Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon

7/30/2019 Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon

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/s!.mk Studies 37:4 11 9981

ARCHIVESMUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA

Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview withKarl Gunter Simon

(fr.) ELMA Rum HARDER

The white village hangs on the cliffs over that sunny coastline aboutwhich the Spaniards occasionally say: "Gibraltar might be ours onceagain, but never again the COSia del So l". With its old church, thepilgrimage grotto, and the picturesque Plaza de Toros, the village isext remely interesting for anthropologists and sociologists , and hasinspired three books. Twenty years.ago eight thousand inhabitants livedhere. two thirds on their little farms in the fields . Their life wasburdensome. The villagers, excepting the large landowners, were bitterlypoor. "In this year. 1988", says the nice Danish woman at the foreignoffice in Ayuntamiento , "we have 16,000 Spaniards and 32,000 mristasresidenles - cOllage dwellers from 52 countries" . The vegetables areexpensive, the fields have become trim residential gardens, the farmershave become bricklayers and waiters, and innumerable bars serve friedchicken or fish and chips , Donkeys carry tourists, and speedy mopedsscreech throughout the night. The village , hardly accessible by cartwenty years ago, appears today as one of the richest Spanishcommunities . The new city hall costs three million Marks .One of the thousands of new houses is called Dar al -Andalus . Thatis the Arabic word for house. Although it appears Arabic-Spanish,

Elma Ruth Harder teaches at the Inlernational School of Islamabad, Thearticle was originally published in Frank/uner Allgemeillt lilung on November18, 1988 , The lranslator is gr3leFuilO Ron Peters for going through lhe fi rstdraft of the translation and for mak ing valuable suggeslions.


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gains weight with time as Muslims in politics seek their rools. And itwas Arabs who entrusted me with The Road to Mecca", theautobiography that ends in 1932. Muhammad Asad decided, at 32, toleave Arabia and travel eastward 10 India. From then on his biographycan only be reconstructed from fragments. Pakistan. New York, andthen. ..? German Muslims told me they had seen the old MuhammadAsad in Makkah as a pilgrim. He was living in Tangien. Finally aGerman ambassador, himself a Muslim, pointed us in the right direction.

The white village, Dar al-Andalus. "He grants no interviewsanymore", Mrs Pola Hamida tens us, but the name Frankfurter hasperhaps made him sentimental. We sit at supper. Salmon from thesupermarket in Marbella and fresh black German bread . "The bestbread", says the old master, "was made by a baker in L'vov', I still havethe taste on my tongue". L'vov'! "Well. yes, Lemberg, that was thenAustria. Do you know that Lemberg comes from ' lowe' (lion), andwhen I converled to Islam in Berlin in 1926, the Indian Imam said to me,'you are called Leopold, and leo means lion - therefore we take theArabic name for lion, Asad' ".

L'vov , Lemberg in 190Cl was "a long street of somewhat dustyelegance, lined by chestnut trees and laid with small wooden brickswhich muffle the hoofbeats of the horses and render every hour of theday into a lazy afternoon. I loved this lovely street with a much greaterawareness than befit my young age, and not JUSt because it was mychildhood street. I loved it, I believe, for the stateliness with which itflowed from the lively centre of that most lively of all cities gradually tothe edge of the city and then into the quiet of the woods and to the greatcemetery, which found itself in the midst of the forest. Beautiful wagonspassed occasionally on their rubber wheels to the lively, rhythmic traptrap of horse hooves . Yet in the winter, when the street was CQveredfoot-deep in snow, the sleighs flew over it and steam clouds issued fromthe nostrils of the hones, and their bells jingled in the frosty air .. . "

"Do you also find", says Mrs Pola Hamida at the supper table, "thattoday the German written in the newspapers is wone than then"? Well,yes. after the war, presumably under the influence of the Americans, amagazine style took hold, and whoever has written such for a few yearscan never get out of it. "No, no" , says the old Mr Weiss-As ad, "nO{ JUStin the Stern or Spiegel, but also in the newspapen. The FrankfurterZeilUlIg of that time ... "

In German, LwQw. AU proper names have lottn given their equivatent Englishspellings.


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536 _MIl GUtlIEA O M O N M u ~ " m m l t d Asad and The Road 10 M ~ c c .

He learned Gennan from his father, Polish from his mother. Hisfather, a welJ . placed allorney, was born in the Bukovina region as sonof the rabbi at Czernowitz; his mother was the child of a rich banker inL 'yav. Thirteen-year-old Leopold read Sienkiewicz in Polish, Karl May,Nietzsche and Rilke in German, and the Torah and Talmud in Hebrewand Aramaic,"Theological and philosophical ways of thinking did not slir meseriously at that time; that which I longed for deep inside did notdifferentiate itself intrinsically from desires and expectations of otherboys my age - action aoo exercise and adventure, .. The firs! decade ofthe European twentieth century stood under the sign of a spi ritualemptiness. Most of the moral values, which fo r hundreds of years hadbeen considered steadfast, were shattered under the terrible jolt of theworld war, and no new values were at hand, to replace those which werelost. All seemed fragile. A feeling of inner insecurity hovered over thepeople, a premonition of conununal and spiritual revolution, which leftalmost everyone doubting whether mankind's deed and thought wouldever again anain the old firmness and constancy. Everything seemed 10flow there in a shapeless flood, and the spiritual unres t of youth wasunable to find a secure footing anywhere ". This trend is noteworthy andwell known. Also those who were born a generation later experiencedand discovered the same thing after Ihe end of the second world war inthis century.Can man save himself by merely resorting to adventure, or does heneed any other deeds? He smuggled hilll'lelf, as a ful1grown fourteenyear-old, into the Austrian army, but his father brought him back. Whenhe reached the age of military service, the war was almost over. Heexperienced the University in Vienna, hunger in Prague, his first smallsuccesses in Berl in . He worked as a theatrical assistant for Mumau as atelephone operator, and finally, as a reporter for a news agency. "Andone day, in the spring of 1922, I received a letter from my UncleDorian". Uncle Dorian, Viennese student of Freud. administered alunatic asylum in Jerusalem. "As he was a stranger to Zionism and hadnot much use for Arabs and in addition was a bachelor, he felt himselfalone in a world which had nothing more 10 offer him than work andincome, and in this lonesomeness he remembered his nephew . And so Ifound myself on the deck of a ship on my way to the East".The trip became a turning point in the life of the twenty-two-yearold. "I stood face to face with a totally new sensation. A warm humanbreath streamed from the blood of the Arabs in their thoughts andgestures; there was none of that painful soul-splitting to be seen, those


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for her husband, after she had found the old negatives: clay palaces, theauthor in Arab garb, his Bedouin wife with and without veil, manyfamous leaders of the East who have long been history alreadyluminaries like 'Abd al-'Aiil ibn Sa'lid, F a y ~ a l ; his son and heir, theGreat Sanilsi; Reza Khan, the late Shah of Persia. Actually, when onesees his life, he must have been as famous as Lawrence of Arabia. Doesit depend on the name? ' Well, yes", says Muhammad Asad, smiling,"Lawrence had a good biographer - Lowell Thomas made him famous'.Lawrence has become an English legend. Though he was a friend of theArabs, he sti1J remained English. "And I - I crossed over to the othercamp' .

Henceforth he was a man of the Islamic world. 'Abd aJ-'AlIZ ibnSa'lid, the new King of Saudi Arabia, gave him his trust and friendship.Six years in Riyad and MadTnah and long rides through the wildernessmade him into an Arab. He dressed as a Bedouin, spoke Bedouin Arabic,and had a wife and child in Madinah. In 1929 he rode as a secret agentfor his Arab ruler to Kuwait. The English, he discovered, weresupponing the Beduoin uprising in the nonh against the central rule ofthe King. Maria Theresa thalers and anns were landing in Kuwait . TheEnglish wanted to weaken 'Abd al-'Alil and they planned a naval basein the Persian Gulf and a rail line from Haifa to Basra. A series ofankles by Muhammad Asad led to the collapse of these plans . Anotherlife threatening mission failed. The Great Saniisi who lived in Madinahsent the young Muslim through British Egypt to Libya, where the SaniisiBrotherhood fought desperately against the It alian invasion. Themessenger, chased by the Italians, turned back without havingaccomplished anything. The guerilla fighters, cut off from all supplies,died in concentration camps, on the gallows of the Italians. This provedto be a quickly forgotten episode, but perhaps also a key to the characterof Libyan politics? The picture of King 'Abd al - 'Aziz ibn Sa'lid has aplace of honour in the living room. "When King Faisal, Ibn Saud's son,was murdered", says Mrs Pola Hamida, "I saw my husband cry for theonly time in his life".

And why did he become a Muslim? Was it the fascination of theEast? "I want to tell you a story", says Muhammad Asad. "During thesecond world war. [ was interned in India. I was the only Muslim amongthree thousand Nazis and a hundred Ami-Fascists. One day in the camp,I came into conversation with the Prince of Lowenstein_ who was a Jesuitand a missionary. 'You were born a Jew', he said to me, 'and naturallythe next step would be to become a Christian'. I asked him if he couldanswer a question I had: 'What is the trinity'? 'Oh ' _ said the Prince,


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'that is a mystery, when you have faith, then your hean willunderstand . .. ' Do you see, that is why I am a Muslim. Islam says, 'Useyour intellect, and you will fmd faith' " . The dedication of his life'swork, the translation of the Qur'in, states: /i-qawmin ymajakkaran, "forpeople who think ". And what of the Sufis, the mystics? "Mysticismmeans to deepen religious thinking and feeling. But the basis is notfeeling, it is intellect".

Up to this point Muhammad Asad has written his own life story , butit is merely the first chapter of a long life. His autobiographical book,The Road to Mecca, begins in Lemberg and ends in the Holy City, whichstands at the centre of the Islamic world. He was thiny-two years oldwhen he left the Arabs - and yet the book seems n()(ably complete, asif he had finished his goal. "He is a Bedouin", says Mrs Pola, "we havealways wandered ".He possessed, however unsellled his life was, a gjft fo r makingfriendships. He remained close to his Saudi friends all his life long. "[nMedina I learned to know many Indian Muslims. I wanted to be in Indiafor a year". In Lahore, Muhammad Asad met Muhammad Iqbal, thewriter now honoured as spiritual father of Pakistan, and again a frienddetermined his life's direction. He made a friend for life. Iqbal, surprisedby the sharp. outspoken young Muslim. persuaded him to stay in Lahoreand work for the cause of Islam. In 1933. Islam at the Crossroadsappeared. This was a book that held a clear mirror before all Muslims,not just for the Indians. It showed hard realities and also the direction toa new way ."Islamic society is ossified", writes Asad. the lion. "It can absorbthe stimuli of a technically superior civilization, namely that of the West,but it must return to its own roots, to overcome the decadence. ProphetMuhammad had advocated the seeking of knowledge, the principle ofIjlihad, the eJtertion of one's own jUdgment, was the basis of the greatArab civilzation. European thought. the age of science which has lastedtill now, would not have occurred without the stimuli of the Arabs.Thanks to Islam, the European Renaissance freed itself of the chains ofthe church of the middle ages, for the science of the Arabs and thePersians had its roots in the teachings of the Prophet. Only in thefollowing centuries when the Abbasids and Mamluks ruled, was the doorof ijtihad locked. The principle of taqlid - blind acctptence wilhoutone's own judgmem - ruled and created the decadence of the Islamicworld". Muhammad Asad later told the periodical Arabia: "To turn awaythe evil of Western civilization is one thing; to accept their benefits is


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540 . ..... GONHR SlMONlMuhllmmMl Asod and ~ RQ8d to Mece,

another. I likely would have never become a Muslim i f the schools ofEurope had not instructed my understanding".

A critic of his books writes that Muhammad Asad was against thepoliticians and against the "mullahs. With Ihis statement in fact he hashit the sore exactly . Till today the Islamic world is looking for thisnarrow way which runs between two rocks and promises salvation. Thepoliticians open themselves up [0 Westernization and thereby give uptheir roots; the mullahs hold fast to their roots, but they become rigid.The politicians - Bbulla in Pak is tan or the Shah of Persia - have failedup to now; the rigid mullahs, as in Khomeini' s Iran, offer no promisingfuture perspecti ve. The right way leads through the middle. that also iswisdom of the Qur'an, an instruction for "people who think ' , /i-qawminyata/akkarW! .In 1946 Asad went to Kashmir and founded a periodical, which hehimself wrote. It was called Am/at like the plain before the gates ofMakkah where pilgrims spend the 9th day of Dhu']-Hijjah in hugecamps . In 1941 Pakistan was born as the only modern state to beestablished on the fundamentals of Islam. In the bloody disorder whichaccompanied the partitioning of British India , even the library of tbescholar was destroyed. His translation of the Hadith of Bukhari, thatmonumental collection of teachings of the Prophet [peace be on him].was never completed. The scholar who at one lime had been a reponerthen moved into pol it ics. The government called him to the Departmentof Islamic Reconstruction, whose mandate was to build the ideologicalframework for the new Islamic state."He has forgotten a few years", says Muhanunad Asad. From 19)9to 1945 he sat in an internment camp. "I was the only Muslim, and theMuslim soldiers who watched me wanted to let me escape, but I steeredaway from that". And what did he do in the camp, for six long years?"Nothing. We were housed in seventy-man barracks. What could we dothere? Once, at Christmas, we fou ght with the Fascists - we won,because we were sober and they were drunk ".

' Six years - a man's best years ", says Mrs Pola. "The black holeis a richly coloured biography. We have forgotten it ". The black hole :things forgonen, repressed , flashes of intense memories which sink backinto the merciful darkness. "My father disappeared in Theresienstadt.After the Anschluss I had supplied him with a visa to the Punjab, but hedid not want to flee without his daughter. When I also sent my sister avisa, she lost the letter. She died in Auschwitz".

"Tell the story about the oil", says Mrs Pola.


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fst.mic Studies 3 7:4 (1 9981 5""Oh, yes, the English accused me, as confidant of Ibn Sa'ud, of

obtaining the oil concession for the Americans and not the English , Itwas all madness" .

"Then we would be millionaires today", says Mrs Pola.In 1949 Muhammad Asad joined the diplomatic service of Pakistan.

He, of course, took charge of the Middle East Departmeru. In 1950 hewent back to visit Arabia . "There was still flO passpon law, I declinedto travel with a British passport and received the very first Pakistanipasspon" . Until then he had had an old Austrian passpon. He replied toa written summons from the German consul to become a pan-Germancitizen with his response "GOtz from Berlichingen ' . In 1952 Pakistansent him as representative to the UN in New York. As Chairman of theCommission of Non-Selfgoverned Territories , he argued for theindependence of Tunisia. Burgiba later invited him as a state guest.

In New York, the third chapter in the life of Muhammad AsadLeopold Weiss began. He met Pola. This American woman had becomea Muslim even before she met the diplomat. "He fascinated me ' . sherecalls , "with his brilliance". (Asad now divorced his wife from SaudiArabia.j The Pakistan Foreign Office refused to agree to the marriage.Asad quickly decided, as he often had in life , to leave the diplomaticservice: he started to write once more .

The Road to Mecca appeared in nine months, the story of his youthand his conversion. The book was a success, and fIOt only in Muslimoountries. "Allah alone knows", wrote the periodical Arabia thirty yearslater, "how many other convens were on their way to faith because ofthis rousing book'. It was translated into Japanese, Malaysian. Serbo-Croatian and nine other languages. The film version with Gregory Peckas Muhammad Asad, remained a plan. The publisher, GottfriedBeermann-Fischer, who met the author in New York, invited him towrite the German version in Germany. For a year, Leopold Weiss-Asadlived with his wife Pola in Badenweiler, in the house of Annette Kolb.

The Black Forest had 00 more hold on him than did Frankfun. TheEast beckoned him again, as unromantic as if was. He spem two yearsin Beirut, where he wrote The Principles of State and Government inIslam, a bri11iant theory of the Islamic state, going back to the roots ofthe Qur'lin and the Sunnah. He lived in Pakistan another year, then againattempted to find his way back to Europe to his own roots. He lived inSwitzerland for six yeaTli, where he started his major work, the Englishtranslation of the Qur'an. "I calculated it would take two years, then itbecame seventeen years. One digs deeper and deeper ".


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These were modes! words for a major work. Whoever pagesthrough the book's thousand dense pages must think, 'Oh good, one ofeighty-five English translations', but then one gets lost in the fullness ofthe commentary, the richness of the thought, which builds a bridgebetween two worlds. And doesn't just seek counsel of the authoritieslike BukharT, Ibn Rushd to M u ~ a m m a d 'Abduh. He has learned thecomplex language at its source with Ibe Bedouins in tbe Arabianwilderness."All translators", he writes in the forward, were people whoacquired their knowledge of Arabic through academic study alone: thaiis, from books. But the Arabic of the Quran is the language of a peopleendowed with that pe1:uliar quick-wittedness which the desert and itsexpanses inspires, the language of people whose mental images quickly,and without mediation, fly, flowing without effort from association toassociation- sequences of though t that slowly approach the idea whichthey aim to ellpress".

Every translation of such a language will necessarily be ils owninterpretation. The famous ayah 190 in Sara( al-Baqarah, to give just oneexample, is translated by Asad like this: And fight in God's causeagainst those who wage war against you, but do not commit a g g r e . ~ s i o n- for, verily, God does oot love aggressors", The oldest reference tojihiul, the idea which is so often misunderstood in the West, is hereclearly defined: a prohibition of offensive war, a ~ o m m a n d m e m fordefense,

Asad d i S C ( l v e ~ the key to understanding of this great and mysteriousbook in the SUrah AI-'Intrall, dyah 7: "He it is who has bestowed uponthee front Oil high this divine writ, containing messages that are clear inand by themselves - and these are the essence of the divine writ - aswell as others that are allegoricaL Now those whose hearts are given toswerving from the truth go after that part of tbe divine writ which hasbeen ellpressed in allegory, seeking out (what is bound to create)confusion, and seeking (to arrive at) its final meaning (in an arbitrarymanner); but none save God knows its final meaning".

"It is this verse", conunenls Asad, "in its absolute sense, whichgives the key to undersfaooing the Quranic message which makes thewhole accessible to the people who think",

The unambiguous signs (ayar muhkamdt) have but one meaning, butthe allegorical signs (dydt mutaslulbiMt) spell out what lies beyond thehuman cognition. " It is this conctp( that builds the foundation for theunderstanding of the Quran and the principles of religion in general, forall religious knowledge builds on the fact that only a small portion of the


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reality of human thought and human fantasy is accessible and the largerponion is locked from comprehension".Asad continually emphasizes the rationality of Islam: "Most surely

the Quran is disregarded in the West because in one aspect it differsfrom all other scriptures: it stresses reason as a way to faith, and itassens the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical spheres ofhuman existence".

The Message of the Qur'lln appeared in 1980, the author's eightiethyear of life, the culmination of a life's work which began with travelpictures on the first page of the FranJifurter Zeitung. The reporterviewed; the politician did; the wise man understood. These have been thethree chapters of his life. Lawrence of Arabia pales into insignificance.

In 1987, after fourteen years in T"flgiers, and then four years inPortugal, Muhammad Asad moved to Marbella, where the Arabs live inthe summer.

When I visited him, he had just moved again. to the white villagewe cannot name. The man wants his peace.

In one of his essays, he speaks of "mutual distrust" between Arabsaoo Europeans. He explains it like this: ' It still stems from the time ofthe crusades. The European encounters other strange religions , sayBuddhism, without prejudice, but the aversion to Islam lies deep in hisunconscious". Doesn 't it also lie in the character of the Arabs, whom weEuropeans have a hard time understanding? Arabs seem, especially inassociation with journalists, often locked and inaccessible. "No, no,Arabs are open and good-natured ". says Asad, who has never felthimself so much at home with friends as in Saudi Arabia.

At that time, I add. there were no terrorists, no fanatic combatorganizations like Hizb Allah or al-Jihad-al-lslami. Isn't it understandablethat the people of the West become shocked with Khomeni? "Khomenihas done for Islam what Hitler did for Germany', says MuhammadAsad. He smiles, "He was, by the way. born in the same year as I".

He takes off his glasses. "Have you read Koestler - The ThirteenthRace? Koestler has maintained that the Ashkinazi, the Eastern Jews,didn't even descend from the Jews, but from the Chasaren, thedescendents of a Turkish race from the Central Steppes, from where theMongols also came. Look at me .. . " Age has drawn his features sharper,the cheekbones protrude, the eyes lie in narrow slits. "And when youspeak of fanaticism, the Quran clearly says in the second Surah, We havewished thai you be a people of the middle way. The Sunnah prohihits{aftit and ifrat, excess in small things as in large things. In the Sunnah


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it also says, God has wished that which is easy for you, not thedifficult " .In the evening. with chocolate mousse in the village tavern, helapses into silence. ' Say something", says Mrs Poia, "I'm considering ",

says the old Bedouin quietly, "whether or not we should move again.. . "It really is too lonely in [he white village, among all the turistasresidentes.

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Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon