The Road to Mecca

Muhammad Asad

Muhammad Juhammad Asad Asad was arguably one of as Leopold Weiss on the 20th century's greatest Muslim thinkers from July 2, 1900 in Galicia, now in Poland, part of t the Weempire, be converted to Islam at the age of 26. The study wears before then Austrian empire, bed in The Road To Mecca, reflexible to his restless search of a home, a man struck by wanderlust, unable to quell his restless spirit un embracing Islam.

In 1922 he became a Near East correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, then one of the most outstanding newspapers in Europe. His career in journalism took him to Palest most outstanding, Perso, Jordan, the Arabian peninsula and Afghew's and Arabia unique perspective on world affairs, particularly issues relating to Jews and Arabs: Crossing the Mediterranean. Leopold's first stop was at Cairo where he tried to learn Arabic and spend some time with Shaikh Mustafa Maraghi, a student of the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh. Mustafa Maraghi, a keen and critical thinker himself subsequently became the Shaikh of the University of Al-Azhar.

Asad traveled to Amman, Damascus, Tripoli and Aleppo, to Baghdad, to the Kurdish mountains and Iran, and to the wild mountains and steppes of Afghanistan. Traveling extensively throughout the Muslim world, his interest in Islam deepened. To understand how Muslims could regenerate themselves, Asad took a characteristic approach he immersed himself in understanding the source of Islam, the Qur'an. Embarking on an intensive study of classical Arabic, he began at the same time living among the bedouin of Central and Eastern Arabia whose speech and linguistic associations had essentially remained unchanged since the time of Prophet Muhammad when the Qur'an was being revealed. The results of this experience helped him with his labour of love. The Message of the Qur'an.

Asad traveled far and wide, conferred with kings, leaders and the common man "between the Libyan Desert and the Pamirs, between the Bosporus and the Arabian Sea," and began putting his ideas on paper. Islam at the Crossroads, published as early as 1934, still stuns the contemporary reader with its analysis of Muslim decline and its bold prescription for instilling self-assurance to an Islamic world suffering the onslaught of Western technology.

When World War II broke out, Asad was in India where he befriended Muhammad Iqbal, the spiritual father of the idea of a separate Pakistan. Iqbal persuaded Asad to abandon plans to travel to eastern Turkestan, China and Indonesia and "to help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic state".

Asad was interned in India at the end of the war. When Pakistan was born in 1947, Asad

was appointed its undersecretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and became its permanent

representative to the United Nations in 1952. Here he met his wife, Pola Hamida, and later began writing The Road to Mecca (1954), which was described by the New York Post as a "very rare and powerful book" and by the Times Literary Supplement as “a narrative of great power and beauty".

vii

A few years later, he wrote The Principles of State and Government in Islam, where Asad lays down in unambiguous terms the foundation of an Islamic state based on the Qur'an and Sunnah (traditions of the Prophet).

Muhammad Asad died on 20 February 1992 and was buried in a cemetery in Granada, Spain.