Becoming Muslim
Muhammad Asad
(Austria)
Statesman, Journalist, and Author
About the author:
Muhammad Asad, Leopold Weiss, was born in Livow, Austria
(later Poland) in 1900, and at the age of 22 made his visit to
the Middle East. He later became an outstanding foreign
correspondent for the Franfurtur Zeitung, and after his
conversion to Islam travelled and worked throughout the Muslim
world, from North Africa to as far East as Afghanistan. After
years of devoted study he became one of the leading Muslim
scholars of our age. After the establishment of Pakistan, he
was appointed the Director of the Department of Islamic
Reconstruction, West Punjab and later on became Pakistan's
Alternate Representative at the United Nations. Muhammad
Asad's two important books are: Islam at the Crossroads and
Road to Mecca. He also produced a monthly journal Arafat. At
present he is working upon an English translation of the Holy
Qur'an. [Asad completed his translation and has passed away. -MSA-USC]
In 1922 I left my native country, Austria, to travel through
Africa and Asia as a Special Correspondent to some of the
leading Continental newspapers, and spent from that year onward
nearly the whole of my time in the Islamic East. My interest in
the nations with which I came into contact was in the beginning
that of an outsider only. I saw before me a social order and an
outlook on life fundamentally different from the European; and
from the very first there grew in me a sympathy for the more
tranquil -- I should rather say: more mechanised mode of living
in Europe. This sympathy gradually led me to an investigation of
the reasons for such a difference, and I became interested in
the religious teachings of the Muslims. At the time in question,
that interest was not strong enough to draw me into the fold of
Islam, but it opened to me a new vista of a progressive human
society, of real brotherly feeling. The reality, however, of
presentday Muslim life appeared to be very far from the ideal
possibilities given in the religious teachings of Islam.
Whatever, in Islam, had been progress and movement, had turned,
among the Muslims, into indolence and stagnation; whatever there
had been of generosity and readiness for self-sacrifice, had
become, among the present-day Muslims, perverted into
narrow-mindedness and love of an easy life.
Prompted by this discovery and puzzled by the obvious
incongruency between Once and Now, I tried to approach the
problem before me from a more intimate point of view: that is, I
tried to imagine myself as being within the circle of Islam. It
was a purely intellectual experiment; and it revealed to me,
within a very short time, the right solution. I realised that
the one and only reason for the social and cultural decay of the
Muslims consisted in the fact that they had gradually ceased to
follow the teachings of Islam in spirit. Islam was still there;
but it was a body without soul. The very element which once had
stood for the strength of the Muslim world was now responsible
for its weakness: Islamic society had been built, from the very
outset, on religious foundations alone, and the weakening of the
foundations has necessarily weakened the cultural structure --
and possibly might cause its ultimate disappearance.
The more I understood how concrete and how immensely
practical the teachings of Islam are, the more eager became my
questioning as to why the Muslims had abandoned their full
application to real life. I discussed this problem with many
thinking Mulsims in almost all the countries between the Libyan
Desert and the Pamirs, between the Bosphorus and the Arabian
Sea. It almost became an obsession which ultimately overshadowed
all my other intellectual interests in the world of Islam. The
questioning steadily grew in emphasis -- until I, a non-Muslim,
talked to Muslims as if I were to defend Islam from their
negligence and indolence. The progress was imperceptible to me,
until one day -- it was in autumn 1925, in the mountains of
Afghanistan -- a young provincial Governor said to me: "But you
are a Muslim, only you don't know it yourself." I was struck by
these words and remained silent. But when I came back to Europe
once again, in 1926, I saw that the only logical consequence of
my attitude was to embrace Islam.
So much about the circumstances of my becoming a Muslim.
Since then I was asked, time and again: "Why did you embrace
Islam ? What was it that attracted you particularly ?" -- and I
must confess: I don't know of any satisfactory answer. It was
not any particular teaching that attracted me, but the whole
wonderful, inexplicably coherent structure of moral teaching and
practical life programme. I could not say, even now, which
aspect of it appeals to me more than any other. 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, with the result of
an absolute balance and solid composure. Probably this feeling
that everything in the teachings and postulates of Islam is "in
its proper place," has created the strongest impression on me.
There might have been, along with it, other impressions also
which today it is difficult for me to analyse. 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. So it was in my
case. Islam came over me like a robber who enters a house by
night; but, unlike a robber, it entered to remain for good.
Ever since then I endeavoured to learn as much as I could
about Islam. I studied the Qur'an and the Traditions of the
Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him); I studied the
language of Islam and its history, and a good deal of what has
been written about it and against it. I spent over five years in
the Hijaz and Najd, mostly in al-Madinah, so that I might
experience something of the original surroundings in which this
religion was preached by the Arabian Prophet. As the Hijaz is
the meeting centre of Muslims from many countries, I was able to
compare most of the different religious and social views
prevalent in the Islamic world in our days. Those
studies and comparisons created in me the firm conviction that
Islam, as a spiritual and social phenomenon, is still in spite
of all the drawbacks caused by the deficiencies of the Muslims,
by far the greatest driving force mankind has ever experienced;
and all my interest became, since then, centred around the
problem of its regeneration.
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