلت في نفسي: لن تقرأ مثله في عمرك إلا مرةً أو مرتين كأقصى تقدير!
سطور أدبية رفيعة وفلسفة كونية عميقة وتجربة جريئة .. هو سلمان النمساوي ! يشبه سلمان الفارسي في بحثه عن الحقيقة .. يرفعك في درجات اليقين بدينك القويم..حين ترى هذا الأوربي الذي تربّى تحت ظلّ أبوين يهوديين .. يفرّ من دياره في الغرب ليستقر إلى الشرق عند صحراء نجد!
ومغامراته أضافت للكتاب ميزة كبيرة .. فمن تسلله إلى سوريا دون أوراق رسمية إلى رحلته للكشف عن خيانة فيصل الداويش..ومن تمرده على أهله إلى زوجته ...more
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Diaa
Feb 09, 2014 Diaa rated it liked it · review of another edition
هذا الكتاب يتناول قصة اسلام الصحفي النمساوي ليوبولد فايس الذي قام بتغيير اسمه الى محمد اسد بالرغم من ان هذا الكتاب يصنف كسيرة ذاتية الا انه يعرض حقيقة واضحة جلية هي ان عامل الجذب للاسلام خصوصا اجتذاب الغربيين هو الوسطية في الاسلام والاتزان الذي يحققه هذا الدين بين الروح والجسد فهو دين دنيا ودين وعلم وعمل ودنيا واخرة ولعل طبيعة الحياة في الصحراء والعادات والتقاليد كان لها دور في استمالة محمد اسد الى الاسلام فالصحراء هي رمز للنقاء والصفاء الذهني وطبيعتها الجغرافية تحلق بالانسان وتسمو بروحه الى منا ...more
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إيمان عبد المنعم
Jan 09, 2017 إيمان عبد المنعم rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
حسنا ..
يبدو أني تأخرت كثيرا حتى قرأت هذا الكتاب المهم ، لذا وجدت كثيرا مما قرأت مر علي من قبل ،
لكن الجميل في كتاب الطريق إلى مكة ليس مجرد مفاهيم شديدة العمق عن ديننا ومجتمعنا وحضارتنا ، بل كيف وصل محمد أسد إلى كل ذلك ، نعم الجميل هو الطريق كما اختار المؤلف الاسم قاصدا واعيا وكما أصر على تصور سيرته في ختام الكتاب كقنطرة يعبر بها فوق هاوية مفجعة وسط ملايين من البشر منذ آلاف السنين وحتى قيام الساعة .
أي نور سكب في روح هذا الرجل لتكون بهذا الصفاء والتجرد والمثابرة ، أي نور هداه وسط دياجير الظلام التي ...more
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Khalid Albadrani
Aug 14, 2011 Khalid Albadrani rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
بعد قراءة للنسختين الأصلية والمترجمة, أستطيع القول أن ترجمة (رفعت علي) غير ناقصة, إلا أنها تنبيء عن جهل المترجم بتاريخ الجزيرة العربية والمدن والأماكن فيها.
أسماء أشخاص ومدن كثيرة أخطأ في ترجمتها, شمار=شمّر, ابن راشد=ابن رشيد, الراس=الرّس, ابن بليحيد=ابن بليهد, ابن مسعد=ابن مساعد وبعض الأسماء والتواريخ الأخرى.
عدا هذه الأخطاء في الترجمة لايوجد شيء آخر.
أعجبتني صراحة محمد أسد في آراءه كثيراً.
لفتني في الكتاب أفكاره الفلسفية عن الحضارة وفهمه للدين والعدل والمساواة. هناك أيضاً انتقادات عديدة, للوهابية ...more
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محمد حمزة
Jan 20, 2017 محمد حمزة rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
لم تتسنّ لي كتابة مراجعة لهذا السِفر الرائع الماتع، لكن تجدون هنا مقدمة الكاتب -بصيغة صوتية- والتي ذكر فيها باعثه على التأليف وأمور فكرية مهمة أخرى:
كتاب الطريق إلى مكة | المقدمة | محمد أسد:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S90L...
قناة مِداد مسموع
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يـٰس قرقوم
Jan 31, 2017 يـٰس قرقوم rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: إسلام, تاريخ
لي عودة هنا...
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The Road to Mecca
by Muhammad Asad
4.45 · Rating details · 3,884 ratings · 493 reviews
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.
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Paperback, 375 pages
Published January 1st 2000 by Fons Vitae (first published 1954)
Original TitleThe Road to Mecca
ISBN 1887752374 (ISBN13: 9781887752374)
Edition LanguageEnglish
URLhttp://muhammad-asad.com/Road-to-Mecca.pdf
Other Editions (38)
الطريق إلى مكة
الطريق إلى مكة
The Road to Makkah
الطريق الي مكة
الطريق إلى الإسلام
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4.45 · Rating details · 3,885 ratings · 493 reviews
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Quo
Mar 27, 2017 Quo rated it really liked it
Recommends it for: Anyone interested in learning more about Islam or the search for identity
Shelves: reviewed
The 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 and stating his opposition with Dr. Chaim Weismann, 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.
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. (less)
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Dr.Abdulkarem
May 12, 2015 Dr.Abdulkarem rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
كتاب؛ ليس بسيرة ذاتية، وليس برحلة.. كما قاله المؤلف بحق... بل هي رحلة بحث عن الحقيقة المجردة... البحث عن الله، وعن دين الله؛ ذا النبع الصافي.. رحلة في الجزيرة العربية؛ بداية القرن العشرين... تفسير معاصر، ومنطقي لكثير من منطلقات الملل اليهودية، والمسيحية، والمحمدية... بيان لأساس ما يُسمى الأخوان المسلمون.. ونشأتهم؛ أيام عبد العزيز بن سعود... وانقلابهم عليه.. نظرتهم المجردة.. في إطار أهداف محمد بن عبد الوهاب.. وتطبيقاتهم؛ لتلك الإصلاحات.. حياتهم؛ اي الإخوان (حتى اليوم) ما بين دم، وموت، وجنة..
قصة ر ...more
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عمر
Jul 30, 2012 عمر rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
يا الله، حقًا؛ من يرد الله أن يهديه يشرح صدره للإسلام، حقًا وصدقًا ويقينًا؛ من يرد الله به خيرًا يوفقه إلى كل خير.
رحم الله محمد أسد، لقد وجد طريقه بإذن الله عن طريق البحث والرحلات المتفرقة في الجزيرة العربية في سيناء والقدس والأردن ودمشق ومصر والمملكة السعودية وبغداد وإيران وكابول وتركيا وعاد إلى ألمانيا وليبيا، التقى العديد من الشخصيات المؤثرة في التاريخ كالشاعر محمد إقبال رحمه الله، والزعيم الشيخ أحمد إدريس السنوسي، والثائر عمر المختار، وكان على صداقة مع الملك عبد العزيز بن عبد الرحمن بن سعود، ...more
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Abu Hasan محمد عبيد
May 18, 2011 Abu Hasan محمد عبيد rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
كنت أعتقد أن هذا الكتاب هو السيرة الذاتية لمحمد أسد... فإذ بي أفاجأ بأنه، على ضخامته، ليس سوى شيء من سيرة سنوات عمره الإثنين والثلاثين الأولى عموما، والسنوات الخمس الأخيرة منها خصوصا، وهي السنوات الأولى لإسلامه المليئة بالأحداث والمغامرات
هدف المؤلف من كتابة سيرته هو (رفع الحجب السميكة والأستار الثقيلة التي تفصل بين الإسلام وحضارته عن العقل الغربي)
كتب المؤلف سيرته على شكل قصة، تبدأ برحلته الأخيرة في الصحراء، والتي يكاد يُشرف فيها على الهلاك، وتنتهي بوصوله إلى مكة، في رمزية واضحة لقصة اعتناقه للإس ...more
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أبو يوسف
May 02, 2013 أبو يوسف rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: favorite-books
لأول مرة أنتهي من كتاب وأعزم على قرائته مرة آخرى ...... من الكتب التي لابد لك من قرائتها قبل أن تموت......تجنب طبعتي ّمكتبة مكتبة الملك عبدالعزيز و مكتبة العبيكان المنقحتين لحوالي ٦٠ صفحة !! قاتلهم الله أنى يؤفكون
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إسراء البردان
Sep 26, 2018 إسراء البردان rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: سيروتراجم
رجل ك هذا تستحق أن تُقرأ سيرته الذاتية والذي أسماها "الطريق إلى مكة" لكن الحقيقة طريقه كان للتوحيد, للإسلام ,ربما عبر عنه بمكة لأنها منبع الرسالة الأولى منذ عهد إبراهيم حتى بعث الله نبيه -صلى الله عليه وسلم- هي رمز للتوحيد, للقبلة, للعقيدة ..
أرى ان المراجعة تُهدر قيمة هذا الكتاب ربما اكتب بضع كلمات لأنوه أنه كتاب يستحق أن يُقتنى ويُقرأ مرة بعد مرة ...
شاكرة للرجل في كشك بيع مطبوعات المجلس الأعلى للثقافة في أحد معارض الكتاب بمدينتي لانه أصرَّ إصرار عجيب على أخذي للكتاب ,أخبرته أن نقودي نفدت ولا أم ...more
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Abeer Alamri
Jan 20, 2012 Abeer Alamri rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
" لقد تحقق أخيرا رغبتي أيام صباي أن أنتمي إلى مدار معين من الفكرات والآراء, أن أكون جزءا من أمة مؤلفة من أخوة"
بالفعل ! تحقق ما أراده محمد أسد في كتابه الرائع " الطريق إلى الإسلام ". في هذا الكتاب يصف محمد إسلام رحلته الشيقة من الظلام إلى النور, كيف ترك بلده النمسا وتجول عبر البلدان الإسلامية والعربية كمراسل صحفي لأحدى الصحف. رغبة منه في سد الفراغ الروحي الذي كان يعاني منه, لم يكن يعلم في رحلاته تلك كيف أنه كان ينجذب لاشعوريا نحو الحق .. كيف انبهر بمقدار الأمن والرضا الداخلي الكبير الذي كان ينعم ...more
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Nick
Aug 29, 2014 Nick rated it really liked it
By turns achingly beautiful, exasperating, illogical, and penetrating, The Road to Mecca is one extraordinary man's transformation from disaffected European to devout Muslim. Along the way, this journalist became friends with the King of Saudi Arabia, got to know the Shah of Iran, and met just about every player in the Middle East in the first part of the 20th Century. His perspective is skewed, flawed, and deeply insightful. It's a huge corrective to the Western media's simplistic and idiotically one-sided reporting on the Arab world. Yes, he's annoyingly dismissive of Western attitudes at times, but that's to help us better understand the Arab point of view. And he's simply wrong a good deal of the time, because he's made the journey of transformation and it has made a partisan out of him, a partisan who sees deeply but not always fairly.
I don't think anyone in the West can understand Iran, or Iraq, or any of the other countries of that part of the world, without reading this book as a starter. And his lyrical descriptions of traveling by camel will make you want to put down the book and jump on a plane to make your way through the desert too. I recommend the book highly, not because it's a complete guide to anything, but because we of the West desperately need to understand other parts of the globe better, and this is a good corrective to begin with. (less)
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Sul6an
Mar 13, 2014 Sul6an rated it liked it · review of another edition
رجلٌ هارب من ماديةِ الغرب ، له دمٌ لجوج في البحث عن الحقيقةِ ، بحثَ في اليهوديةِ فلم يقتنع بتلكَ الرؤيةِ بأنهم شعب اللهِ المختار ، و بحثَ في المسيحيةِ فما أقنعتهُ فكرةُ " الخلاص " و رأها تفرقة غير مبررةٍ - من وجهةِ نظرة - بينَ الروحِ و الجسد ، و جاءَ بهِ قدرهُ إلى الشرقِ العربي ، ليدخُلَ رويداً رويداً في الإسلام عن طريقِ إعجابهِ بطبائِع العرب ، و أخلاقياتهم في التعامل . رجلٌ له تاريخه في المغامراتِ و الرحلاتِ ، فبِدءاً بالقُدس إلى مِصرَ إلى دمشق و الأردن و العراق إلى بلادِ فارس ، و غيرها من رحلا ...more
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Hafsa
Aug 13, 2008 Hafsa rated it it was amazing
Shelves: islam, literature
I was supposed to read this book five years ago...in an Islamic Religious Thought and Practice class. For whatever reason, I couldn't get into it--at all--which is crazy considering I couldn't put it down this time around.
This book is brilliant because you can read it on so many levels- first, as a man's personal journey into faith (which includes some pretty harsh critiques of the system in which he was raised). Second, as a detailed history of a very critical period of recent Muslim history. It was so fascinating to read that he personally knew and was close to so many historical figures-- Ibn Saud, the Grand Sanusi, etc. And third, as an introduction to Islam.
Asad's writing style is magnificent--he is able to articulate, thru his words, things that most Muslims just "feel."
I think in many ways his book is still relevant today-- although so much has changed/ been cemented. East and West can't necessarily be seen as such diametrically opposing systems, as he posits in this book. (less)
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ذكرى فلفلان
Sep 27, 2014 ذكرى فلفلان rated it it was amazing
Shelves: favorite
"مهما كان قدرُ الجمال الشكلي الذي يمكن للإنسان أن يصنعه بعقله ويده، سيكون من قصور الخيال أن يظنّ أنّه يتناسب مع عظمة الله، ولذلك فإن أبسط شكل يمكن أن يدركه العقل البشريّ هو أعظم شكل يتناسب مع عظمة الله" ولأن الله مرتبطٌ بالجمال أينما كنّا فإنني أستطيع أن أطلق على هذه الرحلة الإيمانية التي حدثت بدون قصدٍ للكاتب أنها سلسلة أحداث تأخدنا إلى كل مكان..
ستسافر من كرم البدو إلى فكاهة مصر
رائحة شجر البرتقال في القدس إلى سوريا
إيران وأوروبا وإلى كافة بقاع الأرض
ستقرأ عن الاستعمار، تاريخ المملكة وآل سعود
ستحض ...more
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Huda
Sep 14, 2009 Huda rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Recommended to Huda by: Mrs.NJD
Shelves: arabic-books, religion
اعتقدت في البداية أنني سأقرأ عن قصة إعتناق أحد الأوروبيين لدين الإسلام
لكني الآن أميل إلى تصنيفها من السير الذاتية أو المذكرات أو أيا كان
محمد أسد
صحفي نمساوي اعتنق الإسلام في حقبة زمنية حساسة جدا مليئة بالأحداث، وبالرغم من هذا نجده في كل منها! أمره عجيب
!!
بداية تعرفه على الملك عبدالعزيز مؤسس مملكتنا الحبيبة
زيارته للأزهر أيام الاستعمار
ومقابلته للشخصية الفذة في ليبيا ، عمر المختار
وغيرها
أتسائل ماذا سيكون رأيه إذا مازار المملكة بعد كل هذه السنوات
ورأى "النقلة" التي تنبأ بها مسبقا؟
:)
شكرا د.نجود
أظننا نحت ...more
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Hasan El gebaly
Sep 07, 2011 Hasan El gebaly rated it it was amazing
كتاب رائع لأقصى درجة
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Nojood Alsudairi
Oct 30, 2007 Nojood Alsudairi rated it it was amazing
Recommends it for: All good readers
Shelves: non-fiction, fiction
Just read it even if you do not care to know about Islam. A great traveller's story.
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Charles
Feb 21, 2015 Charles rated it it was amazing
This is a fascinating book—half travelogue and half conversion memoir. Muhammad Asad was born a Jew, Leopold Weiss, in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in what is now Ukraine, the city of Lvov). He was prominent both in interactions with the West in the 20th Century, for example as Pakistani ambassador to the UN, and in theological work, including translation and exegesis of the Q’uran. Asad is regarded, and should be even more regarded in these days of Al Qaeda and ISIS, as a voice for a revitalized, mainstream (he would accurately reject the term “moderate”) Islam. But long before that, he was just a Westerner adrift and looking for spiritual answers.
Asad found those answers in Arabia. In many ways, The Road To Mecca is of the same genre as other travel books of Western men fascinated by Arabia in the first third of the 20th Century, such as Lawrence of Arabia, or lesser known figures such as Wilfred Thesiger (Arabian Sands). A certain type of Western man (a woman could not have had the opportunity) fell in love with the people and landscape of pre-petroleum Arabia, believing that the people had unique virtues (though they admitted the people were not composed only of virtues) and the land brought out the best in men. Some of this smacks of naïve love of the idealized noble savage, of course, and you see the same thing more commonly with Westerners and East Asian cultures like Tibet (hello, Richard Gere!). Conversion to Islam was not the norm, though, for Westerners entranced by Arabia and the Arabs. But Asad was simultaneously on a spiritual quest, and, like others before and since, after rejecting much else found what he was looking for in Islam.
Asad’s memoir is told in the form of flashbacks during a desert trip in 1927 with a traveling companion, ultimately to Mecca (not for his first time)—at the time he lived in Medina, so he had made the hajj pilgrimage several times already. In his book, he alternates descriptions of Arabian geography (as well as Syria, Iraq and Iran, and a little of the Maghreb), with descriptions of key Arabs and their personal and political doings (he knew Ibn Saud well, along with a host of lesser players, although not, apparently, the Hashemite kings of the Hejaz, deposed by Ibn Saud but later kings of Jordan to this day, and, briefly, Iraq). And all along in his book Asad is narrating his own life, and his own religious development, with apparently great honesty and clarity.
Asad rejected Judaism and became agnostic early, although he came from a rabbinical family. His main objection to Judaism is that he could not believe in a God that was focused nearly to exclusion on one people—he repeatedly and accurately contrasts Islam’s ability to embrace all kinds of people and form a new community from them with the exclusive aspects of Judaism. But Asad does not fall into the kind of crude anti-Judaic attitudes so common among modern Muslims, even though such an attitude is well supported in the Q’uran and the Sunnah, and is the historical norm in Islam. (Q’uranic verses such as 2:62, frequently quoted to make Islam seem universalist, “Surely those who believe, those of Jewry, the Christians and the Sabaeans . . . . whoever has faith in Allah and the Last Day, and works righteousness, their wage awaits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be upon them, and neither shall they sorrow” are not to the contrary—their exclusive interpretation in Islam has always been that those verses only apply to Jews before Jesus, and then to Christians before Muhammad, and have zero application today, after Muhammad. See The Reliance of the Traveler, the main Shafi’i “catechism,” at w4.4) He was, however, very opposed to Zionism and the founding of Israel, and friendly with Jews such as Jacob de Haan, a Dutch Jew assassinate by the Haganah in 1924 for favoring negotiations with Arab leaders.
Asad also seems to have considered Christianity, or so he asserts. If I had an objection to this book (although to object to someone else’s reasons for his personal conversion is obviously pretty silly), it is that he does not seem to understand Christianity at all, in that he ascribes to Christianity critical doctrines not actually found there, and ascribes his rejection of Christianity to his aversion to those (bogus) doctrines. The core “doctrine,” to which he returns repeatedly, is that Christianity (supposedly) believes matter and the body evil, and the spirit good. He contrasts this to Islam’s holistic approach, in which nothing Allah has made can be bad, and each human’s physical body and spirit are both key concerns of Islam.
But of course this is a false view of Christianity. More precisely, it is a heretical view. It is the view of the early Gnostics, the Manichees, and the Albigensians, all rejected by mainstream Christianity. They posited dualism—that, as Asad says, the body is bad and the spirit good. But mainstream Christianity holds the opposite—like Islam, it holds that all what God has created is good, though of course Islam and Christianity both hold it can be mis-used. Asad appears to have missed the key doctrine of Christianity of the resurrection of the body, found in both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed. There is a difference between Christianity and Islam, in that Islam does not recognize original sin and Christianity does have non-heretical strains that emphasize spiritual precedence, such as the eremitic monks, but it is just not correct to posit the dualism that Asad appears to be believe to be central to Christianity.
Asad also falls into silly historical errors, such as supposing Islam’s view of the West is dictated by the Crusades, and that the Crusades were the formative moment of Western civilization, whereas in reality the Crusades were forgotten by Muslims (who won, after all) until their memory was resurrected for political purposes in the 19th Century, and were and are of minor importance in the West as well, except as a modern day tool for ignorant Americans to traduce Christianity and the West. He (in passing) also follows the common Muslim habit of erroneously ascribing important scientific inventions to Muslims, from algebra and trigonometry to “Arabic numerals” and the compass, in the usual effort to compensate for Muslim lack of scientific contributions in modern times (or, really, since the 11th Century, and even then mostly by non-Muslims under Muslim domination, and nearly all second-order scientific contributions). But these flaws are understandable and not at all germane to Asad’s basic narrative.
He also points out what are today interesting historical nuggets, such as that until the 19th Century Wahhabi “revival,” the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula were seen as the laxest Muslims at all, and are now the most religious (not always to everyone’s benefit, then or now—Asad, while recognizing certain virtues, notes that it made them “proud, haughty men who regard themselves as the only true representatives of Islam and all other Muslim peoples as heretics”). Finally, he inadvertently confirms a variety of Western views of Islamic cultures as retrograde in certain areas as entirely correct, as when he notes how a family desperately tried and succeeded in hoodwinking him into marrying an 11-year old virgin. (He divorced her when he discovered her age on their wedding night, and did not consummate the marriage.) “[Her mother] was stupefied [by his demand to immediately divorce the girl]. She had never heard of a man who refused so choice a morsel—an eleven-year-old virgin—and must have thought that there was something radically wrong with me.”
Presumably this doesn’t really matter for Asad’s personal conversion. He was attracted to the community of believers in Islam; the fact that Islam provides answers to nearly every question in life, particularly those not directly related to spiritual matters, but to all matters of life (in this Islam is not dissimilar to such Christian groups as Opus Dei or Third Order Franciscans, though the comparison probably shouldn’t be stretched); the harmony of Muslim belief; and the peace Islam brought to the people he knew. He says himself that what he had was “a longing to find my own restful place in the world,” and he found it in Islam. One thing to keep in mind, of course, was that the 1920s were a time when many in the West, after the First World War, despaired of any future for the west. As Asad says: “A world in upheaval and convulsion: that was our Western world.” Islam offered a world united in itself, without any upheaval and convulsion, if properly ordered according to its own principles.
Asad is broad-minded, tolerant, and fascinating. Those are not characteristics in good odor among many strains of modern Islam, which tends in many cases to be anything but modern. His translation/exegesis of the Q’uran, The Message of the Koran, is banned in Saudi Arabia for supposed Mu’tazili tendencies (perceived as undermining the alleged divine nature of the Q’uran) and a willingness to strongly endorse ijtihad, or continued analysis and reasoning, in exegesis of the Q’uran. But whatever your theological predilection, these characteristics are what make Asad’s memoir very much worth reading.
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Δx Δp ≥ ½ ħ
Feb 24, 2009 Δx Δp ≥ ½ ħ rated it it was amazing
Shelves: i-me-mine, a-day-in-the-life, got-to-get-you-into-my-life
...sebuah usaha untuk belajar mengarifi hidup dari jatuh bangunnya para aktifis meraih segenggam cinta... memberi kekayaan batin kepada kita tentang betapa penuh warnanya perjalanan hidup manusia (M. Fauzil Adhim)
baca ulang edisi Inggrisnya
kisah seorang anak manusia, dalam menjawab kegundahan hatinya akan pencarian Iman dan Tuhan. membaca buku ini, kita akan terlempar pada masa-masa suram awal abad dua puluh, pada kehidupan seorang remaja pemberontak.... yang di tengah kegundahan dan kecewanya nekat betualang ke luar negri. siapa sangka jika petualangan nekatnya ke Afrika, malah menyeretnya ke jantung peradaban salah satu agama terbesar, Mekah. apa yang ingin dia akhiri di Afrika, justru menjadi awal bagi masa depannya
memoar-otobiografi ini diceritakan bak novel petualangan, diwarnai keajaiban-keajaiban yang mencengangkan--betapa Tuhan menyambut dengan tangan terbuka hambaNya yang kembali kejalanNya--kita akan terhanyut dalam perjuangan berat seorang anak muda liar saat mengarungi ganasnya padang pasir, dikejar-kejar bangsa barbar, sampai terseret pada gejolak peperangan antar suku dan terjebak pada titik nadir hidup dan mati. siapa sangka jika petualangan liar dan nekat itu akan membuat kehidupan hidupnya jungkir balik.... dan takdir, tak pernah kehabisan kejutan yang tak terduga baginya.
dan di Mekah, Tuhan menjadi saksi kelahiran seorang manusia baru bernama Muhammad Asad, orang yang dulu dipanggil Leopold Weiss--salah seorang pemikir Islam kontemporer terbesar di abad 20--, namun dengan jiwa yang berbeda.
bagi penggemar film petualangan ala Lawrence of Arabia dan petualangan herois ala buku termasyhur karya Karl May bahkan pecinta novel magis The Alchemist-nya Coelho, buku ini adalah paduan sempurna ketiganya. Petualangan fisik yang dibalut petualangan iman. meski buku ini ditulis oleh orang yang beralih agama menjadi seorang Muslim, saat anda membaca buku ini, Anda tak perlu merasa diislamkan.
......I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'What is the sum total of my life?' somthing in me seems to answer, 'You have set out to exchange one world for another-to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.' And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime....
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hanan al-herbish al-herbish
Jan 29, 2012 hanan al-herbish al-herbish rated it it was amazing
قصة جميلة , طوفت بي في الصحراء , والجبال , والثلوج ..
في الأمصار العربية , اسواقها , حياتها , و ساكنيها ..
هو ليست رحلة , ومناظر , ومتغيرات , هو فلسفة وفكر عميقين جدا ً ,
احببت تفكير محمد اسد كثيرا ً , واذاعته بواطن الاشياء , وفلسفة الطبيعة ,
السماء , النجوم , والناس..
لقد احببت الصحراء ... وتمنيت ان ازور الكثبان الرملية , والعب في الرمال,
واعد النجوم في روض سماء الصحراء الخصيب ...
لقد استمتعت في قراءتي , ولأول مرة اقرأ عن تاريخ المملكة . والملك عبدالعزيز ..
اضاف الى معلوماتي الكثير, عن تاريخ حكام الممل ...more
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melissa madjid
May 05, 2010 melissa madjid rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: ebook, unfinished
Leopold, before changing name into "Muhammad Asad", has wrote this noble book to read..
not only read, but truly make a person-or as we are-to have more answers about basic belief in islam
this is one of which i love the most...
Leopold's first exposure to Islam occurred during his initial trip to
Jerusalem when he witnessed a group of people praying in congregation.
It somehow disturbed him to see so real a prayer combined with almost
mechanical body movements, and one day he asked the imâm, who
understood a little English: "Do you really believe that God expects you to show Him your respect by repeated bowing and kneeling and
prostration? Might it not be only to look into oneself and to pray to Him in the stillness of one's heart? Why all these movements of your body?
He replied: How else then should we worship God? Did he not
create both, soul and body, together? And this being so, should man not
pray with his body as well as his soul?” He then went on to explain the
significance of the various movements of the prayer.
This was an important moment in Leopold's life, since he would
one day observe: Years later, I realized that with his simple explanation
the hajji had opened to me the first door to Islam. (less)
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Matthew Moes
Jul 31, 2011 Matthew Moes rated it it was amazing
Shelves: biography-memoir, philosophy-religion-spirituality
Anything but a straightforward autobiography, this is a beautifully written memoir by a rare individual that transports the reader to a completely different time and place; and yet the observations and assessments of everything from the religious to the political are still relevant now and a great stimulus for discussion.
I especially enjoyed Ch X entitled, "Dajjal", as it contains his "conversion" story, which as in many cases is more of a self-discovery amidst a scathing critique of the contrast between Islam and the demise of Muslim civilization. There is plenty more of that to wrestle with here, and I cannot help but wonder what he would say today. I consider this a must-read for anyone who wishes to be literate in modern Islam.
I saved some of my favorite quotes in my quotes application. I am sure I would find much more if I read it again with a pencil in hand! (less)
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